Body Farm 2 - Flesh And Bone Read Online Free PDF

though. You wanna come along?”
    “Don’t you need to stay here…Tiffany?”
    He glared at me, then cupped a hand behind one ear. “I think I hear my mean old mom calling me,” he said. “She says I have to log off and do my stupid algebra homework. Like, what a total bitch?”
    He switched the monitors back on, prompting me to flee to the front of the pawnshop, where I inspected Tiny’s merchandise. The glass display case contained several iPods, a handful of heavy gold neck chains, and at least a dozen handguns, ranging in price from one hundred dollars to three hundred. I couldn’t tell any difference between the least expensive and the most expensive, so I asked Tiny to explain. “This here’s a Hi-Point,” he said, pulling out the hundred-dollar gun. “Lots of ’em out there, ’cause they’s so damn cheap. Some folks say they’re bad to jam, but that’s mostly because of cheap ammo, is what I think. ’Course, if you can’t afford but a hunnerd-dollar gun, you probably got to buy cheap ammo, too. So either way, you could be screwed.” He pulled out the expensive gun. “This is a SIG Sauer,” he said. “Everything about this weapon is top-notch. If I’m needin’ to shoot some sumbitch, I want to be able to trust my piece. Don’t you?”
    “Um, sure,” I said. “Damn right I do.”
    “Okay, Deadeye, let’s go,” said Art. “I have to do homework for a whole hour, and then I’ve got a chat room date I have to get back for.”
    CHAPTER 4
    THE KNOXVILLE POLICE DEPARTMENT was housed in a gray and tan concrete and brick fortress of indeterminate vintage—late 1960s or early ’70s, maybe, the heyday of “urban renewal,” when whole blocks of old buildings were razed to make way for parking lots and stark, boxy structures. Situated a stone’s throw from two of Knoxville’s low-income housing projects, it probably saved the city thousands a year in fuel costs just by virtue of its location.
    As Art and I passed the front desk I looked for Gunderson, the sergeant I’d joked with earlier in the day, but evidently his shift was over, for the desk was staffed by a young Latina woman. She waved at Art, studied me and my cooler briefly, then pressed some button that opened the elevator for us.
    For years the fingerprint lab was down in the basement, but these days, it inhabited quarters on the second floor. Art nodded at a countertop, which I took as a sign to set the cooler down. It was a good guess; he opened the top and lifted out the bag containing the penis.
    “Are you going to fume it?” I asked. I didn’t know a lot about fingerprinting, but I knew Art had patented a gizmo for creating fumes of superglue which would stick to latent prints on what ever object was placed in the chamber that filled with the fumes, tracing the loops and whorls in crisp white.
    “No,” he said, “for this I’ll use leuco-crystal violet. Shows up better than superglue. It reacts chemically in the presence of blood—the hemoglobin actually catalyzes a reaction between the LCV and hydrogen peroxide—to produce a bright purple. Even if the blood were a lot dimmer than what’s on this guy’s pecker, it would be very dramatic.”
    From a cabinet of bottles and boxes and bags of supplies, he took down a brown plastic bottle of ordinary hydrogen peroxide and a bottle of a clear solution; in a small beaker he mixed 50 cc’s of the leuco-crystal violet—a couple of ounces, maybe—with another 200 cc’s of the peroxide. Finally, he slid an oblong pellet the size of the end of his pinkie down the side of the beaker into the mixture.
    “What’s that? The magic ingredient?”
    “Close,” he said. “The magnetic stirrer.” He set the beaker on top of a small instrument with a round, flat platform on top and rotated a switch on the instrument’s face. The pellet began to spin, slowly at first, then faster and faster as he cranked the dial. “Good for mixing drinks, too, as long as you’re not hoping to