Rhymes With Prey Read Online Free PDF Page B

off?”
    â€œBig-time. He’s the S all the way. Wants to be the hurter, not the hurtee.”
    Lily explained about his personal Pinterest album. “Jesus, took all my willpower not to kick him in the balls. You should’ve seen what he did to some of those women.”
    â€œHe pressure you two lovely ladies to go home with him?” Lucas asked.
    â€œSure, but we had to postpone our threesome. Somehow his glass kept getting refilled. He was in no shape to tie anybody up after that much bourbon. I was tempted to let the asshole stagger home and hope some mugger beat the crap out of him. But Amelia was the mature one and we got him into a cab.”
    Sachs glanced at the plastic bags. “What does the evidence say?”
    â€œJust getting it now,” Lincoln told her, and grumbled, “Right, Mel? It seems to be taking forever.”
    Mel Cooper, hunched over a computer monitor, didn’t respond. He shoved his glasses higher on his nose and said, “Interesting.”
    â€œThat’s not a useful term, Mel,” Lincoln snapped.
    â€œI’m getting there. Lucas collected five different kinds of bronze from Verlaine’s. One is typical modern formula: eighty-eight percent copper and twelve percent tin. Then alpha bronze, with about four to five percent tin.
    â€œSome other samples have a higher concentration of copper and zinc and some lead—that’s architectural bronze. Others are bismuth bronze—an alloy that’s got a lot of nickel, and traces ofbismuth. One sample surprised me—it had a Vickers hardness value of two hundred.”
    â€œThat’s the bronze used in swords,” Lucas said.
    They all looked at him. “For the role-playing games I write. Helps to know about old-time weapons. Roman officers had bronze swords; foot soldiers had iron.”
    Amelia asked, “You think he uses bronze as a weapon?”
    Lucas shook his head. “No, I think what it means is that he gets his materials wherever he can find them. Probably from dozens of junkyards and construction sites.”
    â€œI agree,” Lincoln said.
    Cooper added, “And there’s triethanolamine, fluoroboric acid, and cadmium fluoroborate.”
    â€œThat’s flux—used in brazing and soldering,” Lincoln said absently.
    â€œOkay, the big question: any associations, Mel?” Lucas asked.
    In crime scene work, very few samples of evidence actually “matched,” meaning they were literally the same. DNA and fingerprints established true identity but little else did. However, samples of evidence from two scenes could be “associated,” meaning they were similar. If close enough, the jury could deduce that they came from the same source. Here, the team had to show that the shavings found in the first victims’ bodies could be closely associated with those Lucas had collected from Verlaine’s studio.
    Cooper finally pushed back from the screen. He didn’t seem happy. “Like the concrete, the flux and welding rods are close to the trace from the earlier crime scenes.”
    Lincoln’s face tightened into a frown. “But those are used by anyone brazing, welding, or working with bronze. I want to establish identity with the bronze scraps themselves.”
    â€œUnderstood. But that’s more of a problem.” He explained thatfour of the bronze samples at the first crime scene were completely different from any of the metal collected by Lucas. One sample Lucas had collected that night had the same composition as several fragments in the first scenes. The others were similar but had “some compositional differences.”
    â€œ How similar?” Lincoln snapped.
    â€œI’d feel comfortable testifying that it was possible the scraps embedded in the victims came from Verlaine’s loft. But I couldn’t do better than that.”
    The evidence suggested but didn’t prove that Verlaine was the