Flashback (Kendra Michaels #11)

“Well, our department is going to want our guy to do a sketch no matter what.”

“Fine.” Kendra turned to Pauley. “You won’t mind working with my friend after the police officer comes up with a sketch, will you?”

“Nah, it’s fine. Not like I got anything else to do in here.”

“We don’t want to tire him out,” Perry said. “The FBI may want to have their own sketch artist come here.”

“No, they won’t.” Kendra shook her head. “Not after they’ve seen Bill’s sketch. They’ll know they can’t do any better.”

“You’re pretty sure of yourself,” Perry said.

“I’m sure of Bill Dillingham. And you should be, too. But in the end, it may be tough to get a usable sketch no matter who draws it.”

“What makes you say that?” Lynch said.

Kendra stepped back so she could speak to all three men at once. “The guy in the garage was wearing a disguise.”

“How do you know?” Perry said. “You said it was too dark for you to see him.”

“It was.”

He smiled. “I’m starting to get the hang of this now. I take it that you heard or smelled something.”

“Smelled.”

“And what, exactly, did you smell?”

“Ben Nye prosthetic adhesive. When he had me in that choke hold, I was close enough to get a good whiff. It’s used by everybody from high school drama clubs to Broadway stars to attach fake noses, chin pieces, ears, you name it. That guy was wearing a facial disguise, and it was good enough that Pauley saw him from a couple of feet away and couldn’t tell.” She turned back to Pauley. “Could you?”

He shook his head. “No.”

“Do your best with the sketch artists anyway,” Kendra said. “Bill is especially good at coming up with alternatives that account for disguises the perps may have used.”

Pauley looked slightly dazed. “Will do.”

She patted his knee. “Take care, Pauley. We’ll be back to visit you soon.”

Kendra and Lynch hadn’t quite reached the elevator when Perry called from down the hall. “Kendra?”

They both turned.

“There’s something else I wanted to talk to you about,” he said. “We extracted a good DNA sample from that tooth you knocked out, and we ran it through CODIS.”

Kendra looked at him excitedly. “Did you get a hit?”

“Of sorts.”

“What does that mean?”

Perry glanced around to make sure they were out of earshot of the workers and visitors. “The sample came back as ‘expunged.’”

“Expunged? As in deleted?”

“Yes. It happens occasionally.”

Lynch nodded. “Often for juvenile offenders who have finished their sentences, or for innocent suspects in closed cases. Sometimes law-enforcement agencies remove it automatically, sometimes people have to petition to have their DNA samples removed from the database.”

“Well, who pulled it?”