Mickey looked it over and shrugged. “Could be blood.”
“If I was betting, I’d say it was blood.” Paul scraped the fleck off onto a glass slide and smiled. “But I wouldn’t bet a whole lot.”
Paul rotated the bat slowly, going over its surface under the magnification. “The interesting thing is,” he said, “there’s nothing on the exterior surfaces of it. Everything’s down in the cracks. Of course, I’m just guessing, but it looks like it’s been washed off.”
Mickey grunted at the suggestion. “That would make sense. I guess he didn’t do a thorough job though.”
“Blood doesn’t take long to dry, especially on a hot day. After only five or ten minutes, it’s going to be pretty crusty. It would be hard to wash every trace of it out of the cracks in the wood.”
Mickey leaned back against the counter and added, “I doubt he tried that hard. I mean, what were the odds that body was every going to be found? I’ll bet he did a half ass job washing it off because he was just trying to get it clean, he wasn’t thinking about hiding the evidence.”
Paul looked up and thought about it. “Yeah. Why would he keep the bat at all if he was trying to hide the evidence? He could have driven half a mile down that dirt road and tossed the bat out into the desert. No one ever would have found it.”
Mickey was getting excited. He paced across the room to the other counter, hesitated for a second and then turned and paced back. He hovered behind Paul and asked, “How long will this take?”
“I don’t know, Chief.”
“Christ. I’ve got to stop this guy.”
“Chief?” Paul swiveled on the stool with the pick in his hand, another crusty black ball on display. “We don’t even know if this is blood yet. It’s going to take some time.”
Mickey knew he had to wait for confirmation. Before that, everything was speculation. But the prospect of sitting around the rest of the day was killing him. He’d already waited the whole morning for Dr. Kramer to finish seeing patients. Mickey leaned against the counter again and checked his watch. It was after noon already. He folded his arms across his chest and said, “But we’ll know something today, right?”
“I’ll do everything I can, Chief.” Paul didn’t look up from the microscope as he spoke.
Mickey hovered in the background awhile longer, realizing there was nothing he could do and that his lingering presence would not speed the process up. The waiting would drive him crazy. “Alright,” he said, after a few minutes of standing there like an idiot, “you’ve got to call the station as soon as you determine if the blood types match. Jimmy will radio me with the news.”
“Will do, Chief.”
Mickey left the clinic in a hurry, although he had nothing to hurry for. Back at the station, Jimmy was still sitting behind the counter, leaning back with his feet up, reading a western novel with a cowboy hiding behind a rock on the cover. He stretched when Mickey walked in, and said, “You find anything, Chief?”
“Don’t know.” Mickey started to go back to his office, but hesitated, and added. “I’m pretty sure I did, but I’m waiting for Dr. Kramer to call with some test results.”
Jimmy looked at him, expectantly, waiting for details. After a few seconds, Mickey told him what he’d found. “Christ,” Jimmy responded, “let’s go get the son of a bitch right now.” He stood behind the counter and clapped his hands together, like a football player leaving a huddle, ready to make the big play. The muscles in his arms swelled and stretched the fabric of his shirt.
Mickey shook his head. “We have to wait. I shouldn’t have gone into his truck without a warrant anyway. That’s going to be a tough one to explain. That’s a big enough problem already. We can’t do anything worse than we have already.”
“Hell, just say you were looking in the window and saw the bat on the floor. Say you saw the blood on it. Who’s gonna know?”
Mickey heard the words but chose not to listen to them. He’d played that game in the past, every cop who’d been around awhile had played it, whether consciously or not. But not with something like this. It was usually with punks, teenagers, or a traffic stop where the driver was being an asshole. It was a fun game