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While Sammy is in the music room Mr. Heep comes in.  He waves to her, his hand holding a file folder.  "I have the results of your Science Experiment if you'd like to take a look."

"Sure!"  She motions for him to shut the door and sets down her horn.  Faint tinny sounds of a jazz band can be heard coming out of the earbuds draped around her neck.

He hands her the folder.  "The prints you lifted were good, for an amatuer, you should practice some.  They didn't match any of the normal databases, which wasn't a suprise.  They did however come back from one of the various Child Finder databases.  Fingerprints don't change that much over time.  Little Fern Rogers was fingerprinted when she was nine, and she's a sophmore here at Oak Park.  She was suspended from the pep squad for innappropriate behavior in the lunch room, then lying about it to the principal.  She may have been the victim of your love goo."

"On the subject of love goo, the last sample you gave me was different from the others.  It had been modified to be a single agent.  Remember how the other one was an A plus B compound?  You put A on someone and whoever got exposed to B would be attracted to them?  Well, the one from the water bottle had been retooled to effect females.  It just made them more attracted to the people they might otherwise have been attracted too."

"Were Fern's prints found on the locker I dusted, or did they match the print from the bleacher metal sample?  Or both?  I labeled the ones from the locker."

Sammy pales, then turns red at the description of the love goo's effects.  "So when it kicked in, was I just reacting to the first satisfactory male I tripped over, or was it more... selective... than that?"

"Both.  There were other prints on the locker, but it's s high school.  Fern's were the only ones that matched the print on the metal fragment and were on the locker."


"Hard to say.  It seems to enhance general attraction, so if you were attracted to someone then it would enhance it.  If you were repulsed by someone, they'd seem not so repulsive.  Biochemestry is tricky like that."

Well, just another reason to hide from the lunch table...

"So the Acid Attacker is Fern Michaels. We... there is video of the attacker walking away from the flagpole incident.  It was hard to tell who she might be; I was calling her Pinky, because she was wearing a pink hoodie.  The locker was one that was vandalized; we... I thought maybe the girl who owned it was trying to throw any investigators off the scent.  Do the police know yet?  Is any of this even admissable, since it wasn't collected by law enforcement?"

"Well, the fingerprint was obtained from the crime scene, but the match record was illegally obtained from a secure children's safety site.  Any good lawyer could get that suppressed.  Fern Rogers might give you a sample, or you could try swiping one.  Soda can or something with prints and DNA would be pretty solid.  Then you just have to make a good case to the police as to how the chain of evidence was obtained.  I never really worked the law enforcement side of criminal justice."

Sammy smiles at his last comment.  "Me neither.  I guess I'll just have to keep pretending like I know what I'm doing and just hope it all works out."

She lets out a heavy sigh.  "OK, Mr. Heep.  I'll see what I can get from her.  It might not even be too difficult if its done the right way.  Thanks."

"No problem.  Anytime."  he turns and heads out of the music room.