Their eyes landed on the towel-covered surgical pan and the paper sheets covering the gurney I was pushing. They had been around long enough to know that whenever I carried something bagged or pushed something covered, it was nothing they wanted to know about.
“Uh-oh,” Merle said.
“Uh-oh is right,” Beatrice chimed in.
I pushed the elevator button.
“You going anyplace special for Christmas, Dr. Scarpetta?”
They could tell by the look on my face that Christmas was a topic I didn’t particularly care to talk about.
“You’re probably too busy for Christmas,” Merle quickly said.
Both women got uncomfortable for the same reason everybody else did when they were reminded of what had happened to Benton.
“I know this time of year gets real busy,” Merle awkwardly changed the subject. “All those people drinking on the road. More suicides and people getting mad at each other.”
Christmas would be here in about two weeks. Fielding was on call that day. I couldn’t count how many Christ-mases I had worn a pager.
“People burning up in fires, too.”
“When bad things happen this time of year,” I said to them as the elevator doors opened, “we feel them more. That’s a lot of it.”
“Maybe that’s it.”
“I don’t know ’bout that, remember that electrical fire . . . ?”
The doors shut and I headed up to the second floor, which had been designed to accommodate tours for citizens and politicians and anyone else interested in our work. All labs were behind big expanses of plate glass, and at first this had seemed odd and uncomfortable to scientists used to working in secret behind cinder block walls. By now, nobody cared. Examiners tested trigger pulls and worked with bloodstains, fingerprints and fibers without paying much attention to who was on the other side of the glass, which at this moment included me pushing my gurney past.
Neils Vander’s world was a large space of countertops, with all sorts of unusual technical instruments and jury-rigged contraptions scattered all over the place. Against one wall were wooden cabinets with glass doors, and these Vander had turned into glue chambers, using clothesline and clothespins to hold up objects exposed to the Super Glue fumes generated by a hot plate.
In the past, scientists and police had had very little success in lifting prints from nonporous objects such as plastic bags, electrical tape and leather. Then, quite by accident, it was discovered that the fumes from Super Glue adhere to ridge detail, much as traditional dusting powder does, and out pops a white latent print. In a corner was another glue chamber called a Cyvac II that could accommodate larger objects such as a shotgun or rifle or car bumper, or theoretically even an entire body.
Humidity chambers raised prints off porous items, such as paper or wood, that had been treated with ninhydrin, although Vander sometimes resorted to the quick method of using a household steam iron, and once or twice had scorched the evidence, or so I’d heard. Scattered about were Nederman lights equipped with vacuums to suck up fumes and residues from drug Baggies.
Other rooms in Vander’s domain housed the Automatic Fingerprints Identification System known as AFIS, and darkrooms for digital audio and video enhancement. He oversaw the photo lab, where more than a hundred and fifty rolls of processed film came off the speedmaster every day. It took me a while to locate Vander, but I finally caught him in the impression lab, where pizza boxes ingenious cops used to transport plaster casts of tire tracks and footwear prints were neatly stacked in corners, and a door someone had tried to kick in was leaning against a wall.
Vander was seated before a computer, comparing footwear impressions on a split screen. I left the gurney outside the door.
“You’re nice to do this,” I said.
His pale blue eyes always seemed to be elsewhere, and as usual, his lab coat was stained purple from ninhydrin and a felt-tip pen had bled through one of his pockets.
“This is a real good one,” he said, tapping the video screen as he got out of his chair. “Guy buys new shoes and you know how slippery they are if the bottoms are leather? So he gets a knife and slashes them, you know, roughs them up because he’s getting married and doesn’t want to slip coming down the aisle.”
I followed him out of the lab, not really in the mood for anecdotes.
“Well, he gets burglarized. Shoes, bunch of other clothes and stuff, gone. Two days later a woman in his neighborhood is raped. Police find these weird shoeprints at the scene. In fact, there’d been quite a lot of burglaries in that area.”
We entered the alternate light source lab.
“Turns out it was this kid. Thirteen.” Vander was shaking his head as he flipped on the lights. “I just don’t know about kids anymore. When I was thirteen, the worst thing I ever did was shoot a bird with a BB gun.”
He mounted the Luma-Lite on a tripod.
“That’s pretty bad in my book,” I told him.
While I laid out the clothes on white paper under the chemical hood, he plugged in the Luma-Lite and its fans began to whir. A minute later he started the source lamp, rotating the intensity knob to full power. He set a pair of protective glasses near me and placed a blue 450 nanometer optical filter over the output lens. We put on our glasses and turned out the lights. The Luma-Lite cast a blue glow across the floor. Vander’s shadow moved as he did, and nearby jars of dye lit up Brilliant Yellow and Blitz Green and Redwop. Their dust was a constellation of neon stars scattered throughout the room.
“You know, we’ve got these idiots at police departments these days who are getting their own Luma-Lites and processing their own scenes,” Vander’s voice sounded in the dark. “So they dust with Redwop and put the print on a black background, so I have to photograph it with the Luma-Lite on and reverse the damn print to white.”
He started with the plastic wastepaper basket found inside the container and was instantly rewarded with the faint ridges of fingerprint smudges, which he dusted with Redwop, its electric red dust drifting through the dark.
“Good way to start,” I said. “Keep it up, Neils.”
Vander moved the tripod closer to the dead man’s black jeans and the inside-out right pocket began to glow a dull rouge. I poked the material with my gloved finger and found smears of iridescent orange.
“Don’t believe I’ve ever gotten a red like that before,” Vander mused.
We spent an hour going over all of the clothing, including shoes and belt, and nothing else fluoresced.
“Definitely two different things there,” Vander said as I turned on the lights. “Two different things fluorescing naturally. No dye stains involved except the one I used on the bucket.”
I picked up the phone and called the morgue. Fielding answered.
“I need everything that was in the pockets of our unidentified man. It should be air-drying on a tray.”
“That would be some foreign money, a cigar clipper and a lighter.”
“Yes.”
Lights off again and we finished scanning the exterior of all the clothing, finding more of the odd pale hair.
“Is that coming off his head?” Vander asked as my forceps entered the cool, blue light, gently grabbing hairs and placing them inside an envelope.
“His head hair is dark and coarse,” I replied. “So no, this hair can’t be his.”
“Looks like cat hair. One of these long-haired types that I don’t allow in the house anymore. Angora? Himalayan?”
“Rare. Not too many people have either one,” I said.
“My wife loves cats,” Vander went on. “She had this one named Creamsicle. Damn thing would look for my clothes and lie on them, and when I’d find them to get dressed, damn if they didn’t look just like this.”
“I guess it could be cat hair,” I supposed.
“Too fine for dog hair, don’t you think?”
“Not if it’s something like a Skye terrier. Long, straight silky hair.”
“Pale y
ellow?”
“They can be tawny,” I said. “Maybe the undercoat? I don’t know.”
“Maybe the guy’s a breeder or works with one,” Vander suggested. “Aren’t there long-hair rabbits, too?”
“Knock, knock,” Fielding’s voice sounded as he opened the door.
He walked in, tray in hand, and we turned on the lights.
“There are angora rabbits,” I said. “The ones the sweaters are made from.”
“You look like you’ve been working out again,” Vander said to Fielding.
“You mean I haven’t looked that way before?” Fielding asked.
Vander looked puzzled as if he’d never noticed that Fielding was a body-sculpting fanatic.
“We’ve picked up on some sort of residue in one of the pockets,” I told Fielding. “It’s the same pocket the money was in.”
Fielding removed the towel that covered the tray.
“I recognize the pounds and deutsche marks,” he said. “But not those two coppery things.”
“I think they’re Belgian francs,” I said.
“And I got no clue what this cash is.”
It had been lined up bill by bill to dry.
“It looks like it’s got some sort of temple on it and what? What’s a dirham? Arabic?”
“I’ll get Rose to check.”
“Why would somebody have four different kinds of money on him?” Fielding asked.
“If he was in and out of a lot of countries in a short period of time,” I ventured a guess. “That’s all I can think of. Let’s get the residues analyzed ASAP.”
We put on our protective glasses and Vander turned out the lights. The same dull rouge and brilliant orange fluoresced on several of the bills. We scanned all of them on both sides, finding flecks and smudges here and there, and then the ridge detail of a latent fingerprint. It was barely visible on the upper left corner of a hundred-dirham bill.
“We must be living right,” Fielding said.
“Hot dog,” Vander chortled. “Two for two! I’m going to hop on this right away. Get one of my buddies at Secret Service to run ’em through MORPHO, PRINTRAK, NECAFIS, WIN, whatever—every database out there, all forty-fifty million prints.”
Nothing excited Vander more than finding a loop or whorl he could hurl through cyberspace to hog-tie a criminal.
“Is the FBI’s national database up and running yet?” Fielding asked.
“Secret Service already has every damn print the FBI does, but as usual, the Bureau has to re-create the wheel. Spending all this money to create their own database, and using different vendors so everything is incompatible with everybody else. I’ve got a dinner to go to tonight.”
He focused the Luma-Lite on the foul, dark flesh pinned to the cutting board, and instantly two specks fluoresced bright yellow. They were not much bigger than a nailhead, and were parallel and symmetrical and could not be rubbed off.
“I’m pretty sure it’s a tattoo,” I said.
“Yeah,” Vander agreed. “Don’t know what else it could be. Nothing else is doing anything.”
The flesh from the dead man’s back was murky and muddy in the cool, blue light.
“But see how dark this is in here?” Vander’s gloved finger outlined an area about the size of my hand.
“I wonder what the hell that is,” Fielding said.
“I just don’t know why it’s so dark,” Vander mused.
“Maybe the tattoo’s black or brown,” I suggested.
“Well, we’ll give Phil a whirl at it,” Vander said. “What time’s it getting to be? You know, I wish Edith hadn’t said we’d do this dinner tonight. I gotta go. Dr. Scarpetta, you’re on your own. Damn, damn. I hate it when Edith wants to celebrate something.”
“Ah, come on, big guy,” Fielding said. “You know what a party animal you are.”
“I don’t drink much anymore. I feel it.”
“You’re supposed to feel it, Neils,” I said.
Phil Lapointe was not in a good mood when I walked into the image enhancement lab, which looked more like a production studio than a place where scientists worked with pixels and contrasts in all shades of light and dark to put a face on evil. Lapointe was one of our first Institute graduates, and he was skilled and determined but had not yet learned to move on when a case absolutely wouldn’t.
“Damn,” he said, raking his fingers through thick red hair and squinting as he leaned into a twenty-four-inch screen.
“I hate to do this to you,” I said.
He impatiently tapped keys, rolling another shade of gray down a freeze-frame from a convenience store videotape. The figure in dark glasses and hairnet cap was not made much clearer, but the store clerk was certainly vivid as blood sprayed in a fine mist from his head.
“I tweak it and it’s almost there, and then it’s not,” Lapointe wearily complained with a sigh. “I see this damn thing in my sleep.”
“Unbelievable,” I said, staring. “Look how relaxed he is. It’s like all of it is an afterthought, no big deal. A what-the-hell, may-as-well.”
“Yeah, that much I’ve got.” Lapointe stretched his back. “Just wasted the guy for no reason. That’s what I don’t get.”
“I give you a few more years and you’ll get it,” I said.
“I don’t want to become cynical, if that’s what you’re saying.”
“It’s not getting cynical. It’s about finally figuring out there don’t have to be reasons,” I told him.
He stared at the computer screen, lost in the last picture that had ever captured Pyle Gant alive. I had performed his autopsy.
“Let’s see what we’ve got here,” Lapointe said, removing the towel from the surgical pan.
Gant was twenty-three with a two-month-old baby and working overtime to pay for his wife’s birthday necklace on layaway.
“This must be from The Container Man. You’re thinking a tattoo?”
Gant lost control of his bladder before he was shot.
“Dr. Scarpetta?”
I knew this because the back of his jeans and the seat of the chair behind the counter were soaked with urine. When I looked out the window, two cops were restraining his hysterical wife in the parking lot.
“Dr. Scarpetta?”
She was screaming and slapping. She still had braces on her teeth.
“Thirty-one dollars and twelve cents,” I muttered.
Lapointe saved the file and closed it.
“What was?” he asked me.
“That’s what was in the cash register,” I replied.
Lapointe rolled his chair around, opening drawers and getting out different-colored filters and rummaging for gloves. The phone rang and he answered it.
“Hold on.” He held the receiver out to me. “It’s for you.”
It was Rose.
“I got hold of someone in the foreign currency department of Crestar,” she said. “The money you asked me about is Moroccan. To date, there are nine-point-three dirham to the dollar. So two thousand dirham would be about two hundred and fifteen dollars.”
“Thank you, Rose . . .”
“And there’s one other thing you might find interesting,” she went on. “It’s forbidden for Moroccan money to be brought in or taken out of the country.”
“I have a feeling this guy was into a lot of things that are forbidden,” I said. “Can you try Agent Francisco again?”
“Certainly.”
My understanding of ATF protocols was fast turning into the fear that Lucy had rejected me. I desperately wanted to see her. I wanted to do whatever I had to do to make that happen. I hung up and lifted the cork cutting board out of the pan, and Lapointe looked at it under a strong light.
“I’m not feeling real optimistic about this,” he let me know.
“Well, don’t start seeing this one in your sleep, too,” I told him. “I’m not hopeful, either. All we can do is try.”
What was left of the epidermis was as greenish-black as a quarry or a swa
mp, and the flesh underneath was getting darker and dryer like curing meat. We centered the corkboard under a high-resolution camera that was connected to the video screen.
“Nope,” Lapointe said. “Too much reflection.”
He tried oblique light and then switched to black and white. He fitted various filters over the camera lens. Blue was no good, nor was yellow, but when he tried red, the iridescent specks peeked out at us again. Lapointe enlarged them. They were perfectly round. I thought of full moons, of a werewolf with evil yellow eyes.
“I’m not going to be able to get this any better live. I’ll just grab it,” Lapointe said, disappointed.
He captured the image onto his hard drive and began to process it, the software making it possible for us to see some two hundred shades of gray that we couldn’t detect with the unaided eye.
Lapointe worked the keyboard and mouse, going in and out of windows, and using contrast, brightness, and enlarging, shrinking and adjusting. He eliminated background noise, or trash, as he called it, and we began to see hair pores, and then the stippling made by a tattoo needle. Out of the murk emerged black wavy lines that became fur or feathers. A black line sprouting daisy petals became a claw.
“What do you think?” I asked Lapointe.
“I think this is the best we’re going to get,” he impatiently said.
“We know anybody who’s an expert in tattoos?”
“Why don’t you start with your histologist,” he said.
21
I found George Gara in his lab, retrieving his bagged lunch from a refrigerator posted with a sign that read No Food. Inside were stains such as silver nitrate and muci-carmine, in addition to Schiff reagents, none of which was compatible with anything edible.
“That’s not such a great idea,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” he stuttered, setting the bag on the counter and shutting the refrigerator door.
“We have a fridge in the break room, George,” I said. “You’re more than welcome to use it.”
He didn’t respond, and I realized that he was so painfully shy he probably didn’t go into the break room for a reason. My heart ached for him. I couldn’t imagine the shame he must have felt when he was growing up and couldn’t talk without stuttering. Maybe that explained the tattoos slowly taking over his body like kudzu. Maybe they made him feel special and manly. I pulled out a chair and sat down.
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