Kay Scarpet - Postmortem Part 3

"It's like the Herald," she quite surprised me by saying. "All the time there's stuff in the Herald about people being killed. Last week they found a man in the ca.n.a.l and his head was cut off. He must have been a bad man for someone to cut his head off.

"He may have been, Lucy. But it doesn't justify someone's doing something like that to him. And not everyone who is hurt or murdered is bad."

"Mom says they are. She says good people don't get murdered. Only hookers and drug dealers and burglars do."

A thoughtful pause. "Sometimes police officers, too, because they try to catch the bad people."

Dorothy would say such a thing and, what was worse, she would believe it. I felt a flare of the old anger.

"But the lady who got strangled," Lucy wavered, her eyes so wide they seemed to swallow me. "She was a doctor, Auntie Kay. How could she be bad? You're a doctor, too. She was just like you, then."

I was suddenly aware of the time. It was getting late. I switched off the computer, took Lucy's hand, and we walked out of the office and into the kitchen. When I turned to her to suggest a snack before bed, I was dismayed to see she was biting her bottom lip, her eyes welling.

"Lucy! Why are you crying?"

She wrapped around me, sobbing. Clinging to me with fierce desperation, she cried, "I don't want you to die! I don't want you to die!"

"Lucy a"

I was stunned, bewildered. Her tantrums, her arrogant and angry outbursts were one thing. But this! I could feel her tears soaking through my blouse. I could feel the hot intensity of her miserable little body as she held on to me.

"It's all right, Lucy," was all I could think to say, and I pressed her close.

"I don't want you to die, Auntie Kay!"

"I'm not going to die, Lucy."

"Daddy did."

"Nothing is going to happen to me, Lucy."

She was not to be consoled. The story in the paper affected her in a deep and pernicious way. She read it with an adult intellect yet to be weaned from a child's fearful imagination. This in addition to her insecurities and losses.

Oh, Lord. I groped for the appropriate response and couldn't come up with a thing. My mother's accusations began throbbing in some deep part of my psyche. My inadequacies. I had no children. I would have made an awful mother. "You should have been a man," my mother had said during one of our less productive encounters in recent history. "All work and ambition. It's not natural for a woman. You'll dry out like a chinch bug, Kay."

And during my emptiest moments when I felt the worst about myself, d.a.m.n if I wouldn't see one of those chinch bug sh.e.l.ls that used to litter the lawn of my childhood home. Translucent, brittle, dried out. Dead.

It wasn't something I would ordinarily do, pour a ten-year-old a gla.s.s of wine.

I took her to her room and we drank in bed. She asked me questions impossible to answer.

"Why do people hurt other people?" and "Is it a game for him? I mean, does he do it for fun, sort of like MTV? They do things like that on MTV, but it's make-believe. n.o.body gets hurt. Maybe he doesn't mean to hurt them, Auntie Kay."

"There are some people who are evil," I quietly replied. "Like dogs, Lucy. Some dogs bite people for no reason. There's something wrong with them. They're bad and will always be bad."

"Because people were mean to them first. That's what makes them bad."

"In some instances, yes," I told her. "But not always. Sometimes there isn't a reason. In a way, it doesn't matter. People make choices. Some people would rather be bad, would rather be cruel. It's just an ugly, unfortunate part of life."

"Like Hitler," she muttered, taking a swallow of wine.

I began stroking her hair.

She rambled on, her voice thick with sleep, "Like Jimmy Groome, too. He lives on our street and shoots birds with his BB gun, and he likes to steal bird eggs out of nests and smash them on the road and watch the baby birds struggle. I hate him. I hate Jimmy Groome. I threw a rock at him once and hit him when he was riding by on his bike. But he doesn't know it was me because I was hiding behind the bushes."

I sipped wine and continued stroking her hair.

"G.o.d won't let anything happen to you, will He?" she asked.

"Nothing is going to happen to me, Lucy. I promise."

"If you pray to G.o.d to take care of you, He does, doesn't He?"

"He takes care of us." Though I wasn't sure I believed it.

She frowned. I'm not sure she believed it either. "Don't you ever get scared?"

I smiled. "Everybody gets scared now and then. I'm perfectly safe. Nothing's going to happen to me."

The last thing she mumbled before drifting off was "I wish I could always be here, Auntie Kay. I want to be just like you."

Two hours later, I was upstairs and still wide-awake and staring at a page in a book without really seeing the words when the telephone rang.

My response was Pavlovian, a startled reflex. I s.n.a.t.c.hed up the receiver, my heart thudding. I was expecting, fearing, Marino's voice, as if last night were starting all over again.

"h.e.l.lo."

Nothing.

"h.e.l.lo?"

In the background I could hear the faint, spooky music I a.s.sociated with early-morning foreign movies or horror films or the scratchy strains of a Victrola before the dial tone cut it off.

"Coffee?"

"Please," I said.

This sufficed for a "Good morning."

Whenever I stopped by Neils Vander's lab, his first word of greeting was "Coffee?"

I always accepted. Caffeine and nicotine are two vices I've readily adopted.

I wouldn't think of buying a car that isn't as solid as a tank, and I won't start the engine without fastening my seatbelt. There are smoke alarms throughout my house, and an expensive burglar alarm system. I no longer enjoy flying and opt for Amtrak whenever possible.

But caffeine, cigarettes and cholesterol, the grim reapers of the common man - G.o.d forbid I should give them up. I go to a national meeting and sit at a banquet with three hundred other forensic pathologists, the world's foremost experts in disease and death. Seventy-five percent of us don't jog or do aerobics, don't walk when we can ride, don't stand when we can sit, and a.s.siduously avoid stairs or hills unless they're on the decline. A third of us smoke, most of us drink, and all of us eat as if there is no tomorrow.

Stress, depression, perhaps a greater need for laughter and pleasure because of the misery we see - who can be sure of the reason? One of my more cynical friends, an a.s.sistant chief in Chicago, likes to say, "What the h.e.l.l. You die. Everybody dies. So you die healthy. So what?"

Vander went to the drip coffee machine on the counter behind his desk and poured two cups. He had fixed my coffee countless times and could never remember I drink it black.

My ex-husband never remembered either. Six years I lived with Tony and he couldn't remember that I drink my coffee black or like my steaks medium-rare, not as red as Christmas, just a little pink. My dress size, forget it. I wear an eight, have a figure that will accommodate most anything, but I can't abide fluff, froth and frills. He always got me something in a six, usually lacy and gauzy and meant for bed. His mother's favorite color was spring green. She wore a size fourteen. She loved ruffles, hated pullovers, preferred zippers, was allergic to wool, didn't want to bother with anything that had to be dry-cleaned or ironed, had a visceral antagonism toward anything purple, deemed white or beige impractical, wouldn't wear horizontal stripes or paisley, wouldn't have been caught dead in Ultrasuede, believed her body wasn't compatible with pleats and was quite fond of pockets the more the better. When it came to his mother, Tony would somehow get it right.

Vander dumped the same heaping teaspoons of whitener and sugar into my cup as he dumped into his own.

Typically, he was disheveled, his wispy gray hair wild, his voluminous lab coat smeared with black fingerprint powder, a spray of ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers protruding from his ink-stained breast pocket. He was a tall man with long, bony extremities and a disproportionately round belly. His head was shaped remarkably like a light bulb, his eyes a washed-out blue and perpetually clouded by thought.

My first winter here he stopped by my office late one afternoon to announce it was snowing. A long red scarf was wrapped around his neck, and pulled over his ears was a leather flight helmet, possibly ordered from a Banana Republic catalogue and absolutely the most ridiculous winter hat I'd ever seen. I think he would have looked perfectly at home inside a Fokker fighter plane. "The Flying Dutchman," we appropriately called him around the office. He was always in a hurry, flying up and down the halls, his lab coat flapping around his legs.

"You saw the papers?" he asked, blowing on his coffee.

"The whole blessed world saw the papers," I dismally replied.

Sunday's front page was worse than Sat.u.r.day evening's. The banner headline ran across the entire width of the top of the page, the letters about an inch high. The story included a sidebar about Lori Petersen and a photograph that looked as if it came from a yearbook. Abby Turnbull was aggressive enough, if not indecent, to attempt an interview with Lori Petersen's family, who lived in Philadelphia and "were too distraught to comment."

"It sure as h.e.l.l isn't helping us any," Vander stated the obvious. "I'd like to know where the information's coming from so I could string a few people up by their thumbs."

"The cops haven't learned to keep their mouths shut," I told him. "When they learn to zip their lips, they won't have leaks to b.i.t.c.h about anymore."

"Well, maybe it's the cops. Whatever the case, the stuff's making my wife crazy. I think if we lived in the city, she'd make us move today."

He went to his desk, which was a jumble of computer printouts, photographs and telephone messages. There was a quart beer bottle and a floor tile with a dried b.l.o.o.d.y shoe print, both inside plastic bags and tagged as evidence. Randomly scattered about were ten small jars of formalin, each containing a charred human fingertip anatomically severed at the second joint. In cases of unidentified bodies that are badly burned or decomposed, it isn't always possible to get prints by the usual method. Incongruously stationed in the midst of this macabre mess was a bottle of Vaseline Intensive Care lotion.

Rubbing a dollop of the lotion on his hands, Vander pulled on a pair of white cotton gloves. The acetone, xylene and constant handwas.h.i.+ng that go with his trade were brutal on his skin, and I could always tell when he'd forgotten to put on gloves while using ninhydrin, a chemical helpful for visualizing latent prints, because he'd walk around with purple fingers for a week. His morning ritual complete, he motioned me to follow him out into the fourth-floor hallway.

Several doors down was the computer room, clean, almost sterile, and filled with light-silver modular hardware of various boxy shapes and sizes, bringing to mind a s.p.a.ce-age Laundromat. The sleek, upright unit most closely resembling a set of washers and dryers was the fingerprint matching processor, its function to match unknown prints against the multimillion fingerprint data base stored on magnetic disks. The FMP, as it was known, with its advanced pipeline and parallel processing was capable of eight hundred matches per second. Vander didn't like to sit around and wait for the results. It was his habit to let the thing cook overnight so he had something to look forward to when he came to work the next morning.

The most time-consuming part of the process was what Vander did Sat.u.r.day, feeding the prints into the computer. This required his taking photographs of the latent prints in question, enlarging them five times, placing a sheet of tracing paper over each photograph and with a felt-tip pen tracing the most significant characteristics. Next he reduced the drawing to a one-to-one-sized photograph, precisely correlating to the actual size of the print. He glued the photograph to a latent-print layout sheet, which he fed into the computer. Now it simply was a matter of printing out the results of the search.

Vander seated himself with the deliberation of a concert pianist about to perform. I almost expected him to flip up his lab coat in back and stretch his fingers. His Steinway was the remote input station, consisting of a keyboard, a monitor, an image scanner and a fingerprint image processor, among other things. The image scanner was capable of reading both tenprint cards and latent prints. The fingerprint image processor (or FIP, as Vander referred to it) automatically detected fingerprint characteristics.

I watched him type in several commands. Then he punched the print b.u.t.ton, and lists of potential suspects were rapidly hammered across the green-striped paper.

I pulled up a chair as Vander tore off the printout and ripped the paper into ten sections, separating his cases.

We were interested in 88-01651, the identification number for the latents found on Lori Petersen's body. Computerized print comparison is a.n.a.logous to a political election. Possible matches are called candidates, and ranked according to score. The higher the score, the more points of comparison a candidate has in common with the unknown latents entered into the computer. In the case of 88-01651 there was one candidate leading by a wide margin of more than one thousand points. This could mean only one thing.

A hit.

Or as Vander glibly put it, "A hot one."

The winning candidate was impersonally listed as NIC112.

I really hadn't expected this.

"So whoever left the prints on her has prints on file with the data base?" I asked.

"That's right."

"Meaning it's possible he has a criminal record?"

"Possible, but not necessarily."

Vander got up and moved to the verification terminal. He lightly rested his fingers on the keyboard and stared into the CRT display.

He added, "Could be he was printed for some other reason. If he's in law enforcement, or maybe applied for a taxi license once."

He began calling up fingerprint cards from the depths of image retrieval. Instantly, the search-print image, an enlarged aggregation of loops and whorls in turquoise blue, was juxtaposed to the candidate-print image. To the right was a column listing the s.e.x, race, date of birth and other information revealing the can didate's identification. Producing a hard copy of the prints, he handed it over.

I studied it, read and reread the ident.i.ty of NIC112.

Marino would be thrilled.

According to the computer, and there could be no mistake about it, the latents the laser picked up on Lori Petersen's shoulder were left by Matt Petersen, her husband.

Chapter 4.

I was not unduly surprised that Matt Petersen touched her body. Often it is a reflex to touch someone who appears dead, to feel for a pulse or to grip a shoulder lightly the way one does to wake up the person. What dismayed me were two things. First, the latents were picked up because the individual who left them had a residue of the perplexing sparkles on his fingers - evidence also found in the previous strangling cases. Second, Matt Petersen's tenprint card had not been turned in to the lab yet. The only reason the computer got a hit was he already had prints on file with the data base.

I was telling Vander we needed to find out why and when Petersen was printed in the past, if he had a criminal record, when Marino walked in.

"Your secretary said you was up here," he announced by way of a greeting.

He was eating a doughnut I recognized as having come from the box by the coffee machine downstairs. Rose always brought in doughnuts on Monday mornings. Glancing around at the hardware, he casually shoved a manila envelope my way. "Sorry, Neils," he mumbled. "But the Doc here says she's got first dibs."

Vander looked curiously at me as I opened the envelope. Inside was a plastic evidence bag containing Petersen's tenprint card. Marino had put me on the spot, and I didn't appreciate it. The card, under ordinary circ.u.mstances, should have been receipted directly to the fingerprints lab - not to me. It is this very sort of maneuver that creates animosity on the part of one's colleagues.

They a.s.sume you're violating their turf, a.s.sume you're preempting them when, in truth, you may be doing nothing of the sort.

I explained to Vander, "I didn't want this left on your desk, out in the open where it might be handled. Matt Petersen supposedly was using greasepaint before he came home. If there was a residue on his hands, it may also be on his card."

Vander's eyes widened. The thought appealed to him. "Sure. We'll run it under the laser."

Marino was staring sullenly at me.

I asked him, "What about the survival knife?"

He produced another envelope from the stack wedged between his elbow and waist.

"Was on my way to take it to Frank." Vander suggested, "We'll take a look at it with the laser first."

Then he printed out another hard copy of NIC 112, the latents that Matt Petersen had left on his wife's body, and presented it to Marino.