Postmortem

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 a

"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 Saturday evening's. The ba

"It sure as hell 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 bitch 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 bloody 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 hand-washing 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 space-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 Saturday, 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 sca

I watched him type in several commands. Then he punched the print button, 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 analogous 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 wi

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 sex, 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 identity 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 ten-print 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.