Postmortem

"No problem," Marino replied abstractedly. "You can come along with me. After we hit Petersen, we'll swing by the radio room."

We didn't find Matt Petersen at home. Marino left his card under the brass knocker of his apartment.

"I don't expect him to return my call," he mumbled as he crept back out into traffic.

"Why not?"

"When I dropped by the other day he didn't invite me in. Just stood in the doorway like a damn barricade. Was big enough to sniff the jumpsuit before basically telling me to buzz off, practically slammed the door in my face, said in the future to talk to his lawyer. Petersen said the polygraph cleared him, said I was harassing him."

"You probably were," I commented dryly.

He glanced at me and almost smiled.

We left the West End and headed back downtown.

"You said some ion test came up with borax."

He changed the subject. "This mean you didn't get squat on the greasepaint?"

"No borax," I replied. "Something called 'Sun Blush' reacted to the laser. But it doesn't contain borax, and it seems quite likely the prints Petersen left on his wife's body were the result of his touching her while he had some of this 'Sun Blush' on his hands."

"What about the glittery stuff on the knife?"

"The trace amounts were too small to test. But I don't think the residue is 'Sun Blush.'"

"Why not?"

"It isn't a granular powder. It's a cream base - you remember the big white jar of dark pink cream you brought into the lab?"

He nodded.

"That was 'Sun Blush.'

Whatever the ingredient is that makes it sparkle in the laser, it's not going to accumulate all over the place the way borax soap does. The creamy base of the cosmetic is more likely to result in high concentrations of sparkles left in discrete smudges, wherever the person's fingertips come in firm contact with some surface."

"Like over Lori's collarbone," he supposed.

"Yes. And over Petersen's ten-print card, the areas of the paper his fingertips actually were pressed against. There were no random sparkles anywhere else on the card, only over the inky ridges. The sparkles on the handle of the survivor knife were not clustered in a pattern like this. They were random, scattered, in very much the same way the sparkles were scattered over the women's bodies. "

"You're saying if Petersen had this 'Sun Blush' on his hands and took hold of the knife, there'd be glittery smudges versus individual little sparkles here and there."

"That's what I'm saying."

"Well, what about the glitter you found on the bodies, on the ligatures and so on?"

"There were high-enough concentrations in the areas of Lori's wrists for testing. It came up as borax."

He turned his mirrored eyes toward me. "Two different types of glittery stuff, after all, then."

"That's right."

"Hmm."

Like most city and state buildings in Richmond, Police Headquarters is built of stucco that is almost indistinguishable from the concrete in the sidewalks. Pale and pasty, its ugly blandness is broken only by the vibrant colors of the state and American flags fluttering against the blue sky over the roof. Pulling around in back, Marino swung into a line of unmarked police cars.

We went into the lobby and walked past the glass-enclosed information desk. Officers in dark blue gri

We passed bulletin boards plastered with composite sketches of child molesters, flimflam artists, basic garden variety thugs. There were mug shots of Richmond's Ten Most Wanted robbers, rapists and murderers. Some of them were actually smiling into the camera. They'd made the city's hall of fame.

I followed Marino down a dim stairwell, the sound of our feet a hollow echo against metal. We stopped before a door where he peered through a small glass window and gave somebody the high sign.

The door unlocked electronically.

It was the radio room, a subterranean cubicle filled with desks and computer terminals hooked up to telephone consoles. Through a wall of glass was another room of dispatchers for whom the entire city was a video game; 911 operators glanced curiously at us. Some of them were busy with calls, others were idly chatting or smoking, their headphones down around their necks.

Marino took me around to a corner where there were shelves jammed with boxes of large reel-to-reel tapes. Each box was labeled by a date. He walked his fingers down the rows and slipped out one after another, five in all, each one spa

Loading them in my arms, he drawled, "Merry Christmas."

"What?"

I looked at him as if he'd lost his mind.

"Hey."

He got out his cigarettes. "Me, I got pizza joints to hit. There's a tape machine over there."

He jerked his thumb toward the dispatcher's room beyond the glass. "Either listen up in there, or take 'em back to your office. Now if it was me, I'd take them the hell outa this animal house, but I didn't tell you that, all right? They ain't supposed to leave the premises. Just hand 'em back over when you're through, to me personally."

I was getting a headache.

Next he took me into a small room where a laser printer was sweeping out miles of green-striped paper. The stack of paper on the floor was already two feet high.

"I buzzed the boys down here before we left your office," he laconically explained. "Had 'em print out everything from the computer for the last two months."

Oh, God.

"So the addresses and everything are there."

His flat brown eyes glanced at me. "You'll have to look at the hard copies to see what came up on the screen when the calls was made. Without the addresses, you won't know which call's what."

"Can't we just pull up exactly what we want to know on the computer?" I broke out in exasperation.

"You know anything about mainframes?"

Of course I didn't.

He looked around. "Nobody in this joint knows squat about the mainframe. We got one computer person upstairs. Just so happens he's at the beach right now. Only way to get in an expert is if there's a crash. Then they call DP and the department gets knocked up for seventy bucks an hour. Even if the department's willing to cooperate with you, those DP dipsticks are as slow coming around as payday. The guy's going to get around to it late tomorrow, Monday, sometime next week, and that's if Lady Luck's on your side, Doc. Fact is, you was lucky I could find somebody smart enough to hit a Print button."

We stood in the room for thirty minutes. Finally, the printer stopped and Marino ripped off the paper. The stack was close to three feet high. He put it inside an empty printer-paper box he found somewhere and hoisted it up with a grunt.

As I followed him back out of the radio room, he tossed over his shoulder to a young, nice-looking black communications officer, "If you see Cork, I gotta message for him."

"Shoot," the officer said with a yawn.

"Tell him he ain't driving no eighteen-wheeler rig no more and this ain't Smokey and the Bandit."

The officer laughed. He sounded exactly like Eddie Murphy.

For the next day and a half I didn't even get dressed but was sequestered inside my home wearing a nylon warm-up suit and headphones.