He looked over at me, wiping his hands.on his jeans.
“I know this won’t make you feel good, but maybe you’re the. last person she wants to see right now,” he said.
20
There was a rule in our building that any evidence, even something as innocuous as a ten-print card, had to be transported on the service elevator. This was located at the end of a hallway where two cleaning ladies were this minute pushing their carts as I headed to Neils Vander’s lab.
“Good morning, Merle. And Beatrice, how are you?” I smiled at them.
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 elévator button.
“You going anyplace special for Christmas, Dr. Scarpelts.
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 Christmases 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 úp 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 juryrigged 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 fróm 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, arid 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 carne 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.