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.”