“I guess it could be cat hair,” I supposed.
“Too fine for dog hair, don’t you think?”
“Not if it’s something like a Skye terrier. Long, straight silky hair.”
“Pale yellow?”
“They can be tawny,” I said. “Maybe the undercoat? I don’t know.”
“Maybe the guy’s a breeder or works with one,” Vander suggested. “Aren’t there long-hair rabbits, too?”
“Knock, knock;” Fielding’s voice sounded as he opened the door.
He walked in, tray in hand, and we turned on the lights.
“There are angora rabbits,” I said. “The ones the sweaters are made from.”
“You look like you’ve been working out again,” Vander said to Fielding.
“You mean I haven’t looked that way before?” Fielding asked.
Vander looked puzzled as if he’d never noticed that Fielding was a body-sculpting fanatic.
“We’ve picked up on some sort of residue in one of the pockets,” I told Fielding. “It’s the same pocket the money was in.”
Fielding removed the towel that covered the tray.
“I recognize the pounds and deutsche marks,” he said. “But not those two coppery things.”
“I think they’re Belgian francs,” I said.
“And I got no clue what this cash is.”
It had been lined up bill by bill to dry.
“It looks like it’s got some sort of temple on it and what? What’s a dirham? Arabic?”
“I’ll get Rose to check.”
“Why would somebody have four different kinds of money on him?” Fielding asked.
“If he was in and out of a lot of countries in a short period of time;” I ventured a guess. “That’s 4111 can think of. Let’s get the residues analyzed ASAP”
We put on our protective glasses and Vander turned out the lights. The same dull rouge and brilliant orange fluoresced on several of the bills. We scanned all of them on both sides, finding flecks and smudges here and there, and then the ridge detail of a latent fingerprint. It was barely visible on the upper left corner of a hundred-dirham bill.
“We must be living right,” Fielding said.
“Hot dog,” Vander chortled. “Wo for two! I’m going to hop on this right away. Get one of my buddies at Secret Service to run ‘ em through MORPHO, PRINTRAK, NECAFIS,WIN, whatever-every database out there, all fortyfifty million prints.”
Nothing excited Vander more than finding a loop or whorl he could hurl through cyberspace to hog-tie a criminal.
“Is the FBI’s national database up and running yet?” Fielding asked.
“Secret Service already has every damn print the FBI does, but as usual, the Bureau has to re-create the wheel. Spending all this money to create their own database, and using different vendors so everything is incompatible with everybody else. I’ve got a dinner to go to tonight”
He focused the Luma-Lite on the foul, dark flesh pinned to the cutting board, and instantly two specks fluoresced bright yellow. They were not much bigger than a nailhead, and were parallel and symmetrical and could not be rubbed off.
“I’m pretty sure it’s a tattoo,” I said.
“Yeah,” Vander agreed. “Don’t know what else it could be. Nothing else is doing anything.”
The flesh from the dead man’s back was murky and muddy in the cool, blue light.
“But see how dark this is in here?” Vander’s gloved finger outlined an area about the size of my hand.
“I wonder what the hell that is,” Fielding said.
“I just don’t know why it’s so dark,” Vander mused.
“Maybe the tattoo’s black or brown,” I suggested.
“Well, we’ll give Phil a whirl at it,” Vander said. “What time’s it getting to be? You know, I wish Edith.hadn’t said we’d do this dinner tonight. I gotta go. Dr. Scarpetta, you’re on your own. Damn, damn. I hate it when Edith wants to celebrate something.”
“Ah, come on, big guy,” Fielding said. “You know what a party animal you are.”
“I don’t drink much anymore. I feel it.”
“You’re supposed to feel it, Neils,” I said.
Phil Lapointe was not in a good mood when I walked into the image enhancement lab, which looked more like a production studio than a place where scientists worked with pixels and contrasts in all shades of light and dark to put a face on evil. Lapointe was one of our first Institute graduates, and he was skilled and determined but had not yet learned to move on when a case absolutely wouldn’t.