“The little boy named Eddie Heath? I saw his record in the case file. He was found with no clothes on, next to a Dumpster. Someone had cut out parts of his skin.”
“Lucy, you shouldn’t read case records,” I said as my pager went off. I unclipped it from the waistband of my abs and glanced at the number.
“Excuse me for a moment” I said, getting up from the table as our drinks arrived.
I found a pay phone. It was almost eight P.M..
“I need to talk to you,” said Neils Vander, who was still at the office. “You might want to come down here and bring by Ronnie Waddell’s ten print cards.”
“Why?”
“We’ve got an unprecedented problem. I’m about to call Marino, too.”
“All right. Tell him to meet me at the morgue in a half hour.”
When I returned to the table, Lucy knew by the look on my face that I was about to ruin another evening.
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
“Where are we going?”
“To my office, then to the Seaboard Building.”
I got out my billfold.
“What’s in the Seaboard Building?”
“It’s where the serology, DNA, and fingerprint labs moved not so long ago. Marino’s going to meet us,” I said. “Its been a long time since you’ve seen him.”
“Jerks like him don’t change or get better with time.”
“Lucy, that’s unkind. Marino is not a jerk.”
“He was last time I was here.”
“You weren’t exactly nice to him, either.”
“I didn’t call him a smartass brat.”
“You called him a number of other names, as I recall, and were continually correcting his grammar.”
A half hour later, I left Lucy inside the morgue office while I hurried upstairs. Unlocking the credenza, I retrieved Waddell’s case file, and no sooner had I boarded the elevator when the buzzer sounded from the bay. Marino was dressed in jeans and a dark blue parka, his balding head warmed by a Richmond Braves baseball cap.
“You two remember each other, don’t you?”
I said. “Lucy’s visiting me for Christmas and is helping out with a computer problem,” I explained as we walked out into the cold night air.
The Seaboard Building was across the street from the parking lot behind the morgue and cater-cornered to the front of Main Street Station, where the Health Department’s administrative offices had relocated while its former building was being stripped of asbestos. The cock in Main Street Station’s tower floated high above us like a hunter’s moon, and red lights atop high buildings blinked slow warnings to low-flying planes. Somewhere in the dark, a train lumbered along its tracks, the earth rumbling and creaking like a ship at sea.
Marino walked ahead of us, the tip of his cigarette glow glowing at intervals. He did not want Lucy here, and I knew she sensed it. When he reached the Seaboard Building, where supplies had been loaded onto boxcars around the tithe of the Civil War, I rang the bell outside the door. Vander appeared almost immediately to let us in He did not greet Marino or ask who Lucy was. If a creature from outer space were to accompany someone he trusted, Vander would not ask any questions or expect to be introduced. We followed him up a flight of stairs to the second floor, where old corridors and offices had been repainted in shades of gunmetal gray and refurnished with cherry-finished desks and bookcases and teal upholstered chairs.
“What are you working on so late?” I asked as we entered the room housing the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, known as AFIS.
“Jennifer Deighton’s case,” he said.
“Then what do you want with Waddell’s ten print cards?” I asked, perplexed.
“I want to be sure it was Waddell you autopsied last week,” Vander said bluntly.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Marino looked at him in astonishment.
“I’m getting ready to show you.”
Vander seated himself before the remote input terminal, which looked like an everyday PC. It was connected by modem to the State Police computer, on which resided a data base of more than six million fingerprints. He hit several keys, activating the laser printer.