Men in scrubs and masks rolled her into the X-ray room, where each of us was given a pair of orange-tinted plastic glasses to add to our armor. Rader set up a light energy source called a Luma-Lite, which was a simple black box with an enhanced blue fiber-optic cable. It was another set of eyes that could see what ours could not, a soft white light that turned fingerprints fluorescent and caused hairs, fibers and narcotic and semen stains to glare like fire.
‘Someone hit the lights,’ Rader said.
In the dark, he began going over the body with the Luma-Lite, and multiple fibers lit up like fine-gauge hot wire. With forceps, Rader collected evidence from pubic hair, feet, hands and the stubble on her scalp. Small areas of yellow got bright like the sun as he passed the light over the finger pads of her right hand.
‘She’s got some chemical here,’ Rader said.
‘Sometimes semen lights up like that.’
‘I don’t think that’s it.’
‘It could be street drugs,’ I offered my opinion.
‘Let’s get it on a swab,’ said Rader. ‘Where’s the hydrochloric acid?’
‘Coming up.’
The evidence was recovered and Rader moved on. The small white light passed over the geography of the woman’s body, into the dark recessed areas where her flesh had been removed, over the flat plain of her belly and gentle slopes of her breasts. Virtually no trace evidence clung to her wounds. This corroborated our theory that Gault had killed and maimed her where she was found, because had she been transported after the assault, debris would have adhered to drying blood. Indeed, her injuries were the cleanest areas of her body.
We worked in the dark for more than an hour, and she was revealed to me inches at a time. Her skin was fair and seemed a stranger to the sun. She was poorly muscled, thin, and five foot eight. Her left ear had been pierced three times, her right ear twice, and she wore studs and small loops, all in gold. She was dark blond with blue eyes and even features that may not have been so bland had she not shaved her head and were she not dead. Her fingernails were unpainted and chewed to the quick.
The only sign of old injuries were healed scars on her forehead and the top of her head over the left parietal bone. The scars were linear, one and a half to two inches long. The only visible gunshot residue on her hands was an ejector port mark on her right palm between her index finger and thumb, which I believed placed that hand in a defensive position when the pistol was fired. The residue most likely ruled out suicide even if all other evidence had pointed to it, which of course it did not.
‘I guess we don’t know which was her dominant hand.’ Horowitz’s voice sounded in the dark somewhere behind me.
‘Her right arm is slightly more developed than her left,’ I observed.
‘Right-handed, then, my guess is. Her hygiene, nutrition were poor,’ Horowitz said.
‘Like a street person, a prostitute. That’s going to be my guess,’ offered O’Donnell.
‘No hooker I know’s gonna shave her head.’ Marino’s gruff voice sounded from darkness across the table.
‘Depends on who she was trying to attract,’ said O’Donnell. ‘The plainclothes officer who spotted her in the subway thought at first she was a man.’
‘This was when she was with Gault,’ Marino said.
‘When she was with the guy you think was Gault.’
‘I don’t think it,’ Marino said. ‘That’s who she was with. I can almost smell the son of a bitch, like he leaves a bad odor everywhere he’s been.’
‘I think what you smell is her,’ O’Donnell said.
‘Move it down, right about here. Good, thanks.’ Rader collected more fibers as disembodied voices continued to converse in a darkness as thick as velvet.
Finally, I confessed, ‘I find this very unusual. Generally I associate so much trace with someone who has been wrapped in a dirty blanket or transported in the trunk of a car.’
‘It’s obvious she hasn’t bathed lately, and it’s winter,’ Rader said as he moved the fiber-optic cable, illuminating a faint childhood scar from a smallpox inoculation. ‘She may have been wearing the same clothing for days, and if she traveled on the subway or by bus, she could have collected a lot of debris.’