Patricia Cornwell – Scarpetta11 – The Last Precinct

“Well, how about you call Mrs. Kiffin right now and see if she remembers him wearing this clothing when he checked in?” I politely tell Stanfield to do his job. “And what about a car? Do we know how he got to the motel?”

“No vehicle’s turned up so far.”

“The way he was dressed is certainly inconsistent with a low-budget motel, Detective Stanfield.” I am drawing pants on a clothing diagram form.

The black jacket and black T-shirt as well as the belt, shoes and socks are expensive designer labels, and this makes me think about Jean-Baptiste Chandonne, whose unique baby-fine hair was found all over Thomas’s decomposing body when it showed up in the Richmond Port earlier this month. I comment on the similarity of the clothes to Stanfield. The pre­vailing theory, I go on to explain to him, is that Jean-Baptiste murdered his brother, Thomas, probably in Antwerp, Bel­gium, and switched clothing with him before sealing the body inside a cargo container bound for Richmond.

“Because you found all those hairs I been reading about in

the paper?” Stanfield is trying to understand what would be difficult for even the most experienced investigator who has seen it all.

“That and microscopic findings that relate to diatomsal­gaeconsistent with an area of the Seine near the Chandonne house in lie Saint-Louis, in Paris.” I talk on. Stanfield is com­pletely lost. “Look, all I can tell you, Detective Stanfield, is this man”I refer to Jean-Baptiste Chandonne”has a very rare congenital disorder and allegedly has been known to bathe in the Seine, maybe thinking it might cure him. We have reason to believe the clothing on his brother’s body was origi­nally Jean-Baptiste’s. Make sense?” I am drawing a belt and noting from the indentation in the leather which notch was used the most.

“Well, to tell you the truth,” Stanfield replies, “I been hear­ing about nothing but this weird case and this Werewolf fel­low. I mean, ma’am, that really is all you hear when you turn on the TV or pick up the paper, and I guess you know that, and by the way, I’m really sorry for what you been through and to tell you the truth, can’t figure how you can even be in here or thinking straight. Godalmighty!” He shakes his head. “The wife said if something like that showed up at our door, he wouldn’t have to do a thing to her. She’d die right off of a heart attack.”

I catch a spark of his misgivings about me. He is wonder­ing if I am completely rational right now, if I might just be projectingif somehow everything I experience becomes tainted by Jean-Baptiste Chandonne. I slip the clothing dia­gram off the clipboard and place it with John Doe’s paper­work as Stanfield dials a number he reads from his notepad. I watch him insert a finger in his free ear, squinting as if Turk’s sawing open another skull hurts his eyes. I can’t hear what Stanfield is saying. He hangs up and comes back over to me as he reads the video display of his pager.

“Well, we got good news and bad news,” he announces. “The lady, Mrs. Kiffin, remembers him dressed real nice in a dark suit. That’s the good news. The bad news is, she also re­members he had a key in his hand, one of those remote kinds that a lot of new, expensive cars have.”

“But there’s no car,” I reply.

“No ma’am, no car. No key, either,” he says. “Sure looks

like whatever happened to him, he had some help. You think maybe somebody drugged him and then tried to burn him up to hide the evidence?”

“I think we’d better seriously consider homicide.” I state the obvious. “We need to get him printed and see if he matches up with anybody in AFIS.”

The Automated Fingerprint Identification System allows us to scan fingerprints into a computer and compare them with those in a database that can be linked state to state. If this dead man has a criminal record in this country, or if his prints are in the database for some other reason, we most likely will get a hit. I work my hands into a pair of fresh gloves, doing my best to cover the plaster looped around my left lower palm and thumb. Fingerprinting dead bodies requires a simple tool called a spoon. It is nothing more than a curved metal imple­ment shaped much like a hollow tube cut in half lengthwise. A strip of white paper is threaded through slits in the spoon so that the paper’s surface is curved to accommodate the con­tours of fingers no longer flexible or compliant to their owner’s will. With each print, the strip is advanced ahead to the next clean square. The procedure isn’t hard. It doesn’t re­quire great intelligence. But when I tell Stanfield where the spoons are, he frowns as if I have just spoken to him in a for­eign language. I ask him if he has ever printed a dead body be­fore. He admits he has not.

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