‘I wish I could correct the camera angle, the perspective distortion,’ he muttered, talking to himself, which he often did. ‘But I don’t know the measurements of anything. Too bad whoever took this didn’t include a nice little ruler as a scale.’
‘Then I would really worry about who we were dealing with,’ I commented.
‘That’s all we need. A killer who’s like us.’ He defined the edges, and readjusted the positions of the photographs one more time. ‘Let’s see what happens if I superimpose them.’
He did, and the overlay was amazing, bone ends and even the ragged flesh around the severed neck, identical.
‘That does it for me,’ I announced.
‘No question about it in my mind,’ he agreed. ‘Let’s print this out.’
He clicked the mouse and the laser printer hummed on. Removing the photographs from the scanner, he replaced them with the one of the feet and hands, moving it around until it was perfectly centered. As he began to enlarge images, the sight became even more grotesque, blood staining the sheet bright red, as if it had just been spilled. The killer had neatly lined up feet like a pair of shoes, hands side by side like gloves.
‘He should have turned them palm down,’ Vander said. ‘I wonder why he didn’t?’
Using spatial filtering to retain important details, he began eliminating interference, such as the blood and the texture of the blue table cover.
‘Can you get any ridge detail?’ I asked leaning so close, I could smell his spicy aftershave.
‘I think I can,’ he said.
His voice was suddenly cheerful, for there was nothing he liked better than reading the hieroglyphics of fingers and feet. Beneath his gentle, distracted demeanor was a man who had sent thousands of people to the penitentiary, and dozens to the electric chair. He enlarged the photograph and assigned arbitrary colors to various intensities of gray, so we could see them better. Thumbs were small and pale like old parchment. There were ridges.
‘The other fingers aren’t going to work,’ he said, staring, as if in a trance. ‘They’re too curled for me to see. But thumbs look pretty darn good. Let’s capture this.’ Clicking into a menu, he saved the image on the computer’s hard disk. ‘I’m going to want to work on this for a while.’
That was his cue for me to leave, and I pushed back my chair.
‘If I get something, I’ll run it through AFIS right away,’ he said of the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, capable of comparing unknown latent prints against a databank of millions.
‘That would be great,’ I said. ‘And I’ll start with HALT.’
He gave me a curious look, because the Homicide Assessment and Lead Tracking System was a Virginia database maintained by the state police in conjunction with the FBI. It was the place to start if we suspected the case was local.
‘Even though we have reason to suspect the other cases are not from here,’ I explained to him, ‘I think we should search everything we can. Including Virginia databases.’
Vander was still making adjustments, staring at the screen.
‘As long as I don’t have to fill out the forms,’ he replied.
In the hallway were more boxes and white cartons marked EVIDENCE lining either side and stacked to the ceiling. Scientists walked past, preoccupied and in a hurry, paperwork and samples in hand that might send someone to court for murder. We greeted each other without slowing down as I headed to the fibers and trace evidence lab, which was big and quiet. More scientists in white coats were bent over microscopes and working at their desks, black counters haphazardly arranged with mysterious bundles wrapped in brown paper.
Aaron Koss was standing in front of an ultraviolet lamp that was glowing purple-red as he examined a slide through a magnifying lens to see what the reflective long wavelengths might tell him.
‘Good morning,’ I said.
‘Same to you.’ Koss grinned.
Dark and attractive, he seemed too young to be an expert in microscopic fibers, residues, paints and explosives. This morning, he was in faded jeans and running shoes.
‘No court for you,’ I said, for one could usually tell by the way people were dressed.