What we saw didn’t register at first.
The wand was probing several inches of Lori Petersen’s right shoulder when directly over her right clavicle three irregular smudges suddenly leapt out as if they were painted with phosphorus. We both stood still and stared. Then he whistled through his teeth as a faint chill ran up my spine.
Retrieving a jar of powder and a Magna brush, Vander delicately dusted what appeared to be three latent fingerprints left on Lori Petersen’s skin.
I dared to hope. “Any good?”
“They’re partials,” he said abstractedly as he began taking photographs with an MP-4 Polaroid camera. “The ridge detail’s damn good. Good enough to classify, I think. I’ll run these babes through the computer right away.”
“Looks like the same residue,” I thought out loud. “The same stuff on his hands.”
The monster had signed his work again. It was too good to be true. The fingerprints were too good to be true.
“Looks the same, all right. But he must have had a lot more of it on his hands this time.”
The killer had never left his prints in the past, but the glittery residue, which apparently caused them to fluoresce, was something we’d grown to expect. There was more of it. As Vander began probing her neck, a constellation of tiny white stars popped out like shards of glass hit by headlights on a dark street. He held the wand in place as I reached for a sterilized gauze pad.
We’d found the same glitter scattered over the bodies of the first three strangling victims, more of it in the third case than in the second, and the least amount found in the first. Samples had been sent to the labs. So far, the strange residue had not been identified beyond determining it was inorganic.
We weren’t closer to knowing what it was, though by now we had quite a long list of substances it couldn’t be. Over the past few weeks, Vander and I had run several series of tests, smearing everything from margarine to body lotions on our own forearms to see what reacted to the laser and what didn’t. Fewer samples lit up than either of us had supposed, and nothing blazed as brightly as the unknown glittery residue.
I gently wedged a finger under the electrical cord ligature around Lori Petersen’s neck, exposing an angry red furrow in the flesh. The margin wasn’t clearly defined-the strangulation was slower than I’d originally thought. I could see the faint abrasions from the cord’s having slipped in place several times. It was loose enough to keep her barely alive for a while. Then suddenly, it was jerked tight. There were two or three sparkles clinging to the cord, and that was all.
“Try the ligature around her ankles,” I said quietly.
We moved down. The same white sparkles were there, too, but again, very few of them. There was none of this residue, whatever it was, anywhere on her face, none in her hair or on her legs. We found several of the sparkles on her forearms, and a spangling of them over her upper arms and breasts. A constellation of the tiny white stars clung to the cords savagely binding her wrists in back, and there was a scattering of the glitter over her cut gown as well.
I moved away from the table, lit a cigarette and began reconstructing.
The assailant had some material on his hands that was deposited wherever he touched his victim. After Lori Petersen’s gown was off, perhaps he gripped her right shoulder and his fingertips left the smudges over her clavicle. One thing I felt sure of. For the concentration of this material to be so dense over her clavicle, he must have touched her there first.
This was puzzling, a piece that seemed to fit but didn’t, really.
From the beginning, I’d assumed he was restraining his victims immediately, subduing them, perhaps at knifepoint, and then binding them before he cut off their clothing or did anything else. The more he touched, the less of the residue was left on his hands. Why this high concentration over her clavicle? Was this area of her skin exposed when he began his assault? I wouldn’t have supposed so. The gown was an interlocking cotton material, soft and stretchy and fashioned to look almost exactly like a longsleeved T-shirt. There were no buttons or zippers, and the only way for her to have put it on was to pull it over her head. She would have been covered to her neck. How could the killer touch the bare skin over her clavicle if she still had her gown on? Why was there such a high concentration of the residue at all? We’d never found such a high concentration before.