My first winter here he stopped by my office late one afternoon to announce it was snowing. A long red scarf was wrapped around his neck, and pulled over his ears was a leather flight helmet, possibly ordered from a Banana Republic catalogue and absolutely the most ridiculous winter hat I’d ever seen. I think he would have looked perfectly at home inside a Fokker fighter plane. “The Flying Dutchman,” we appropriately called him around the office. He was always in a hurry, flying up and down the halls, his lab coat flapping around his legs.
“You saw the papers?” he asked, blowing on his coffee.
“The whole blessed world saw the papers,” I dismally replied.
Sunday’s front page was worse than Saturday evening’s. The banner headline ran across the entire width of the top of the page, the letters about an inch high. The story included a sidebar about Lori Petersen and a photograph that looked as if it came from a yearbook. Abby Turnbull was aggressive enough, if not indecent, to attempt an interview with Lori Petersen’s family, who lived in Philadelphia and “were too distraught to comment.”
“It sure as hell isn’t helping us any,” Vander stated the obvious. “I’d like to know where the information’s coming from so I could string a few people up by their thumbs.”
“The cops haven’t learned to keep their mouths shut,” I told him. “When they learn to zip their lips, they won’t have leaks to bitch about anymore.”
“Well, maybe it’s the cops. Whatever the case, the stuff’s making my wife crazy. I think if we lived in the city, she’d make us move today.”
He went to his desk, which was a jumble of computer printouts, photographs and telephone messages. There was a quart beer bottle and a floor tile with a dried bloody shoe print, both inside plastic bags and tagged as evidence. Randomly scattered about were ten small jars of formalin, each containing a charred human fingertip anatomically severed at the second joint. In cases of unidentified bodies that are badly burned or decomposed, it isn’t always possible to get prints by the usual method. Incongruously stationed in the midst of this macabre mess was a bottle of Vaseline Intensive Care lotion.
Rubbing a dollop of the lotion on his hands, Vander pulled on a pair of white cotton gloves. The acetone, xylene and constant hand-washing that go with his trade were brutal on his skin, and I could always tell when he’d forgotten to put on gloves while using ninhydrin, a chemical helpful for visualizing latent prints, because he’d walk around with purple fingers for a week. His morning ritual complete, he motioned me to follow him out into the fourth-floor hallway.
Several doors down was the computer room, clean, almost sterile, and filled with light-silver modular hardware of various boxy shapes and sizes, bringing to mind a space-age Laundromat. The sleek, upright unit most closely resembling a set of washers and dryers was the fingerprint matching processor, its function to match unknown prints against the multimillion fingerprint data base stored on magnetic disks. The FMP, as it was known, with its advanced pipeline and parallel processing was capable of eight hundred matches per second. Vander didn’t like to sit around and wait for the results. It was his habit to let the thing cook overnight so he had something to look forward to when he came to work the next morning.
The most time-consuming part of the process was what Vander did Saturday, feeding the prints into the computer. This required his taking photographs of the latent prints in question, enlarging them five times, placing a sheet of tracing paper over each photograph and with a felt-tip pen tracing the most significant characteristics. Next he reduced the drawing to a one-to-one-sized photograph, precisely correlating to the actual size of the print. He glued the photograph to a latent-print layout sheet, which he fed into the computer. Now it simply was a matter of printing out the results of the search.
Vander seated himself with the deliberation of a concert pianist about to perform. I almost expected him to flip up his lab coat in back and stretch his fingers. His Steinway was the remote input station, consisting of a keyboard, a monitor, an image scanner and a fingerprint image processor, among other things. The image scanner was capable of reading both ten-print cards and latent prints. The fingerprint image processor (or FIP, as Vander referred to it) automatically detected fingerprint characteristics.