He produced another envelope from the stack wedged between his elbow and waist.
“Was on my way to take it to Frank.” Vander suggested, “We’ll take a look at it with the laser first.”
Then he printed out another hard copy of NIC 112, the latents that Matt Petersen had left on his wife’s body, and presented it to Marino.
He studied it briefly, muttering, “Ho-ly shit,” and he looked up straight at me.
His eyes smiled in triumph. I was familiar with the look, which I had expected. It said, “So there, Ms. Chief: So maybe you got book-learning, but me, I know the street.”
I could feel the investigative screws tightening on the husband of a woman who I still believed was slain by a man not known to any of us.
Fifteen minutes later, Vander, Marino and I were inside what was the equivalent of a darkroom adjoining the fingerprint lab. On a countertop near a large sink were the ten-print card and the survival knife. The room was pitch-black. Marino’s big belly was unpleasantly brushing my left elbow as the dazzling pulses ignited a scattering of sparkles on the inky smudges of the card. In addition, there were sparkles on the handle of the knife, which was hard rubber and too coarse for prints.
On the knife’s wide shiny blade was a smattering of virtually microscopic debris and several distinct partial prints that Vander dusted and lifted. He leaned closer to the ten-print card. A quick visual comparison with his eagle, expert eye was enough for him to tentatively say, “Based on an initial ridge comparison, they’re his, the prints on the blade are Petersen’s.”
The laser went off, throwing us into complete blackness, and presently we were squinting in the rude glare of overhead lights that had suddenly returned us to the world of dreary cinder block and white Formica.
Pushing back my goggles, I began the litany of objective reminders as Vander fooled around with the laser and Marino lit a cigarette.
“The prints on the knife may not mean anything. If the knife belonged to Petersen, you’d expect to find his prints. As for the sparkling residue – yes, it’s obvious he had something on his hands when he touched his wife’s body and when he was fingerprinted. But we can’t be sure the substance is the same as the glitter found elsewhere, particularly in the first three strangling cases. We’ll give scanning electron microscopy a shot at it, hopefully determine if the elemental compositions or infrared spectrums are the same as those in the residues found on other areas of her body and in the previous cases.”
“What?” Marino asked, incredulously. “You thinking Matt had one thing on his hands and the killer had something else, and they ain’t the same but both look the same under the laser?”
“Almost everything that reacts strongly to the laser looks the same,” I told him in slow, measured words. “It glows like white neon light.”
“Yeah, but most people don’t have white neon crap on their hands, to my knowledge.”
I had to agree. “Most people don’t.”
“Sort of a weird little coincidence Matt just happens to have the stuff on his hands, whatever it is.”
“You mentioned he’d just come home from a dress rehearsal,” I reminded him.
“That’s his story.”
“It might not be a bad idea to collect the makeup he was using Friday night and bring it in for testing.”
Marino stared disdainfully at me.
In my office was one of the few personal computers on the second floor. It was connected to the main computer down the hall, but it wasn’t a dumb terminal. Even if the main computer was down, I could use my PC for word processing if nothing else.
Marino handed over the two diskettes found on the desk inside the Petersen bedroom. I slipped them into the drives and executed a directory command for each one.
An index of files, or chapters, of what clearly was Matt Petersen’s dissertation appeared on the screen. The subject was Tennessee Williams, “whose most successful plays reveal a frustrating world in which sex and violence lie beneath the surface of romantic gentility,” read the opening paragraph of the Introduction.