A pause. “I’m sure. Just these five.”
Marino said, “You slapped the label on this PERK, and your prints should be on it, seems to me.”
“Not if she was wearing gloves,” said Betty, who was watching all this with dismay.
“I generally don’t wear gloves when I’m labeling things,” I muttered. “They’re bloody. The gloves would be bloody.”
Marino blandly went on, “Okay. So you wasn’t wearing gloves and Dingo was-”
“Wingo,” I irritably said. “His name’s Wingo!”
“Whatever.”
Marino turned to leave. “Point is, you touched the PERK with bare hands, meaning your prints should be on it.”
He added from the hall, “But maybe nobody else’s should be.”
Chapter 10
Nobody else’s were. The only identifiable prints on the cardboard file were mine.
There were a few smudges – and something else so completely unexpected that I had, for the moment, completely forgotten the unhappy reason for coming to see Vander at all.
He was bombarding the file with the laser and the cardboard was lit up like a night sky of pinpoint stars.
“This is just crazy,” he marveled for the third time.
“The damn stuff must have come from my hands,” I said incredulously. “Wingo was wearing gloves. So was Betty . . .”
Vander flipped on the overhead light and shook his head from side to side. “If you were male, I’d suggest the cops take you in for questioning.”
“And I wouldn’t blame you.”
His face was intense: “Rethink what you’ve been doing this morning, Kay. We’ve got to make sure this residue’s from you. If it is, we might have to reconsider our assumptions about the strangling cases, about the glitter we’ve been finding-”
“No,” I interrupted. “It isn’t possible I’ve been leaving the residue on the bodies, Neils. I wore gloves the entire time I worked with them. I took my gloves off when Wingo found the PERK. I was touching the file with my bare hands.”
He persisted, “What about hair sprays, cosmetics? Anything you routinely use?”
“Not possible,” I repeated. “This residue hasn’t shown up when we’ve examined other bodies. It’s shown up only in the strangling cases. ”
“Good point.”
We thought for a minute.
“Betty and Wingo were wearing gloves when they handled this file?”
He wanted to make sure.
“Yes, they were, which is why they left no prints.”
“So it isn’t likely the residue came from their hands?”
“Had to have come from mine. Unless someone else touched the file.”
“Some other person who may have planted it in the refrigerator, you’re still thinking.”
Vander looked skeptical. “Yours were the only prints, Kay.”
“But the smudges, Neils. Those could be from anyone.”
Of course they could be. But I knew he didn’t believe it.
He asked, “What exactly were you doing just before you came upstairs?”
“I was posting a hit-and-run.”
“Then what?”
“Then Wingo came over with the slide folder and I took it straight to Betty.”
He glanced unemphatically at my bloodstained scrubs and observed, “You were wearing gloves while doing the post.”
“Of course, and I took them off when Wingo brought me the file, as I’ve already explained-”
“The gloves were lined with talc.”
“I don’t think that could be it.”
“Probably not, but it’s a place to start.”
I went back down to the autopsy suite to fetch an identical pair of latex gloves. Several minutes later, Vander was tearing open the packet, turning the gloves inside out, and shooting them with the laser.
Not even a glimmer. The talc didn’t react, not that we really, thought it would. In the past we’d tested various body powders , from the murdered women’s scenes in hopes of identifying the glittery substance. The powders, which had a talc base, hadn’t reacted either.
The lights went on again. I smoked and thought. I was trying to envision my every move from the time Wingo showed me the slide file to when I ended up in Vander’s office. I was engrossed in coronary arteries when Wingo walked up with the PERK. I set down the scalpel, peeled off my gloves and opened the file to look at the slides. I walked over to the sink, hastily washed my hands and patted them dry with a paper towel. Next I went upstairs to see Betty. Did I touch anything inside her lab? I didn’t recall if I had.