But what came to mind most vividly was a case years ago of an especially resourceful burglar whose brother worked in a funeral home. The burglar, who had been imprisoned many times, attempted to give himself a pair of gloves that would leave someone else’s prints. This he accomplished by repeatedly dipping a dead man’s hands into liquid rubber, forming layer after layer until the “gloves” could be pulled off.
The plan did not work well for at least two reasons. The burglar had neglected to knock air bubbles out with each layer of rubber, and this made for rather odd latent prints recovered at the next mansion he hit. He also had not bothered to research the individual whose prints he stole. Had he done so, he would have learned that the decedent was a convicted felon who had died peacefully while out on parole.
I thought of my visit to ERF on a sunny afternoon that now seemed years ago.
I had sensed that Carrie Grethen was not pleased to find Wesley and me in her office when she walked in stirring a viscous substance, which, in retrospect, could have been liquid silicone or rubber. It was during this visit that Lucy mentioned the biometric lock research she was “in the middle of.” Maybe what she had said was literally true. Maybe Carrie had intended at that moment to make a rubber cast of Lucy’s thumb. If my theory about what Carrie had done was accurate, I knew it could be proven. I wondered why none of us had thought before to ask a very simple question. Did the print scanned into the biometric lock system physically match Lucy’s, or were we simply taking the computer’s word for it? ”
“Well, I would assume so,” Benton Wesley said to me when I got him on the car phone.
“Of course you would assume it. Everyone would assume it. But if someone made a cast of Lucy’s thumb arid scanned it into the system, the print should be a reversal of the corresponding one on her ten-print card on file with the Bureau. A mirror image, in other words.” Wesley paused, then sounded surprised.
“Damn. But wouldn’t the scanner have detected the print was backward and rejected it?”
“Very few scanners could distinguish between a print and an inversion of that same print. But a fingerprint examiner could,” I said.
“The print scanned into the biometric lock system should still be digitally stored in the data base.”
“If Carrie Grethen did this, don’t you think she would have eradicated the print from the data base?”
“I doubt it,” I replied.
“She’s not a fingerprint examiner. It’s unlikely she would realize that every time a latent print is left, it’s reversed. And it matches a ten-print card only because those prints are reversed as well. Now if you made a cast of a digit and left a latent print with it, you would actually have a reversal of a reversal.”
“So a latent made with this rubber thumb would be a reversal of the same latent made with the person’s actual thumb.”
“Precisely.”
“Christ, I’m not good with things like this.”
“Don’t worry about it, Benton. I know it’s confusing, but take my word for it.”
“I always do, and it sounds like we need to get a hard copy of the print in question.”
“Absolutely, and right away. There’s something else I want to ask you. Were you aware of a research project pertaining to ERF’s biometric lock system? ”
“A research project conducted by the Bureau?”
“Yes.”
“No. I’m not aware of any project like that.”
“That’s what I thought. Thank you, Benton.” Both of us paused, waiting for a personal word from the other. But I did not know what else to say. So much was inside me.
“Be careful,” he told me, and we said goodbye.
I found the spy shop not more than a half hour later in a huge shopping mall learning with cars and people. Eye Spy was inside near Ralph Lauren and Crabtree & Evelyn. It was a small shop with a window display of the finest that legal espionage had to offer. I hesitated a safe distance away until a customer at the register moved, allowing me to see who was working at the counter. An older, overweight man was ringing up an order, and I could not believe he could be Carrie Grethen’s lover. No doubt this detail was yet one more of her lies.