Linda Fairstein - Hell Gate

We each grabbed a soda and something to eat, while Patty explained. “He’s assigning a numerical value to the fingerprint I just submitted. And he’s searching the Latent Cognizant database. Give him a few minutes.”

“Is he as good at it as you?” Mike asked, tousling her hair.

“Not always,” Patty said. “Sir Francis is a genius-don’t get me wrong. But we do things differently. He assigns values to things that I sometimes disagree with. Hey, you-keep your crumbs off my desk, Mike.”

Those of us in law enforcement talked about fingerprint identification as a science, but it was much more accurate to call it an art. The skill of the examiner, the ability to distinguish between blindingly similar ridge endings and bifurcations, was something far too complex to take for granted.

“There are a lot of holes in the net,” she went on. “Garbage in, garbage out. Had a case last month-a homicide in Staten Island. The perp’s been in the system for a lot of years, but his inked prints were done so badly back in 2003 that Sir Francis here missed him. Couldn’t get a read at all.”

“But you did?” I asked.

“It wasn’t easy. We just don’t always see things the same, Francis and me.”

Mike was on his second candy bar. “How about the plastic bag, Patty? You think you could get any lifts off that?”

“Not my job, sweetheart.”

“By the time I find Crime Scene on a busy Saturday night and get them over here to dust it, I might as well go to a double feature, take a nap, come back all fresh in the morning. Like that.”

She reached for the corner of the bag with her gloved hand. “You fall for his bullshit, too, Alex? I’m telling you, he wheedled everything out of me except my virginity.”

“That was so long gone by the time you got to the academy, Detective Baker, not even Sherlock Holmes could have found a trace of it.”

“Then why’d you spend so much time looking?” Patty was bent over again, moving her hand over the bag with her magnifying glass. “Plastic’s great for prints. What are you hoping to get?”

“I guess you’re going to tell me pretty soon whether Sir Francis can put the mascara case together with Salma.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, she’s not the one who dropped it at City Hall, ’cause she was already dead. I’d like to think the guy who handled the bag might have left his prints on that.”

“You got a load of partials on here. But they’re mostly smudged. Overlaid on each other. You might have multiple handlers.”

“Two tickets to the Super Bowl?”

“You got ’em?”

“Find me a killer and I’ll put you on the fifty-yard line.”

“See what I mean, Alex? And still I go for the bait.”

Patty took the bag over to a larger workbench against the wall and turned on a brighter lamp. “Here’s my advice. I’ll break the rules for you, Mike. Again. If I get anything of value, I’ll give you a call immediately. My guess is that I’m going to get an endless bunch of overlays.”

She was already at work, dusting the first side of the bag and taking her lifts.

“We know at least one guy in the Parks Department picked it up out of a ditch,” Mike said. “No telling how many hands have been on it.”

Patty handed Mike the first of the index cards she was making after marking it with a red dot. “No value.”

“You gotta find me one,” Mike said. He was throwing back M &M’s now, washing them down with soda. “Just one that great big brain can read.”

“I’m giving you something better, okay? When you leave here, you going uptown?”

“Yeah.”

“Stop at the DNA lab. Give ’em this. See if your blarney works on those dames.”

“It’s no value, you said.”

“Fingerprints, sweetheart, are a mixture of sweat and oils and skin cells. You figured that out yet, Mike? There are tiny little repositories of DNA in all that minutiae,” Patty said. “That smudge is of no value to me, but I can give you a whole bunch of lifts that may just have the genetic fingerprint-the DNA-you’re looking for.”

“Touch DNA,” I said. “That’s what they’re working on for me on that old case I have against Lem Howell. We’ll have them rush it. Howard Browner will do it.”

“Let me get the four or five best partials for you.”

We waited another fifteen minutes for Patty Baker to finish her work. She straightened up, packaged together the lift cards, and handed them to Mike.

“I think Sir Francis has spoken,” she said.

“How’d you know?” I asked.

“Just used to his whirring sound. I heard something coming into the printer.”

“I’ll get it,” Mike said.

“Mitts off, sweetheart. Keep that leash on him for a few minutes, will you, Alex? The computer may kick out a handful of close possibilities. I do the final comparison, and I do it without a bloodhound breathing sour-cream-and-garlic-chip odors over my shoulder.”

Patty walked to the machine and scooped up a sheaf of papers. She returned to the desk, picked up the magnifier, and got back to work. “You heard me, didn’t you, Mike? Back off.”

Mike turned away from Patty and began to pace. Another twenty minutes went by before she raised her head to speak to us.

“I hope you weren’t too wedded to that match,” she said. “The computer didn’t kick out Salma Zunega for you.”

“Maybe Sir Francis is wrong again, Patty. Can’t you call the lieutenant and dig her card out of his office?”

“I think the old boy knows exactly what he’s doing, sweetheart. He and I are ready to declare the same match.”

“The thumbprint on the mascara wand actually comes up a hit against someone in your database?” I asked. “Someone other than Salma Zunega?”

“I’ll walk you through the ridges and minutiae if you like. You got more than enough points of comparison to stand up in court.”

My head was spinning. The expensive makeup was sold in upscale department stores and boutiques, but I had thought if the fingerprint on it matched anyone in the statewide identification system, it would have been Salma.

Patty Baker held out the computer result and the lift card she created an hour earlier. “Looks like the girl with the midnight black mascara washed up on the beach the other day. It’s the Golden Voyage case, all right. She’s still got no name in my database, but the woman who used this makeup is your other murder victim. She’s your Jane Doe Number One.”

“You want to come up?” I asked Mike. “I can order in a Peking duck from Shun Lee.”

We were parked in the driveway in front of my apartment. It was almost nine P.M.

“No, thanks. I overdosed on junk food. And you need to get some rest.”

“You going home?”

“Making a stop first.”

He had blown up his date with Fanny Levit last night to hang out with me at Vickee and Mercer’s. I had it in my head that he would stop by her place tonight. It was none of my business and I tried to push my curiosity out of mind.

“You have any thoughts on how Jane Doe got her hands on such expensive makeup?” I asked.

“Your guess is as good as mine. Who knows what the snakeheads did to lure those girls to make this trip? Ask Olena when you see her on Monday.”

“I will, but she didn’t seem to have anything more than the shirt on her back.”

“I’ll talk to the guys who searched the ship. Find out what was left on board. Maybe the baggie was in Jane Doe’s pocket when she washed up.”

“I’ll give you that one. She had on a sweat jacket, right?”

“Yeah,” Mike said.

“Now, how did it get from the beach to the front doorstep of City Hall?”

We were both stumped by that one. Mike started ticking off the names of people who’d been at both the beach and the mayor’s office.