Patricia Cornwell - Postmortem

He shot a sidelong glance at the wall clock. His ten-hour shift was almost at an end.

"We've got another strangling coming in," I bluntly told him.

"Lord, Lord! Sure am sorry." Shaking his head. "I tell you. It's hard to imagine anybody doing something like that. All them poor young ladies."

Head still shaking.

"It will be here any minute and I want you to make sure the bay door is shut and remains shut after the body's brought in, Fred. The reporters will be out in droves. I don't want anybody within fifty feet of this building. Is that clear?" I sounded hard and sharp, and I knew it. My nerves were singing like a power line.

"Yes, ma'am."

A vigorous nod. "I'll keep an eye out, I sure will."

Lighting a cigarette, I reached for the telephone and stabbed out my home number.

Bertha picked up on the second ring and sounded drugged with sleep when she hoarsely asked, "Hello?"

"Just checking in."

"I'm here. Lucy hasn't budged, Dr. Kay. Sleeping like a log, didn't even hear me come in."

"Thank you, Bertha. I can't thank you enough. I don't know when I'll be home."

"I'll be here till I see you, then, Dr. Kay."

Bertha was on notice these days. If I got called out in the middle of the night, so did she. I'd given her a key to the front door and instructions about the operation of the burglar alarm. She probably arrived at my house just minutes after I left for the scene. It dully drifted through my mind that when Lucy got out of bed in several hours, she'd find Bertha inside the kitchen instead of her Auntie Kay.

I had promised to take Lucy to Monticello today.

On a nearby surgical cart was the blue power unit, smaller than a microwave oven, with a row of bright green lights across the front. It was suspended in the pitch darkness of the X-ray room like a satellite in empty space, a spiral cord running from it to a pencil-sized wand filled with seawater.

The laser we acquired last winter was a relatively simple device.

In ordinary light sources, atoms and molecules emit light independently and in many different wavelengths. But if an atom is excited by heat, and if light of a certain wavelength is impinged upon it, an atom can be stimulated to emit light in phase.

"Give me just another minute." Neils Vander was working various knobs and switches, his back to me. "She's slow to warm up this morning…"

Adding in a despondent mumble, "So am I, for that matter."

I was standing on the other side of the X-ray table, watching his shadow through a pair of amber-tinted goggles. Directly below me was the dark shape of Lori Petersen's remains, the covers from her bed open but still underneath her. I stood in the darkness waiting for what seemed a very long time, my thoughts undistracted, my hands perfectly still, my senses undisturbed. Her body was warm, her life so recently ended it seemed to linger about her like an odor.

Vander announced "Ready" and flipped a switch.

Instantly spitting from the wand was a rapidly flashing synchronized light as brilliant as liquid chrysoberyl. It did not dispel darkness but seemed to absorb it. It did not glow but rather flowed over a small surface area. He was a flickering lab coat across the table as he began by directing the wand at her head.

We explored inches of the suffused flesh at a time. Tiny fibers lit up like hot wires and I began collecting them with forceps, my movements staccato in the strobe, creating the illusion of slow motion as I went from her body on the X-ray table to the evidence buttons and envelopes on a cart. Back and forth. Everything was disconnected. The laser's bombardment illuminated a corner of a lip, a rash of pinpoint hemorrhages on the cheekbone, or a wing of the nose, isolating each feature. My gloved fingers working the forceps seemed to belong to somebody else.

The rapidly alternating darkness and light were dizzying, and the only way I could maintain my equilibrium was to channel my concentration into one thought at a time, as if I, like the laser beam, was in phase, too-all of me in sync with what I was doing, the sum of my mental energy coalesced into a single wavelength.

"One of the guys who brought her in," Vander remarked, "told me she was a surgical resident at VMC."

I barely responded.

"Did you know her?"

The question took me by surprise. Something inside me tightened like a fist. I was on the faculty of VMC, where there were hundreds of medical students and residents. There was no reason I should have known her.

I didn't answer except to give directions such as "A little to the right," or "Hold it there for a minute."

Vander was slow and deliberate and tense, as was I. A feeling of helplessness and frustration was getting to us. So far the laser had proven to be no better than a Hoover vacuum cleaner that collected miscellaneous debris.

We'd tried it on maybe twenty cases by now, only a few of which actually merited its use. In addition to its usefulness in finding fibers and other trace evidence, it reveals various components of perspiration that fluoresce like a neon sign when stimulated by a laser. Theoretically, a fingerprint left on human skin can emit light and may be identified in cases where traditional powder and chemical methods will fail. I knew of only one case where prints on skin were found, in south Florida, where a woman was murdered inside a health spa and the assailant had tanning oil on his hands. Neither Vander nor I was expecting our luck to be any better than it had been in the past.

What we saw didn't register at first.

The wand was probing several inches of Lori Petersen's right shoulder when directly over her right clavicle three irregular smudges suddenly leapt out as if they were painted with phosphorus. We both stood still and stared. Then he whistled through his teeth as a faint chill ran up my spine.

Retrieving a jar of powder and a Magna brush, Vander delicately dusted what appeared to be three latent fingerprints left on Lori Petersen's skin.

I dared to hope. "Any good?"

"They're partials," he said abstractedly as he began taking photographs with an MP-4 Polaroid camera. "The ridge detail's damn good. Good enough to classify, I think. I'll run these babes through the computer right away."

"Looks like the same residue," I thought out loud. "The same stuff on his hands."

The monster had signed his work again. It was too good to be true. The fingerprints were too good to be true.

"Looks the same, all right. But he must have had a lot more of it on his hands this time."

The killer had never left his prints in the past, but the glittery residue, which apparently caused them to fluoresce, was something we'd grown to expect. There was more of it. As Vander began probing her neck, a constellation of tiny white stars popped out like shards of glass hit by headlights on a dark street. He held the wand in place as I reached for a sterilized gauze pad.

We'd found the same glitter scattered over the bodies of the first three strangling victims, more of it in the third case than in the second, and the least amount found in the first. Samples had been sent to the labs. So far, the strange residue had not been identified beyond determining it was inorganic.

We weren't closer to knowing what it was, though by now we had quite a long list of substances it couldn't be. Over the past few weeks, Vander and I had run several series of tests, smearing everything from margarine to body lotions on our own forearms to see what reacted to the laser and what didn't. Fewer samples lit up than either of us had supposed, and nothing blazed as brightly as the unknown glittery residue.

I gently wedged a finger under the electrical cord ligature around Lori Petersen's neck, exposing an angry red furrow in the flesh. The margin wasn't clearly defined-the strangulation was slower than I'd originally thought. I could see the faint abrasions from the cord's having slipped in place several times. It was loose enough to keep her barely alive for a while. Then suddenly, it was jerked tight. There were two or three sparkles clinging to the cord, and that was all.