Edward Lee - Ghouls

“Why? Problems?”

She grinned, and Kurt found himself contemplating the length of her cuspids. “I’ve seen funny things in this business,” she said, “but I’ll let you be the judge.” Absently, she coiled a tress of hair around her finger; the finger was white, like bone. “I’ll give you the dull stuff first… Whenever we get something that involves a missing police officer, we tend to suspect the very worst, and spend a little extra time on the preliminaries. Fortunately, the level of decomposition on the hand wasn’t severe—the primary friction ridges were still in great shape—”

Kurt found it easy to picture her inking up Swaggert’s severed hand. “It was Swaggert’s hand, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, and all the partials on the brass, the speedloader, and the Smith were Swaggert’s, too. No one else handled any of that stuff before or after he put on the sand gloves.” She pointed placidly to the black-topped counter where she’d set the clipboard. Beside a suds-filled sink lay a plastic bag containing wads of cotton stained with something orange, like Mercuro-chrome. She went on to explain. “Neutron-activation analysis on the glove itself found heavy traces of fresh antimony.”

Kurt was puzzled. “Why bother? Isn’t it assumed—”

“We don’t assume anything here,” she almost snapped. “Leave that to the other departments, the three-ring circuses. The first step was to determine that Swaggert had definitely discharged the weapon. This state is famous for police officers shot with their own guns. Shades of Terrence Johnson.”

“But that still doesn’t prove he wasn’t wasted by his own piece.”

“Theoretically, no. But statistically it does, almost without a doubt. Once a cop gets his hands on his weapon, no one ever takes it away. It’s not the cops that are the problem, it’s the holsters. All this quick-draw nonsense, open-tops, friction holsters, thumb-snaps. Dead meat. Cops should have their guns handcuffed to their wrists at the start of every shift. What kind of holster do you use?”

Kurt looked to the floor. “Uh, thumb-snap.”

“Then I guess you also carry around a banner that says TAKE MY GUN AND KILL ME WITH IT,” Jan Beck said, and scowled. “But to get back on track, next I tried to get a type and an Rh from the bitemark on Drucker’s arm, but the saliva had oxidized by the time I got to it. County ding-dongs don’t know how to preserve evidence. Antigen test was no-go, so was the antihuman serum test. And no chance for a good dental print. It was a lousy bite, not at all pronounced.”

Kurt couldn’t believe his ears. “We had assumed that the bitemark was from an animal after the fact. You think it was human? ”

“I’m not paid to think. I run tests, and anything with a bodily secretion in it I check. You’d be surprised at the number of human bitemarks we get in here, and you’d be even more surprised at how many autopsies and stomach pumps bring up human tissue. We check every angle, every imaginable possibility, no matter how remote.”

Suddenly the lights went out, and Kurt shuddered when this woman actually took his arm and guided him across the room.

“Now the fun begins.” She took him to a viewing partition, where sat a Sirchie slide comparator. There was a sliding click; the twin screens flashed white, then darkened, bearing odd shapes. In the left block was a single enlarged fingerprint. The right block contained a dark oval. Jan Beck hovered over the screen, pointing the camel’s hair brush in the fashion of a knife.

“In the left box, we have a normal lampblack fingerprint, and in the right a tape-lift of one of the latents on the coffin. As you can see, they’re quite different from each other. The image in the right box possesses none of the qualities associated with latent fingerprints. No loops, no whorls, no bifurcations—no ridge patterns whatsoever.”

Kurt pinched his chin, thinking. Jan Beck stared at him as if in wait of a natural response. Finally, he said, “Porous glove smear?”

“No. It’s a fingerprint.”

“But you just said—”

She grinned in the uplit darkness, to a hideous effect. The comparator hummed. “It’s a fingerprint devoid of most normal, expected characteristics. In other words, what you’re seeing is a photograph of an actual latent deposit.”

“I don’t understand.”

Unconsciously, she caressed the brush handle, in a way that made Kurt think of his first date at Palmer’s Drive-in. She went on, “A latent fingerprint is composed of a bunch of things, perspiration, sebaceous and fatty secretions, chloride ions, residual alpha amino acids. It’s these substances that form the actual latent ridge patterns we use for comparison and identification. What I’m saying is that the image in the right box is a normal deposit of common fingerprint residue, yet there is no observable ridge pattern.”

“How often does this happen?” Kurt asked.

“Never.”

The screens glowed. He dragged his cigarette and muttered an inconclusive “Shit.”

”Uh huh,” she replied. She turned off the left screen; a new slide popped into the right—a luminous blue oval. “Here’s a fluorescent dust job under ultraviolet. Still no ridge pattern.”

The screen changed again, now a pink blob on a gray background. “This one’s a Neohydrin-acetone treatment. Nothing.”

The next slide showed a glistening, brownish splotch on a white background. “When I got really desperate, I did this silver nitrate transfer, also under UV light. The silver chloride reaction barely even showed up.”

Kurt flicked ashes on the floor when she wasn’t looking. “Maybe the guy did something to his fingertips.”

Her face seemed to tweak, as though he’d insulted her. “Only idiots do that; it happens more in the movies than anywhere else. Sure, there have been a fair number of bozos who’ve cut off their fingerprints, or burned them off, but what they’re too stupid to realize is that fingerprints are genetically unalterable; the ridge patterns always come back after healing, along with scars which are even more identifiable. Besides, if these were mutilated fingerprints, then the pore patterns would be obviously deformed. And they aren’t. Look.”

The next slide was completely filled with an orange smear and darker orange spots. “At least the coffin was jet lacquered,” she said. “The ideal surface for pore schemes, next to glass. Here’s an iodine fume, a perfect sebaceous print.” Next slide. “And a mercuric oxide blow. Perfect.” Now her eyes were large and off focus. She turned to him and said, “Everyone who touched the surface of this coffin left perfect pore patterns but no ridges. Why?”

Kurt squashed his cigarette out under his Adidas, dismayed. “The coffin was sitting in the woods for at least twenty-four hours,” he reminded her.

“Big deal,” she said. “Granted, sodium chloride residuum will diffuse after a short time. But the point is the sebaceous secretions are still wholly intact, and amino acid deposits have been known to last for years, decades in some instances. And it doesn’t make a poop streak’s worth of difference anyway”—she tapped the screen rapidly with her brush—“because the pore patterns are still there.”

She seemed winded now, all at once having worked herself into a delicate frenzy. Aggravation brought color to her face, and she continued to fondle the brush handle as though it were a penis. A leak of sexual repression? Kurt thought. Or just wishful thinking?

“I’ve done everything I know,” she said, looking off in a fog. “You’re missing the gist of what I’m telling you. I know I’m not the most imposing person in the world, and I suppose it might be hard for you to take me seriously; but if I didn’t know what I was doing, then I wouldn’t be here. I’m an evidence technician by design, and a poroscopist by specialty. I do good work, and I know what I’m talking about, and let me tell you, quite professionally—it’s goddamned fucking impossible to leave perfect pore configurations with no ridge patterns.”