Dark Rivers of the Heart

scar.

He turned and gazed through the glass door of the restaurant.

The man whose mother had died of thirst on the South China Sea now stood among the tables again, folding white cloth napkins into fanciful, peaked shapes.

* * *

The print lab, where David Davis and a young male assistant were waiting for Roy Miro, was one of four rooms occupied by Fingerprint Analysis. Image-processing computers, high-definition monitors, and more exotic pieces of equipment were provided in generous quantity.

Davis was preparing to develop latent fingerprints on the bathroom window that had been carefully removed from the Santa Monica bungalow. It lay on the marble top of a lab bench — the entire frame, with the glass intact and the corroded brass piano hinge attached.

“This one’s important,” Roy warned as he approached them.

“Of course, yes, every case is important,” Davis said.

“This one’s more important. And urgent.”

Roy disliked Davis, not merely because the man had an annoying name, but because he was exhaustingly enthusiastic. Tall, thin, storklike, with wiry blond hair, David Davis never merely walked anywhere but bustled, scurried, sprinted. Instead of just turning, he always seemed to spin. He never pointed at anything but thrust a finger at it. To Roy Miro, who avoided extremes of appearance and of public behavior, Davis was embarrassingly theatrical.

The assistant — known to Roy only as Wertz — was a pale creature who wore his lab coat as if it were the cassock of a humble novice in a seminary. When he wasn’t rushing off to fetch something for Davis, he orbited his boss with fidgety reverence. He made Roy sick.

“The flashlight gave us nothing,” David Davis said, flamboyantly whirling one hand to indicate a big zero. “Zero! Not even a partial. Crap. A piece of crap—that flashlight! No smooth surface on it. Brushed steel, ribbed steel, checked steel, but no smooth steel.”

“Too bad,” Roy said.

“Too bad?” Davis said, eyes widening as if Roy had responded to news of the Pope’s assassination with a shrug and a chuckle. “It’s as if the damned thing was designed for burglars and thugs — the official Mafia flashlight, for God’s sake.”

Wertz mumbled an affirmative, “For God’s sake.”

“So let’s do the window,” Roy said impatiently.

“Yes, we have big hopes for the window,” Davis said, his head bobbing up and down like that of a parrot listening to reggae music. “Lacquer. Painted with multiple coats of mustard-yellow lacquer to resist the steam from the shower, you see. Smooth.” Davis beamed at the small window that lay on the marble lab bench. “If there’s anything on it, we’ll fume it up.”

“The quicker the better,” Roy stressed.

In one corner of the room, under a ventilation hood, stood an empty ten-gallon fish tank. Wearing surgical gloves, handling the window by the edges, Wertz conveyed it to the tank. A smaller object would have been suspended on wires, with spring-loaded clips. The window was too heavy and cumbersome for that, so Wertz stood it in the tank, at an angle, against one of the glass walls. It just fit.

Davis put three cotton balls in a petri dish and placed the dish in the bottom of the tank. He used a pipette to transfer a few drops of liquid cyanoacrylate methyl ester to the cotton. With a second pipette, he applied a similar quantity of sodium hydroxide solution.

Immediately, a cloud of cyanoacrylate fumes billowed through the fish tank, up toward the ventilation hood.

Latent prints, left by small amounts of skin oils and sweat and dirt, were generally invisible to the naked eye until developed with one of several substances: powders, iodine, silver nitrate solution, ninhydrin solution — or cyanoacrylate fumes, which often achieved the best results on nonporous materials like glass, metal, plastic, and hard lacquers. The fumes readily condensed into resin on any surface but more heavily on the oils of which latent prints were formed.

The process could take as little as thirty minutes. If they left the window in the tank more than sixty minutes, so much resin might be deposited that print details would be lost. Davis settled on forty minutes and left Wertz to watch over the fuming.

Those were forty cruel minutes for Roy, because David Davis, a techno geek without equal, insisted on demonstrating some new, state-of-the-art lab equipment. With much gesticulating and exclaiming, his eyes as beady and bright as those of a bird, the technician dwelt on every mechanical detail at excruciating length.

By the time Wertz announced that the window was out of the fish tank, Roy was exhausted from being attentive to Davis. Wistfully, he recalled the Bettonfields’ bedroom the night before: holding lovely Penelope’s hand, listening to the Beatles. He’d been so relaxed.

The dead were often better company than the living.

Wertz led them to the photography table, on which lay the bathroom window. A Polaroid CU-5 was fixed to a rack over the table, lens downward, to take closeups of any prints that might be found.

The side of the window that was facing up had been on the inside of the bungalow, and the mystery man must have touched it when he escaped. The outside, of course, had been washed with rain.

Although a black background would have been ideal, the mustard-yellow lacquer should have been sufficiently dark to contrast with a friction-ridge pattern of white cyanoacrylate deposits. A close examination revealed nothing on either the frame or the glass itself.

Wertz switched off the overhead fluorescent panels, leaving the lab dark except for what little daylight leaked around the closed Levolor blinds. His pale face seemed vaguely phosphorescent in the murk, like the flesh of a creature that lived in a deep-sea trench.

“A little oblique light will make something pop up,” Davis said.

A halogen lamp, with a cone-shaped shade and a flexible metal cable for a neck, hung on a wall bracket nearby. Davis unhooked it, switched it on, and slowly moved it around the bathroom window, aiming the focused light at severe angles across the frame.

“Nothing,” Roy said impatiently.

“Let’s try the glass,” Davis said, angling light from first one direction then another, studying the pane as he’d studied the frame.

Nothing.

“Magnetic powder,” Davis said. “That’s the ticket.”

Wertz flicked on the fluorescent lights. He went to a supply cabinet and returned with a jar of magnetic powder and a magnetic applicator called a Magna-Brush, which Roy had seen used before.

Streamers of black powder flowed in rays from the applicator and stuck where there were traces of grease or oil, but loose grains were drawn back by the magnetized brush. The advantage of the magnetized over other fingerprint powders was that it did not leave the suspect surface coated with excess material.

Wertz covered every inch of the frame and pane. No prints.

“Okay, all right, fine, so be it!” Davis exclaimed, rubbing his long-fingered hands together, bobbing his head, happily rising to the challenge. “Shoot, we’re not stumped yet. Damned if we are! This is what makes the job fun.”

“If it’s easy, it’s for assholes,” Wertz said with a grin, obviously repeating one of their favorite aphorisms.

“Exactly!” Davis said. “Right you are, young master Wertz. And we are not just any assholes.”

The challenge seemed to have made them dangerously giddy.

Roy looked pointedly at his wristwatch.

While Wertz put away the Magna-Brush and jar of powder, David Davis pulled on a pair of latex gloves and carefully transferred the window to an adjoining room that was smaller than the main lab. He stood it in a metal sink and snatched one of two plastic laboratory wash bottles that stood on the counter, with which he washed down the lacquered frame and glass. “Methanol solution of rhodamine 6G,” Davis explained, as though Roy would know what that was or as if he might even keep it in his refrigerator at home.