Wertz came in just then and said, “I used to know a Rhodamine, lived in apartment 6G, just across the hall.”
“This smell like her?” Davis asked.
“She was more pungent,” Wertz said, and he laughed with Davis.
Nerd humor. Roy found it tedious, not funny. He supposed he should be relieved about that.
Trading the first wash bottle for the second, David Davis said, “Straight methanol. Washes away excess rhodamine.”
“Rhodamine always went to excess, and you couldn’t wash her away for weeks,” said Wertz, and they laughed again.
Sometimes Roy hated his job.
Wertz powered up a water-cooled argon ion laser generator that stood along one wall. He fiddled with the controls.
Davis carried the window to the laser-examination table.
Satisfied that the machine was ready, Wertz distributed laser goggles. Davis switched off the fluorescents. The only light was the pale wedge that came through the door from the adjoining lab.
Putting on his goggles, Roy crowded close to the table with the two technicians.
Davis switched on the laser. As the eerie beam of light played across the bottom of the window frame, a print appeared almost at once, limed in rhodamine: strange, luminescent whorls.
“There’s the sonofabitch!” Davis said.
“Could be anybody’s print,” Roy said. “We’ll see.”
Wertz said, “That one looks like a thumb.”
The light moved on. More prints magically glowed around the handle and the latch hasp in the center of the bottom member of the frame. A cluster: some partial, some smeared, some whole and clear.
“If I was a betting man,” Davis said, “I’d wager a bundle that the window had been cleaned recently, wiped with a cloth, which gives us a pristine field. I’d bet all these prints belong to the same person, were laid down at the same time, by your man last night. They were harder to detect than usual because there wasn’t much oil on his fingertips.”
“Yeah, that’s right, he’d just been walking in the rain,” Wertz said excitedly.
Davis said, “And maybe he dried his hands on something when he entered the house.”
“There aren’t any oil glands in the underside of the hand,” Wertz felt obliged to tell Roy. “Fingertips get oily from touching the face, the hair, other parts of the body. Human beings seem to be incessantly touching themselves.”
“Hey, now,” Davis said in a mock-stern voice, “none of that
They both laughed.
The goggles pinched the bridge of Roy’s nose. They were giving him a headache.
Under the lambent light of the laser, another print appeared.
Even Mother Teresa on powerful methamphetamines would have been stricken by depression in the company of David Davis and the Wertz thing. Nevertheless, Roy felt his spirits rise with the appearance of each new luminous print.
The mystery man would not be a mystery much longer.
SEVEN
The day was mild, though not warm enough for sunbathing. At Venice Beach, however, Spencer saw six well-tanned young women in bikinis and two guys in flowered Hawaiian swim trunks, all lying on big towels and soaking up the rays, goose-pimpled but game.
Two muscular, barefoot men in shorts had set up a volleyball net in the sand. They were playing an energetic game, with much leaping, whooping, and grunting. On the paved promenade, a few people glided along on roller skates and Rollerblades, some in swimwear and some not. A bearded man, wearing jeans and a black T- shirt, was flying a red kite with a long tail of red ribbons.
Everyone was too old for high school, old enough so they should have been at work on a Thursday afternoon. Spencer wondered how many were victims of the latest recession and how many were just perpetual adolescents who scammed a living from parents or society. California had long been home to a sizable community of the latter and, with its economic policies, had recently created the former in hordes to rival the affluent legions that it had spawned in previous decades.
On a grassy area adjacent to the sand, Rosie was sitting on a concrete-and-redwood bench, with her back to the matching picnic table. The feathery shadows of an enormous palm tree caressed her.
In white sandals, white slacks, and a purple blouse, she was even more exotic and strikingly beautiful than she had been in the moody Deco lighting at The Red Door. The blood of her Vietnamese mother and that of her African-American father were both visible in her features, yet she didn’t call to mind either of the ethnic heritages that she embodied. Instead, she seemed to be the exquisite Eve of a new race: a perfect, innocent woman made for a new Eden.
The peace of the innocent didn’t fill her, however. She looked tense and hostile as she stared out to sea, no less so when she turned and saw Spencer approaching. But then she smiled broadly when she saw Rocky. “What a cutie!” She leaned forward on the bench and made come-to-me motions with her hands. “Here, baby. Here, cutie.”
Rocky had been happily padding along, tail wagging, taking in the beach scene — but he froze when confronted by the reaching, cooing beauty on the bench. His tail slipped between his legs, fell still. He tensed and prepared to spring away if she moved toward him.
“What’s his name?” Rosie asked.
“Rocky. He’s shy.” Spencer sat on the other end of the bench.
“Come here, Rocky,” she coaxed. “Come here, you sweet thing.”
Rocky cocked his head and studied her warily.
“What’s wrong, cutie? Don’t you want to be cuddled and petted?”
Rocky whined. He dropped low on his front paws and wiggled his rear end, though he couldn’t bring himself to wag his tail. Indeed, he wanted to be cuddled. He just didn’t quite trust her.
“The more you come on to him,” Spencer advised, “the more he’ll withdraw. Ignore him, and there’s a chance he’ll decide you’re okay.”
When Rosie stopped coaxing and sat up straight again, Rocky was frightened by the sudden movement. He scrambled backward a few feet and studied her more warily than before.
“Has he always been this shy?” Rosie asked.
“Since I’ve known him. He’s four or five years old, but I’ve only had him for two. Saw one of those little spots the newspaper runs every Friday for the animal shelter. Nobody would adopt him, so they were going to have to put him to sleep.”
“He’s so cute. Anyone would adopt him.”
“He was a lot worse then.”
“You can’t mean he’d bite anyone. Not this sweetie.”
“No. Never tried to bite. He was too beaten down for that. He whined and trembled anytime you tried to approach him. When you touched him, he just sort of curled into a ball, closed his eyes, and whimpered, shivering like crazy, as if it hurt to be touched.”
“Abused?” she said grimly.
“Yeah. Normally, the people at the pound wouldn’t have featured him in the paper. He wasn’t a good prospect for adoption. They told me — when a dog’s as emotionally crippled as he was, it’s usually best not even to try to place him, just put him to sleep.”
Still watching the dog as he watched her, Rosie asked, “What happened to him?”
“I didn’t ask. Didn’t want to know. There are too many things in life I wish I’d never learned…’cause now I
