and the size of the television. He complained about the heat in the room. He complained about the gyros they had eaten which Stevie had thought were particularly good. Stevie had eaten two of them.
The job had gone well, which was why Mr. Marco had given him the day off and the next day- Monday, Stevie's birthday- too. He should do something to celebrate besides coming back and sitting in Toolie's and downing mugs of Sam Adams, but he couldn't think of anything he wanted to do except maybe call Sandrine and have her send a girl, possibly that little Maxine, over to his two-room apartment. He liked small girls. Maybe later if he hadn't had too many beers.
The phone rang and Toolie answered it saying, 'Yeah.'
Then Toolie handed the phone to Big Stevie, who also said, 'Yeah.'
Stevie listened carefully.
'Got it,' he said and handed the phone back to Toolie.
Big Stevie had another job to do. He wondered if maybe he wasn't getting a little old for this kind of thing.
Tomorrow Big Stevie Guista would be seventy-one years old.
Aiden Burn had called the offices of the NAACP and The Salvation Army. There was no answer at the NAACP, but there was an emergency number.
She called the emergency number and got a woman named Rhoda James, who said that she worked in the office and that she remembered no anonymous donations slipped under the door at any time in the past four years.
There was an answer at The Salvation Army. A Captain Allen Nichols said that he did remember one donation in particular, several years ago, an envelope with a one-hundred-dollar bill found inside the mailbox. As it was just before Christmas, all donations were put into the pot, ranging from a few cents to several thousand dollars. They were all anonymous.
She had passed the information on to Mac before returning to Charles Lutnikov's apartment where she started by taking photographs of all the walls of Charles Lutnikov's bookshelves. She stood close enough so that the book titles would all show clearly when she blew the photographs up into eight by tens.
She paused at one of the bookcases in the bedroom where two shelves were devoted to pristine copies of what looked to be all the books of Louisa Cormier. Aiden put down her camera and pulled out one of the Cormier books,
She opened it and went to the title page. It had not been signed by Louisa Cormier. She checked all of the author's books, putting them back after she finished. Her feeling that none of them had been read was confirmed when she flipped through the pages of
She took out her notebook and wrote a reminder to tell this to Mac. She didn't really need the reminder, but it didn't hurt and it followed procedure.
A random examination of a few dozen of the hundreds of books in the apartment showed that they had been read- jackets showing some wear, spines sometimes split or coming apart, coffee stains and ancient crumbs of toast or doughnut.
And then she turned to the typewriter, lifted the gray metallic top, and leaned forward to examine the black ribbon. Approximately one-third of the ribbon was on the right reel and two-thirds on the left. The ribbon on the right reel was what interested her. She carefully lifted the metal tabs holding each reel and then lifted them out.
Aiden bagged the typewriter ribbon, closed her kit, took a final look around the room, and opened the door. She took one more look back as she ducked under the crime-scene ribbon and closed the door behind her.
Mac sat at the lab station, a pile of slides and photographs of fingerprints taken from the crime scene elevator in front of him.
Mac had great respect for fingerprints, more than for DNA or even confessions. He had made a study of them, had notes in a file cabinet at home on the history of fingerprints, notes he had once planned to turn into a book. He had abandoned that idea the day his wife had died.
Fingerprints simply and truly did not lie. Liars with skill could play tricks with fingerprints, but the fact was simple: There were no two fingerprints alike. A Persian doctor in the fourteenth century had made this discovery. No one had ever found two alike. Even the most uncannily similar identical twins had different fingerprints. Mac had heard a sermon from a police chaplain who suggested that God had included this microscopic truth to show the vastness of his invention. Mac spent little time thinking about that. What interested him was the truth of the statement.
The first use of fingerprints in the United States was in 1882 by Gilbert Thompson of the U.S. Geological Survey in New Mexico. He put his fingerprints on a document to prevent forgery.
A murderer is identified by his fingerprints in Mark Twain's
The first recorded criminal identification was made in 1892 by Juan Vucetich, an Argentinean police official. He identified a woman named Rojas who had murdered her two sons and cut her own throat to implicate a third party. Vucetich found a bloody fingerprint of Rojas's on a door. The fingerprint had been left there before she cut her throat.
In 1897, under the British Council General of India, the first Fingerprint Bureau in Calcutta was established using a classification developed by two Indian experts which is still used today.
Eight years later, in 1905, the United States Army began using fingerprints for personal identification. The Navy and Marine Corps soon followed.
Today the FBI has a computer index, AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identification System), of more than forty- six million fingerprints of known criminals. Each state also has its own fingerprint file. New York is no exception.
After three hours, Mac concluded that the fingerprints of Ann Chen, Charles Lutnikov, and Louisa Cormier, in addition to many others, were all over the elevator in which Lutnikov had been killed.
Mac wondered when the elevator had last been thoroughly cleaned. He doubted it had been recently. He looked at the fingerprints of Lutnikov and the two women. The elevator might be a dead end, but there was still the murder weapon to find and places to look that they might not yet have considered.
Mac sat up, his back aching, and imagined the Rojas woman murdering her children and cutting her own throat. The image was not vivid, but the one of Juan Vucetich finding that fingerprint was.
It was a moment of forensic history that Mac Taylor wished he could have witnessed.
'No problem,' the man said, sipping some coffee at the counter in Woo Ching's on Second Avenue uptown.
His egg roll, with two bites out of it, sat in front of him. He wasn't hungry. To his right sat a woman, not old, not young, once pretty, now good looking with short platinum hair. She was lean, well groomed and wore a fur- lined leather jacket and a fur hat. She had taken a few sips of the green tea she had ordered.
It was eleven in the morning on a Sunday, too cold for off-the-street customers except a few seeking respite from the weather over a cup of coffee or tea and a bowl of wonton soup or some egg foo yung.
The only other customers were a trio of women in a booth by the window.
The man didn't know who would be coming to talk to him, only that he was to go to Woo Ching's and have something to eat as soon as he was able to get away. No phones. When she did enter, he had recognized her.
