Four Walls

laser or ink-jet printer of some sort. 'Who sent these?'

'Hell if I know. That's why I brought them to you people.'

Angell muttered, 'Knew this was too good to be true.'

'Look, all I know is, it was someone at Belluso's.'

'How do you know that?' Stella asked.

''Cause that's what Maria told me. She said it was no big deal, but I knew this guy was nutsy-cuckoo, y'know?' He slapped one meaty hand on the table. 'I kept trying to get her to quit that damn place, but would she listen? That girl had a mind of her own, y'know?'

'Yeah, I hate when that happens,' Angell said dryly. 'When did the letters start coming?'

'I'm not sure. I only found out about them a couple weeks ago, and she wouldn't tell me when it started, but I figure at least six months. She's been at Belluso's eight months, so it couldn't have been more than that.'

Stella started reading one of the letters aloud. ''Dear Maria. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways that I could love you. Number one-''

'Do you have to read that out loud?' DelVecchio asked plaintively.

Flipping to the next one, Stella said, 'He misquotes Shakespeare on the next one, too.' She started riffling through them. 'Ooh, he does a haiku here-and the next one's got a detailed description of what he wants to do to her in the bakery bathroom.'

'It's disgusting!' DelVecchio cried.

'Can we keep these?' Stella asked.

DelVecchio recoiled. 'I sure as hell don't want them.'

'Do you have any guesses who it might be?'

'How the hell should I know? I mean, sure, there were lots of guys who went in there, and Maria's a hottie, y'know? If she wasn't already my girl, I'd have been hitting on her too. But I didn't know none of those guys. I don't like those kinds of places-too froofy. Gimme a Starbucks any day of the week.'

'So noted. While you're here, Mr. DelVecchio,' Stella said, 'we're going to need some blood and DNA-if you don't mind.'

DelVecchio shrugged. 'Why should I mind? You do that, you can eliminate me as a suspect, right?'

Relieved, Stella took out her kit. DelVecchio had struck her as the type who would give her a hard time about it just on general principles. 'Exactly.'

'If it makes it easier to find Maria's killer, I'll give you my left arm.'

Angell asked DelVecchio a few more general questions while Stella took his blood and swabbed his cheek. Then he left.

After he was gone, Stella thwapped the letters into a neat pile and said, 'I'm gonna take these letters to the lab to see if we can trace the provenance of the printer that made it.'

'Good luck.'

She snorted. 'We're gonna need it. Handwriting you can trace. Even typewriters would sometimes have something distinctive about different models-especially the old manuals, they went off-kilter when you looked at them funny. But printers? They're mass produced. There might be DNA on the more recent ones, though.'

'Let's hope so,' Angell said.

11

FINGERPRINTS WERE FIRST USED as a tool for identification purposes in criminal investigations in the nineteenth century. The first known instance of fingerprints being discussed was in an anatomy text published in Breslau in 1823. It wasn't until the later part of the century that people started applying them to criminalistics- though the idea didn't take at first. Sheldon Hawkes remembered the first time he'd read with surprise that Dr. Henry Faulds-who'd published a paper on prints in 1880 in Nature-offered the notion of using fingerprints to identify criminals to the Metropolitan Police in London. They refused, dismissing the entire notion as fanciful.

Hawkes often wondered if the people who rejected the notion realized their mistake. It was like the person who wanted to close the U.S. Patent Office in the early part of the twentieth century because he thought everything that could be invented had been invented, or the people in the 1940s who saw television as a passing fad, or the people in the 1970s who couldn't imagine what possible use people would ever have for a computer in their homes.

The definitive work on the subject was Finger Prints, a book published in 1892 by Sir Francis Galton, which included all ten of Galton's own fingerprints as an illustration on the title page.

Hawkes had actually found a leather-bound copy of the book in the Strand one day last year and bought it for Mac as a combination Christmas and belated thank-you present for moving him over to fieldwork. It had been two years, and Hawkes had no regrets about leaving the morgue. Besides, he knew the place was safe in Peyton Driscoll's hands.

For one thing, it meant he got to play with fingerprints. Although Hawkes had wanted to be a doctor since he was a kid, he'd always had an interest in forensic science, going back to when he read Pudd'nhead Wilson by Mark Twain, one of the first works of fiction to make use of the nascent field of dactyloscopy.

From a forensic perspective, the good thing about fingerprints was that they were everywhere. The same papers that first postulated the uniqueness of fingerprints in the nineteenth century also pointed out the uniqueness of palm-, toe-, and soleprints. All of those extremities secreted oils from the eccrine glands that were often left behind on things touched by that particular body part in the pattern of the dermal papillae (ridges) that made up the prints.

But people touched things with their fingers considerably more often than they did their palms or any part of their feet, so fingers became the focal point.

The bad thing about fingerprints was that while they were everywhere, they were often incomplete. Criminals weren't always considerate enough to leave perfect impressions of their entire finger whenever they touched something at a crime scene.

And sometimes they touched things that had already been touched repeatedly by others. Case in point: the weights in the yard from RHCF.

The actual method for making latent prints visible hadn't changed overmuch since Galton's day: you used powder of some kind. In the old days, you'd cover the surface with the powder, then gently blow it away. What remained behind had adhered to the eccrine gland secretions, which were left in the pattern of the fingerprint.

At least in theory. Sometimes those prints were smudged, particularly when several people in succession had touched the thing and left plenty of sweat on it. That sweat also tended to make regular powders clump, messing up the latent print. For that reason, Hawkes went with contrasting powder, which he applied gently with a magnetic brush. One of the advantages of his years as a surgeon was that it made it easier for him to keep his hand steady while applying the magnetic powder. Danny had been particularly cranky when Hawkes got the hang of it after only a few hours-it had taken Danny months to get it right.

Hawkes had taken the doughnut weight that appeared to have been used to kill Malik Washburne, as well as the barbell and the other doughnut weights on it. The latter were really for comparison purposes, to see if he could figure out who had been using the weights besides the vic.

After taking photos of the powdered weights, Hawkes used acetate stickers to pull up anything that even resembled a fingerprint. The porous nature of the metal in the weights was such that the stickers might not work, so he had the photos as backup. As he pulled each print, he placed the sticker on his flatbed 1000-DPI scanner. The slowness of the scan was offset by the small size of the image being scanned, so it took about an hour for Hawkes to get everything that looked even vaguely like a print onto the lab computer's mainframe.

Unfortunately, some of the prints were very vague indeed. The vast majority of them were too smudged