Ghouls

“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.”

Kurt let out a slow breath. He thought he was beginning to understand. “Like pushing a penny into clay and getting the date, but not a trace of Lincoln’s face.”

“Exactly.”

“Isn’t there anything you can do with just the pore patterns?”

“No. Not in this situation anyway. As a rule, pore schemes are used to link good ridge patterns with bad. By themselves, they’re almost never admissible in court—you can run fingerprints, but you can’t run pore patterns. Without any suspects, these things are useless.”

Neither of them spoke for a time, but when their silence became edgy, she punched the slide button again. She seemed to be squeezing the brush handle as hard as she could. “Here’s another dust job with anthracene. I upped the UV to 380 nanometers, to make it pretty.”

Kurt’s face screwed up in confusion. The screen captured a bright, glowing blue outline against a flat gray background, like a phosphorescent inkblot of a man with one arm and no head.

“How do you like it?” she asked. Her face was beaming now in the fragmented darkness. She brought the tip of the brush handle to her mouth and bit down, delighted at Kurt’s bewilderment.

“What is it?”

“A palm print,” she said. “I found six complete palm prints on the coffin. I treated and photographed two of them. Here’s the second one.” The comparator churned and spat the last slide into the slot. Now the screen held a similar outline, but with reversed polarity.

Kurt stared at her. It couldn’t be what he was thinking. “Tell me,” he said.

“The first slide was a right hand, the second a left. You know what that means, don’t you?”

“Only three fingers on each hand?”

“Uh huh. And if that’s not balled up enough, consider the physical measurements. The average handspread of an adult Caucasian male, that is minimus to opposable thumb, is roughly nine and a half inches. The same measurement on this print is over twelve.”

Kurt looked at his own hand and tried to envision the difference. He gulped.

“Which means,” she went on, “that this person is big, real big.”

Kurt’s eyes darted from her to the screen, then back to her again. “But this is crazy.”

“And there’s no way that an accident can account for the missing fingers on each hand. The palmer outlines are too natural, the spaces between the metacarpals too wide, too even. It’s got to be some kind of birth defect or something.” She jammed the brush into the hole of a test-tube rack, and left it there. “I’m going to send some of this stuff to the bureau, see what they say about it. Count on a six-week wait. In the meantime…” She extended a white, tiny hand to the screen.

Kurt stared at the illumined, blue image. It seemed to waver in space, as if three dimensional. “At least I got a good lead.”

“Yeah, knock yourself out. How hard can it be to spot a guy with three fingers on each hand and a notable case of acromegaly?” Laughter fluttered up between Jan Beck’s words. “It’s either that, or spacemen have landed in Tylersville.”

««—»»

Bard seemed to have grown into his office chair; its confines were filled by the sheer girth of his body, his buttocks and belly handles settling there like a big bag of mud. Kurt thought if the chief didn’t get out of that chair soon, he’d have to have it surgically removed. It was no wonder the man had a bad heart and blood pressure high enough to spin a turbine.

Seated, Kurt faced him. He reached shakily for a cigarette and almost broke it getting it out of the pack. All the while Bard’s face filled with hot blood as he scanned the forensic findings from Pikesville. Severe dissatisfaction raised a nearly palpable blockade across the desk, and with excruciating slowness, Bard’s eyes tracked up from the report and found Kurt’s, like a pair of ice picks.

“What is this shit you bring me?”

Kurt shrugged, trying to pretend nonchalance. He felt strangely as though the evidence findings were his fault, much the same as the aide must’ve felt who had waked Hitler to tell him that Europe was being invaded. Kurt