Black Notice - Cornwell Patricia - Страница 36

"We must be living right," Fielding said.

"Hot dog," Vander chortled. "Wo for two! I'm going to hop on this right away. Get one of my buddies at Secret Service to run ' em through MORPHO, PRINTRAK, NECAFIS,WIN, whatever-every database out there, all fortyfifty million prints."

Nothing excited Vander more than finding a loop or whorl he could hurl through cyberspace to hog-tie a criminal.

"Is the FBI's national database up and running yet?" Fielding asked.

"Secret Service already has every damn print the FBI does, but as usual, the Bureau has to re-create the wheel. Spending all this money to create their own database, and using different vendors so everything is incompatible with everybody else. I've got a dinner to go to tonight"

He focused the Luma-Lite on the foul, dark flesh pinned to the cutting board, and instantly two specks fluoresced bright yellow. They were not much bigger than a nailhead, and were parallel and symmetrical and could not be rubbed off.

"I'm pretty sure it's a tattoo," I said.

"Yeah," Vander agreed. "Don't know what else it could be. Nothing else is doing anything."

The flesh from the dead man's back was murky and muddy in the cool, blue light.

"But see how dark this is in here?" Vander's gloved finger outlined an area about the size of my hand.

"I wonder what the hell that is," Fielding said.

"I just don't know why it's so dark," Vander mused.

"Maybe the tattoo's black or brown," I suggested.

"Well, we'll give Phil a whirl at it," Vander said. "What time's it getting to be? You know, I wish Edith.hadn't said we'd do this dinner tonight. I gotta go. Dr. Scarpetta, you're on your own. Damn, damn. I hate it when Edith wants to celebrate something."

"Ah, come on, big guy," Fielding said. "You know what a party animal you are."

"I don't drink much anymore. I feel it."

"You're supposed to feel it, Neils," I said.

Phil Lapointe was not in a good mood when I walked into the image enhancement lab, which looked more like a production studio than a place where scientists worked with pixels and contrasts in all shades of light and dark to put a face on evil. Lapointe was one of our first Institute graduates, and he was skilled and determined but had not yet learned to move on when a case absolutely wouldn't.

"Damn," he said, raking his fingers through thick red hair and squinting as he leaned into a twenty-four-inch screen.

"I hate to do this to you," I said.

He impatiently tapped keys, rolling another shade of gray down a freeze-frame from a convenience store videotape. The figure in dark glasses and hairnet cap was not made much clearer, but the store clerk was certainly vivid as blood sprayed in a fine mist from his head.

"I tweak it and it's almost there, and then it's not," Lapointe wearily complained with a sigh. "I see this damn thing in my sleep."

"Unbelievable," I said, staring. "Look how relaxed he is.

It's like all of it is an afterthought, no big deal. 'A what-the hell, may-as-well."

"Yeah, that much I've got." Lapointe stretched his back. "Just wasted the guy for no reason. That's what I don't get.

"I give you a few more years and you'll get it," I said.

"I don't want to become cynical, if that's what you're saying."

"It's not getting cynical. It's about finally figuring out there don't have to be reasons," I told him.

He stared at the computer screen, lost in the last picture that had ever captured Pyle Gant alive. I had performed his autopsy.

"Let's see what we've got here," Lapointe said, removing the towel from the surgical pan.

Gant was twenty-three with a two-month-old baby and working overtime to pay for his wife's birthday necklace on layaway.

"This must be from The Container Man. You're thinking a tattoo?"

Gant lost control of his bladder before he was shot.

"Dr. Scarpetta?"

I knew this because the back of his jeans and the seat of the chair behind the counter were soaked with urine. When I looked out the window, two cops were restraining his hysterical wife in the parking lot.

"Dr. Scarpetta?"

She was screaming and slapping. She still had braces on her teeth.

"Thirty-one dollars and twelve cents;" I muttered.

Lapointe saved the file and closed it.

"What was?" he asked me.

"That's what was in the cash register," I replied.

Lapointe rolled his chair around, opening drawers and getting out different-colored filters and rummaging for gloves. The phone rang and he answered it.

"Hold on." He held the receiver out to me. "It's for you."

It was Rose.

"I got hold of someone in the foreign currency department of Crestar;" she said. "The money you asked me about is Moroccan. To date, there are nine-pуint-three dirham to the dollar. So two thousand dirham would be about two hundred and fifteen dollars."

"Thank you, Rose..: ' "And there's one other thing you might find interesting," she went on. "It's forbidden for Moroccan money to be brought in or taken out of the country."

"I have a feeling this guy was into a lot of things that are forbidden," I said. "Can you try Agent Francisco again?"

"Certainly."

My understanding of ATF protocols was fast turning into the fear that Lucy had rejected me. I desperately wanted to see -her: I wanted to do whatever I had to do to make that happen. I hung up and lifted the cork cutting board out of the pan, and Lapointe looked at it under a strong light.

"I'm not feeling real optimistic about this," he let me know.

"Well, don't start seeing this one in your sleep, too;" I told him. "I'm not hopeful, either. All we can do is try."

What was left of the epidermis was as greenish-black as a quarry or a swamp, and the flesh underneath was getting darker and dryer like curing meat. We centered the corkboard under a high-resolution camera that was connected to the video screen.

"Nope;" Lapointe said. "Too much reflection."

He tried oblique light and then switched to black and white. He fitted various filters over the camera lens. Blue was no good, nor was yellow, but when he tried red, the iridescent specks peeked out at us again. Lapointe enlarged them. They were perfectly round. I thought of full moons, of a werewolf with evil yellow eyes.

"I'm not going to be able to get this any better live. I'll just grab it," Lapointe said, disappointed.

He captured the image onto his hard drive and began to process it, the software making it possible for us to see some two hundred shades of gray that we couldn't detect with the unaided eye:

Lapointe worked the keyboard and mouse, going in and out of windows, and using contrast, brightness, and enlarging, shrinking and adjusting. He eliminated background noise, or trash, as he called it, and we began to see hair pores, and then the stippling made by a tattoo needle. Out of the murk emerged black wavy lines that became fur or feathers. A black line sprouting daisy petals became a claw.

"What do you think?" I asked Lapointe.

"I think this is the best we're going to get," he impatiently said.

"We know anybody who's an expert in tattoos?"

"Why don't you start with your histologist," he said.