Postmortem(108)

“You probably were,” I commented dryly.

He glanced at me and almost smiled.

We left the West End and headed back downtown. “You said some ion test came up with borax.” He changed the subject. “This mean you didn’t get squat on the greasepaint?”

“No borax,” I replied. “Something called ’Sun Blush’ reacted to the laser. But it doesn’t contain borax, and it seems quite likely the prints Petersen left on his wife’s body were the result of his touching her while he had some of this ’Sun Blush’ on his hands.”

“What about the glittery stuff on the knife?”

“The trace amounts were too small to test. But I don’t think the residue is ’Sun Blush.’ ”

“Why not?”

“It isn’t a granular powder. It’s a cream base—you remember the big white jar of dark pink cream you brought into the lab?”

He nodded. “That was ’Sun Blush.’ Whatever the ingredient is that makes it sparkle in the laser, it’s not going to accumulate all over the place the way borax soap does. The creamy base of the cosmetic is more likely to result in high concentrations of sparkles left in discrete smudges, wherever the person’s fingertips come in firm contact with some surface.”

“Like over Lori’s collarbone,” he supposed.

“Yes. And over Petersen’s ten-print card, the areas of the paper his fingertips actually were pressed against. There were no random sparkles anywhere else on the card, only over the inky ridges. The sparkles on the handle of the survivor knife were not clustered in a pattern like this. They were random, scattered, in very much the same way the sparkles were scattered over the women’s bodies.”

“You’re saying if Petersen had this ’Sun Blush’ on his hands and took hold of the knife, there’d be glittery smudges versus individual little sparkles here and there.”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“Well, what about the glitter you found on the bodies, on the ligatures and so on?”

“There were high-enough concentrations in the areas of Lori’s wrists for testing. It came up as borax.”

He turned his mirrored eyes toward me. “Two different types of glittery stuff, after all, then.”

“That’s right.”

“Hmm.”

Like most city and state buildings in Richmond, Police Headquarters is built of stucco that is almost indistinguishable from the concrete in the sidewalks. Pale and pasty, its ugly blandness is broken only by the vibrant colors of the state and American flags fluttering against the blue sky over the roof. Pulling around in back, Marino swung into a line of unmarked police cars.

We went into the lobby and walked past the glass-enclosed information desk. Officers in dark blue grinned at Marino and said, “Hi, Doc,” to me. I glanced down at my suit jacket, relieved I’d remembered to take off my lab coat. I was so used to wearing it, sometimes I forgot. When I accidentally wore it outside of my building, I felt as if I were in my pajamas.

We passed bulletin boards plastered with composite sketches of child molesters, flimflam artists, basic garden-variety thugs. There were mug shots of Richmond’s Ten Most Wanted robbers, rapists and murderers.

Some of them were actually smiling into the camera. They’d made the city’s hall of fame.

I followed Marino down a dim stairwell, the sound of our feet a hollow echo against metal. We stopped before a door where he peered through a small glass window and gave somebody the high sign.

The door unlocked electronically.

It was the radio room, a subterranean cubicle filled with desks and computer terminals hooked up to telephone consoles. Through a wall of glass was another room of dispatchers for whom the entire city was a video game; 911 operators glanced curiously at us. Some of them were busy with calls, others were idly chatting or smoking, their headphones down around their necks.

Marino took me around to a corner where there were shelves jammed with boxes of large reel-to-reel tapes. Each box was labeled by a date. He walked his fingers down the rows and slipped out one after another, five in all, each one spanning the period of one week.

Loading them in my arms, he drawled, “Merry Christmas.”

“What?” I looked at him as if he’d lost his mind.

“Hey.” He got out his cigarettes. “Me, I got pizza joints to hit. There’s a tape machine over there.” He jerked his thumb toward the dispatcher’s room beyond the glass. “Either listen up in there, or take ’em back to your office. Now if it was me, I’d take them the hell outa this animal house, but I didn’t tell you that, all right? They ain’t supposed to leave the premises. Just hand ’em back over when you’re through, to me personally.”