can see something with the naked eye. In truth, though, it wasn’t very much more difficult to put the brassiere on the long white counter over which hung the ultraviolet lights. A flip of the switch, and the counter turned a lovely shade of purple, and the brassiere turned a lovely shade of purple, and Sam’s men turned it over and over, searching for the luminous Phantom Fast laundry mark that many laundries use. The Phantom Fast mark is a good idea since it leaves no unsightly numbers on the back of your shirt collar or the seat of your underpants. It means compiling a separate set of marks for police files, but think of how pretty your shirts look. The only thing that’ll bring out a Phantom Fast mark is ultraviolet light, and hell, police labs are crawling with that kind of light.
The only trouble with the dead girl’s brassiere was that it didn’t carry a Phantom Fast mark, either.
Faced with the fact that the girl probably did her own laundry, but otherwise unfazed, Sam’s men began putting the bra through a series of chemical tests to determine whether or not it held any peculiar stains.
Meanwhile, back at the morgue…
The assistant medical examiner was a man named Paul Blaney. He had been examining dead bodies for a good many years, but he still could not get used to floaters. He had been examining this particular dead body for nigh onto two hours, and he still could not get used to floaters. He had estimated that the dead girl was approximately thirty-five years of age, that her weight while she was alive (according to her five-foot-three-and-a-half-inch height and her large bone structure) was probably somewhere around 125 pounds, and that her head hair (judging from the color of her pubic hair) was probably blonde.
Her lower front teeth had been lost in the water, and her upper front teeth were in good condition, although her upper back teeth and her lower back teeth had a good many fillings and a good many cavities. The upper right second molar had been extracted a long time ago and never replaced. Blaney had prepared a dental chart to be compared with the dental chart of any suspected missing person.
He had also made a methodical scrutiny of the girl’s body for identifying marks or scars and had concluded that she’d once had an appendectomy (there was a long scar across her belly), that she’d been vaccinated on her left thigh rather than on either of her arms, that there was a duster of birthmarks at the base of her spinal column, and unusual in a woman, that there was a small tattoo on the fold of skin between her right thumb and forefinger. The tattoo was a simple heart, the point of which ran toward the arm. There was a single word within the heart. The tattoo looked like this:
Blaney estimated that the body had been submerged for at least three to four months. The epidermis of both hands was lost, and he sighed a forlorn sigh for his brothers of toil in the police laboratory because he knew this would mean extra work for them. And then, with a great show of distaste and a maximum of somehow remarkably detached efficiency, he cut off the fingers and thumb of each hand and wrapped them up for delivery to Sam Grossman.
Then he began working on the dead girl’s heart.
It requires a certain amount of dispassionate, emotionless patience to lift fingerprint impressions from fingers and thumbs that have been cut from a cadaver.
If the dead girl had been in the water for a comparatively short period of time, Sam Grossman’s men could have dried off each finger with a soft towel and then—in order to smooth out the so-called washerwoman’s skin effect—have injected glycerin beneath the fingertip skin. They could then have taken their prints with ease.
Unfortunately, the girl had not been in the water for a short period of time.
Nor had she been in the water only long enough to wear away the friction ridges of her fingers. Had this been the case, the lab boys would have cut away the skin of each fingertip, placing these snips in separate test tubes with formaldehyde solution. Assuming the papillary ridges were intact on the outer surface of the skin, one of Sam’s men would have put on a rubber glove, placed the piece of skin on his index finger, and then rolled finger, glove, and skin