“Ah, Captain Klause,” the paper’s exec editor greeted in her in his office.
“Closs,” she corrected.
“Have a seat. What can I do for you?”
“Turn on a tape recorder and print everything I say in tomorrow morning’s edition.” Helen sat down, poker-faced.
Tait had a nicely trimmed beard and hair pulled back in a ponytail. “I’m always happy to accommodate the police,” Tait said. “Coffee?”
“No thank you. Just turn on your recorder or get a pencil and a piece of paper while I dictate to you.”
“My handwriting’s atrocious.” Tait turned on a small Sony tape recorder extracted from a desk drawer. “Shoot.”
“Speculations published regarding the possibility of Jeffrey Dahmer still being alive are premature, unfocused, and irresponsibly directed. The P Street murder of Stewart K. Arlinger at the White Horse Inn was a single incident and certainly perpetuated by what we call a derivative-stage killer, not Jeffrey Dahmer. Jeffrey Dahmer is dead. I saw his dead body in the state police morgue facility on November 29, 1994. His body was positively ID’d. And as far as the note left at the P Street crime scene, it’s a fake. The Wisconsin State Police Violent Crimes Unit has successfully dealt with far more grievous homicides in the past, and we will deal with this one in a manner that is thorough, expeditious, and final. Now, turn off the tape recorder.”
Tait did so, an approving look on his face.
“Print that, verbatim, in tomorrow morning’s edition, on the front page, Mr. Tait, and include an official retraction of the tabloid-like tripe you published today.”
“Hmmm. Interesting. The police can order a newspaper what to print.”
“No, but the police can close down any enterprise which perpetuates federal violations of the United States Code regarding the employment of immigrants.” Helen got up, began to put on her coat. “Have a good day, Mr. Tait.”
“How do you know those guys on the dock don’t have work visas?” Tait asked.
“Because if they did, you would have told me that by now, Mr. Tait.”
“Good point. But don’t the people have a right to be informed of even extreme possibilities when a murder has been committed?”
“They have a right to be informed of the truth based on a professional analysis of evidence,” Helen said. “They don’t have the right to be frightened by irresponsible journalism fabricating news in order to sell more papers than the competition.”
“I hear you, Captain Klause—”
“Closs.”
“—and I’ll publish your statement as instructed.” Tait leaned back in a chair that must’ve cost a thousand dollars. He lit a Marlboro. “But let me make a statement of my own, to you. Fair enough?”
Helen turned at the door.
“You better be right,” Tait said, and winked.
««—»»
CRIMINAL EVIDENCE SECTION.
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.
Helen’s heels snicked past doors with queer plastic signs: Toolmarks, SEM, Electrophoresis, Spectrometry. This was the wing opposite the state morgue in the basement of St. John the Divine hospital, the Technical Services Division. A skein of politics propelled here: the state deficit, however phantom due to a balanced-budget amendment, exceeded millions; under the current governor, true, it was going down fast, but the problem still existed. Hence, the state leased the hospital’s basement for one dollar per year, in exchange for corporate tax breaks. Politicians wheeled and dealed just like district attorneys and pawn shops. It was all the same in a way.
The hallways down here seemed labyrinthine, and reminded Helen of the primeval CD-ROM games that Tom played. Whenever she came down here, she felt a thousand feet beneath the earth. This was Jan Beck’s domain.
In an quad-room that looked something similar to a high-school biology lab, a plaque read DIAGNOSTICS. Jan Beck sat amid bulky machines that hummed in ranks and regurgitated rolls of tractor-fed paper. She wore a white cotton apron like a butcher’s.
“It’s a felt-tip pen with standard blue ink that manufacturers refer to as Blue-Dark 4b,” the TSD honcho said. “But that’s just a service standard. Different variations of the same hue are used with different application systems.”
“Application systems?” Helen questioned. She was tired now, frazzled and emptied. All she could think about, in the back of her mind, was Tom. “A pen’s a pen, Jan,” she tried to focus.
Beck sat beside a clunky looking machine. “Not really. Today you’ve got ballpoints, hardpoints, drypoints. You’ve got a plethora of adhesion inks for another plethora: Micro-balls, liquid pumps, fine-points, medium points, etc. In other words, the service standard for—as the example is here—Blue-Dark 4b is chemically dissimilar for each manufacturer.”
“What you’re saying,” Helen guessed without a whole lot of interest, “is that Blue-Dark 4b in a Scripto pen is identifiably different from Blue-Dark 4b in a Bic pen?”
“Exactly. Each company fine-tunes the service-standard ink formulas for their own application systems.”
“Their own pens, you mean.”
“Exactly,” the pale, kink-haired woman repeated.
“So the trick, first, is to analyze the ink on the letter and identify the manufacturer of the pen, which will probably take forever.”
“It took me about ninety minutes, Captain,” Beck surprised her. “With a liquid chromatograph, a Canon digitizer, and a computer search of the printed mole-index. Your P-Street killer wrote the note with the most popular, the most reliable, and the most common felt-tip pen in the world. A Flair.”
“You found all that out in ninety minutes?”
“Sure. Sometimes it takes longer if the uplinks are busy, but it’s usually a breeze. It still doesn’t give us much, though.”
“At least it’s something,” Helen remarked.
“Well, I should have a lot more for you soon.”
“What I need more than anything, Jan, is some kind of graphological proof that the handwriting wasn’t really Dahmer’s. Then I can put a hard lid on the press.”
“I’m working on it.” Beck leaned back on a machine which sported a face of dials, jumping meters, and a hatch for a belly, a BV Model 154 peptide analyzer made by a company called Dissel Industries in Erlangen, Germany. It identified trace organic food substances in the digestive system by measuring peptidal enzyme deviations, and it cost the state over $100,000. If a decedent ate a Big Mac on Thursday night, Jan Beck would know that by early Friday morning. “That part might take another—”
“Jan,” Helen implored, “I need it in a day, no more.”
“—another eight hours,” Beck continued without pause. “I have a trace plate cooking right now.”
“A trace plate?”
“A high-grain photograph of the letter, which I snapped immediately. Then, to sniff out fingerprints, I put the physical body of the note through an Anthra-Hydrin fume.”
“What’s that?” Helen made the mistake of asking.
“In the old days we had two major critical fingerprint-detection substances: Anthracene and Neohydrin. Then a third came along called Cyanoacrylate, which will detect latent ridge patterns left on ideal surfaces by someone who’s even wearing rubber surgical gloves.”
“You’re kidding? Rubber gloves?”
“Sure. Sebaceous secretions of certain incipient amino acids will molecularly penetrate rubber surgical gloves, which happen to be the misconceived glove of choice for serial killers and burglars. Somebody should tell these assholes to wear jersey gloves, or driving gloves. Anyway, when I first got into the business, I worked for a county department on the east coast, and I had a fifteen-year-old homicide where the suspected perp was placed off the crime scene by an unreliable witness. The county attorney’s office was bugging the hell out of me to look back into it, so I used Cyanoacrylate on the target perimeter and found this guy’s prints all over the place. And it washed in court; the asshole got sent up to Jessup for forty years for a crime he committed over a decade earlier.”