After a long spell of meaningful kissing, I slid my hands down her neck, over her shoulders, and down her sides to the bottom of the sweatshirt. Then I burrowed them under the loose-fitting hem and began easing them back up: up the nubby sweatpants, over the top of her hips, till I felt the bare skin of her waist. It seemed magical, miraculous somehow, that within this huge, shapeless tent of a sweatshirt could be something so slender, so smooth-so female-as the sculpted curves and hollows of this waist. I touched the tips of my thumbs together, and my fingers stretched halfway around her back. I grazed my thumbs around the rim of her navel, imagining its vertical cleft; I pressed the taut flatness of her belly, slid the waistband of the pants down to grip the solid flare of her hip bones. It had been more than two years since my hands had held a woman’s hips like this, but I remembered what female hips felt like, and I could tell these were splendid hips, to match the splendid belly. It augured well for what the rest of her would be like, too. Just to be sure, I slipped my hands higher, and I knew I’d guessed right. Her breath caught as I began to trace the curves of her breasts, which were bare beneath the baggy shirt. It seemed almost as if I were living two lives at the moment: one life, my visible life, was a baggy, frumpy sweatshirt sort of life; the other, lived by my mouth and hands, was an exotic, dizzying swirl of tongues and fingertips, rounded breasts and hardening nipples. I pulled away from the kiss so I could see Jess’s face, and I was glad I did, because it radiated a combination of tenderness and desire and wonder I had never glimpsed before.
“That is the single most gorgeous thing I have ever seen on this earth,” I whispered, and she buried her face in my neck and began to kiss softly. “You know what?” I murmured eventually.
“No, what?”
“You did such a good job showing me how to work those chopsticks, I’m thinking maybe you could teach me a few other skills.”
“What did you have in mind?”
“What’s the best way to take off a pair of sweatpants-standing up, or lying down?”
“Come upstairs and I’ll show you,” she said.
And so I did, and she did, and we did. And we liked what we did so much that we did it again. Finally, happily tired from all we’d done, we laced our arms and legs together and lay still. Within minutes Jess was asleep, a sweet, childlike snore accompanying the rhythmic rise of her chest.
I watched her sleep, savoring the peaceful expression on a face that was often as focused and intense as a laser. Eventually I must have dozed off, because I noticed a murky awareness of awakening. The clock read 4:47. Unknotting myself from her embrace, I recovered my far-flung clothes and got dressed, leaving off my shoes so I wouldn’t make noise. I found some paper and a pen, and wrote a note. “Dear Jess-Sorry to go. I have an early meeting, and I couldn’t bear to wake you. Call me when you wake, if you want.” I thought a moment, then added, “You took my breath away, and then you gave it back again.” I didn’t figure I needed to sign it.
I folded her sweats and laid them on the foot of the bed, setting the note on top. Then I bent and kissed her cheek. She made a soft sound, somewhere between a coo and a laugh, and I hoped maybe she was dreaming of the love we had made.
I tiptoed out of her bedroom, down the stairs, and out the front door. Sitting on the top step of Modern Home No. 158, I put on my shoes and walked to my truck. I had parked on the street, and the truck was headed down a gentle incline, so I coasted a ways before cranking the engine. I pulled onto I-75 North toward Knoxville just as the sky’s velvety darkness began to yield to a voluptuous red in the east.
CHAPTER 16
I’D ARRANGED TO MEET Art at KPD headquarters at 7:30 A.M.: just before his undercover shift at Broadway Jewelry amp; Loan began; just before he waded into the sewers of cyberspace, trolling for the creeps who troll for kids, pursuing the monsters who peddle kids. Art was waiting just inside the glassed-in lobby of the building; he took the plastic jar-now containing both the skin and the solution that had rehydrated it-and inspected it, nodding in approval or optimism. We took the elevator up to his lab and he set the jar on a tabletop, then donned a pair of snug latex gloves.
Unscrewing the lid, he extracted the skin with a pair of tweezers, then unfurled it slowly on a tray lined with paper toweling, studying each fingertip in turn, gently blotting it dry. Finally he spoke. “All of the fingers are torn in places, so we won’t get any prints that are completely intact. The center of the fingertips are intact, though, so I’m pretty sure we can get enough details for a match, if this guy’s prints are in aphids.”
“Aphids,” I asked, “like the rosebush-eating garden insect?”
“No, Dilbert,” he said. “AY-fiss, A-F-I-S, like Automated Fingerprint Identification System.” He frowned, then corrected himself. “I mean I-AFIS. They tacked an I on the front end a while back-stands for ‘Integrated’-but I still call it AFIS. Force of habit.”
“Easier to say ‘AY-fiss’ than ‘EYE-ay-fiss,’ too,” I said. “Especially for an old dog like you.”
I remembered that AFIS was a database created by the FBI six or eight years earlier. Before its creation, I could recall Art squawking about the weeks or even months it took the Bureau’s fingerprint lab to analyze prints. The delays often meant that by the time a match was found, a suspect who had been arrested or detained for questioning was no longer in custody-and nowhere to be found. These days, he told me, it was possible to get a match-a name-within two hours in criminal cases, and within twenty-four hours for civilian requests such as employment background checks.
“How big is their database by now?” I asked.
“Pretty darn big. Last time I looked, they had prints from nearly fifty million people on file.”
“That is big. I didn’t realize so many of our friends and neighbors were criminals.”
“They’re not. Remember, a big chunk of those are people required to submit fingerprints as part of their employment-teachers, military personnel, firefighters, gun buyers, all sorts of folks. Mine are in there; yours probably are, too, aren’t they?” He was right, I realized. When the director of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation had asked me to serve as a TBI consultant, I had filled out a long questionnaire and had been fingerprinted, presumably to make sure the agency wasn’t hiring a fox to help guard the hen house.
As I watched in fascination, Art carefully fitted the dead man’s skin to his own right hand, then walked to a laptop computer sitting at the end of the table. Beside it was a thin rectangular gadget, slightly smaller than the laptop’s keyboard, with a blue pad on top. Using his left thumb and forefinger to stretch the skin taut over his right thumb, he laid one edge of his thumb on the blue pad and rolled it in a half revolution, from one edge of the nail to the other. After a few seconds, a six-inch-high swirl of tightly nested lines appeared on the laptop’s screen.
“Hey, where’s the roller, the ink, the glass plate?” I asked.
“Bill, Bill,” he said. “Ink-on-slab is so last-century. This is optical scanning. No fuss, no muss. Digitizes the prints directly, and lets us upload them directly to AFIS. We can print out hard copies on standard fingerprint cards so Jess and the Chattanooga PD can add them to their files, but this is a lot quicker and easier than the old way. Shoot, the new criminalists we hire these days, kids fresh out of school? Some of them have never rolled a set of prints in ink. Or if they have, it was just as a history lesson, a demonstration of how things were done back in the day. Like letting kids milk a cow or churn butter by hand to show them the pioneer way.”
“You sound disgruntled,” I said, “but I notice you’ve switched over.”