THIRTY-NINE

“Now you’ve got something to give Battaglia,” Mike said. “It’s the perfect time to call him and tell him you were tagged with a GPS. He’ll lose all interest in you once you explain how much ground we’ve covered.”

We had walked out the door of the U.S. Attorney’s Office just after six o’clock and made the left turn that put us directly in front of police headquarters.

“Better than that, he’ll be putting the knot in his black tie for whatever event his wife’s dragging him to tonight. It’s a good idea.”

I waited until we reached the quiet lobby of One Police Plaza and were waved in by the cop at the security desk.

The call was a quick one. I assured Battaglia that I was fine, that the NYPD had me covered, and that the small device attached to the rear of my car had a tampered ID number, so it would be difficult to trace.

As Mike predicted, he was far more interested in our meeting with Ethan Leighton, furious that we had stepped on Tim Spindlis’s toes by talking to Kendall Reid, and intrigued by the conversation with Donny Baynes. I had bought myself lunch with the district attorney at noon on Monday.

The Latent Print Unit was on the fifth floor of One PP. It ran 24/7 with some of the smartest detectives in the city.

I was from the new generation of prosecutors, spoiled by the revolutionary techniques of forensic DNA, which had only been introduced to the criminal justice system two decades before. But like many other young lawyers, I expected it to solve an increasing number of cases as its methods were refined and its variety of applications expanded almost explosively.

Mike’s training, and the fact that he had learned from his father since earliest childhood, kept him centered on good old-fashioned policing techniques. He was skilled at detailed interrogations and he used traditional applications, like fingerprinting, that were updated with high-tech computer assists.

He opened the door to the unit where several detectives were at work.

“Yo, Patty,” he called out across the room. A tall, thin redhead with a platinum streak in her long hair was standing next to her desk, thumbing through a pile of fingerprint cards.

“Hey, Mike. How lucky can I get on a Saturday night?”

“Patty Baker, meet Alex Cooper. You could get very lucky if you’ve got the right answers.”

“Remind me to wake up my husband and tell him. What’s happening? And if you’re asking me to jump the line, I’ve got way too much Golden Voyage business going on to help you.”

“We’re working that case. Nobody told you they think it’s connected to the broad who went headers in the Gracie Mansion well?”

“That’s the skinny.”

“I want you to take a look at these things for me.” Mike lifted the plastic bag out of his pocket, holding it by a corner.

“CSU see it yet?”

“Nobody has. It wasn’t found at the scene. Coop and I have a feeling it may be connected, but it was dumped somewhere else and a couple of guys have already had their hands on the bag before it got to us.”

“You have used up just about every last favor in the bank,” Patty said, sitting at her desk. She looked over at me with her intense blue eyes. “We were in the same class at the academy. That’s how come he gets special treatment. Mike knows way too many secrets about me.”

“I can relate to that.”

Patty put on her gloves, slid back the blue plastic zipper, and spread the bag apart. She set out a clean place to work and rolled the three items out onto the desktop.

Normally, the crime scene officers retrieved pieces of evidence like these. They dusted them with powder, as every television viewer seemed to know-white powder on black surfaces and black on white. Then they placed tape over the powdered area, and lifted it, attaching it to a three-by-five-inch index card. It was up to the latent-print examiners to determine if the retrieved image was of sufficient value to be useful.

Patty readied the white powder as she examined the three makeup cases.

“Forget the compact for the moment. Lipstick too,” she said. “The mascara wand is my best bet. I can probably get a good thumbprint off that. What do you think, Alex?”

She was holding an imaginary eye makeup case in the air, grasping it with her thumb.

“It never occurred to me, but it looks like you could be right.”

Patty did the lifts herself, taping them onto a card. She was a lefty, and it seemed as though she was doing everything backward as she went about her work.

Then she picked up a magnifying glass and examined the marks carefully, studying three cards. “I’ve got a nice clean one here. A couple of partials but one good print.”

On two of the index cards Patty placed a red dot-a notation that they were of no value. NV is how they would be filed.

“I can try for a match with this one,” she said about the single lift from the mascara wand that was OV-of value.

“Go for it,” Mike said. “Salma Zunega-that’s the woman whose body was in the well-is she in the system?”

The techs at the morgue would have rolled all ten fingers of the dead woman onto a card before she was autopsied, to preserve for identification purposes.

“Yep. Her inked prints were loaded yesterday on the day tour.”

“You eyeball them?”

“Me? No. But I saw the entry in the case log. Salma’s in. I’d do a visual comparison to the inked card myself, but the boss must have it under lock and key. I can’t get in his office tonight either. He’s squirrely about his evidence.”

SAFIS-the Statewide Automated Fingerprint Identification System-was a giant computer databank that went into operation in 1989, the same year that DNA was accepted in American courts as a valid scientific technique. In tandem, the two sophisticated processes were able to resolve an unimaginable number of cases.

“Can you upload this one now?”

“You have a date or something?” Patty asked, continuing on with her meticulous work. “Patience never was your strong suit.”

“I want to know whether to wait or not.”

“Take a load off. There are fingerprint images of more than three million people in this computer brain. He’s pretty fast, so just calm yourself down.”

“We’re in there, too, aren’t we?” I asked.

Every prosecutor, cop, government employee, elected official, and federal agent was in the system. We all had to be fingerprinted as part of our ordinary background check.

“You bet,” Patty said. “I’ll scan this in. You know where the vending machines are, Mike? Feel like springing for hors d’oeuvres?”

“Sure.”

Patty yawned. “Get me two sodas-whatever promises the most caffeine.”

Mike left the lab and I stayed riveted at Patty’s side, following her from her work space to the giant machine that would perform the search. “Mind if I watch?”

“Not at all. You get this?”

“I hope so. I’ve had so many of your colleagues on the stand, I’ve had to relearn it as each technique has been developed to make it clear to the jurors.”

Prints usually appeared as a series of dark lines, representing the high peaking portion of the friction ridge skin. The white spaces-the shallow portions-were the valleys in between. The identification and matching is based primarily on what are now called minutiae-the location and direction of ridge endings and bifurcations along the ridge path.

“I’m going to scan this in, Alex, see? Sir Francis takes it from here for a while.”

“Sir Francis?”

“The best partner I ever had. And he’s not a ball breaker like Mike. Give me a nice, quiet computer any day,” Patty said. “Francis Galton was the first guy to define the characteristics for a scientific identification of unique prints. Galton Points-loops, islands, whorls, deltas-they make up the minutiae from which comparisons are made.”

Patty finished scanning, hit the Search button, and walked back to her desk.