"Shit!" Matt said.

"What?" McFadden asked.

Olivia looked at him with concern, then touched his cheek to turn his head so that she could look in his eyes. Her eyes asked, "What?"

"Nothing," Matt said. "Charley, I have to go…"

"The naked broad's horny?"

"Absolutely. I'll see you and Hay-zus at the airport at three."

"Yeah," Detective McFadden said, and hung up.

Matt tossed the telephone aside and looked up at Olivia. "A lot of people thought you acted heroically in Doylestown," she said.

"That's a joke. I didn't even do the job right. If I had, Susan would still be alive."

" 'Susan'? You were friends?"

"More than friends," Matt said.

"I saw you crying on TV," she said. "I wondered."

He looked at her but didn't say anything.

"You know what I feel like doing to you right now?" she said.

"I'm yours! And I love your imagination."

"I feel like putting my arms around you and holding you and telling you that everything's going to be all right."

"That isn't exactly what I thought you had in mind."

"Can I?" Olivia asked.

"Yeah," he said after a moment.

She leaned toward him and he half sat up, and she put her arms around him and held him to her breast.

They stayed that way for perhaps three minutes, and then Olivia glanced down at the sheet covering his groin.

"You horny sonofabitch," she said, wonderingly.

"Is that a complaint?"

She pushed him away from her breast and back onto the bed and looked down at him for a moment before shaking her head, "no."

Fifteen minutes later, they got into the unmarked Crown Victoria and rode out to the Northeast Detectives Division and gave their statements.

THIRTEEN

[ONE] J. Richard Candelle, a squat, gray-haired fifty-year-old black man who wore his frameless spectacles low on his nose, looked over them at Detective Tony Harris, backed against a laboratory table, shook his head, and announced, "Tony, I'm sorry, that's the best I can do. There's just not enough points."

The reality of identification through fingerprints is not nearly as simple, or as easy, as a thousand cops-and-robbers movies have made the public-and, in fact, a surprising number of law enforcement officers-think it is.

Fingerprints are identified-and compared with others- through a system of point location, and the classification of these points. The more points on a print, the better. The more prints-prints of more than one finger, of the heel of the hand, or ten fingers and both heels-and the more classified points on each print, the easier it is to find similarly classified prints in the files.

Presupposing havingboth to compare, comparing the print found on the visor hat left behind by the doer at the Roy Rogers restaurant with the print of the doer himself would be relatively simple and would just about positively identify the suspect.

But establishing the identity of the doer by finding a match of his index-finger print among the hundreds of thousands of index-finger prints in the files of the Philadelphia police department, or the millions in the FBI's files, was a practical impossibility.

Except, if a print could be obtained with many "good" points, that could be point classified.

J. Richard Candelle, Philadelphia's fingerprint expert, had just not been able to detect enough points on the single index finger print he had to offer even a slight chance of matching it with a print in the files.

"Fuck, that's not good enough," Harris said, bitterly.

"I will elect not to consider that a personal criticism, and under these circumstances forgive your vulgarity." Candelle, whose forensic laboratory skills were legendary, was a dignified man, befitting his part-time status as an adjunct professor of chemistry at Temple University.

"It wasn't a shot at you, Dick, and you know it," Harris said.

Candelle waited until he saw what he thought was a genuine look of regret on Harris's face, and then went on:

"I was here all fucking night, Tony. I had two fucking doughnuts for breakfast, my fucking feet hurt, and I have had every fucking white shirt in the Roundhouse in here making sure I was really doing my fucking best."

Harris looked at him.

"Well, in that case, you fucking overworked old fart, I guess I better buy you some fucking lunch before you fucking expire of starvation, old age, and self-pity right here in the fucking lab."

"I think that would be an appropriate gesture of your gratitude, " Candelle replied, smiled, and started to replace his laboratory coat with a sports coat.

Using tweezers, Candelle picked up the crownless visor cap the doer had left behind in the Roy Rogers and replaced it in the plastic evidence bag.

"You want me to hang on to this, Tony?"

"No. Give it to me. Maybe I'll take it to a psychic."

Candelle chuckled.

"I really am sorry, Tony," he said.

Harris punched him affectionately on the arm.

"We both are, Dick," he said. "What do you feel like eating? "

They went to DiNic's in the Reading Terminal Market on Twelfth Street and sat on stools at a counter. Both ordered roast pork sandwiches with sharp provolone cheese and roasted hot peppers and washed them down with beer.

"I hate to reopen a wound," Candelle said, "but I just had another unpleasant thought."

"Which is?"

"It's really a shame Luther Stecker retired."

"Who's he?"

"The State Police guy, in Harrisburg. Lieutenant."

"Oh, yeah. I don't think he could have done anything you couldn't," Harris said. "I hadn't heard he'd retired."

Candelle looked at his watch.

"Today," he said. "I was invited to his retirement party. Tonight. I decided Harrisburg was too far to drive for free beer."

"What makes you think he could have helped?"

"He's got a new machine, AFIS. It stands for Automated Fingerprint Identification System."

"And?"

"It's supposed to be able to get points off a week-old print on a dry falling leaf in a high wind."

"You're serious?"

Candelle nodded.

"Harrisburg, here I come," Tony said.

"I told you, Stecker's retiring today."

"Well, there ought to be somebody else out there who knows how to operate this wonder machine."

"Tony, if I thought there was, I'd suggest you go out there."

"Well, won't the FBI have one?" Harris asked. "As a last desperate move, I'm going to send the goddamn hat to them."

"They probably have a half-dozen of them. But whether they have anybody who knows how to use one, get all that it is capable of from it, is another question." He paused, then added, "There's a question of experience, even art, in this."

"So we're dead, huh?"

Candelle shrugged.

"It looks that way. I'm sorry. So what are you going to do now?"

"We're down to showing the artist's sketches to everybody again. And we both know that's not going to work. Everybody in the place saw somebody else."

"At the risk of repeating myself, Tony, I'm really sorry I couldn't do more. Maybe the FBI'll be able to."

"You're sure nobody in the State Police could do us any good? Who's taking Stecker's place?"

"I met the gentleman," Candelle said. "He left me with the impression he would have trouble finding his posterior with both hands."

"Great!"

Harris drove his Crown Victoria to the rear door of the Roundhouse.

"You're not coming in?" Candelle asked.

"No. I'm going to go somewhere to try to figure out what to tell the Black Buddha," he said.

"I'll do that for you, Tony," Candelle said, "before I go home. I don't want him calling me at the house to have one more shot at it."

" 'Turn over the stone under the stone'?"

"We're out of stones on this hat, Tony," Candelle said. "And I think the Black Buddha's more likely to accept that from me than you."