It had long been a theoretical possibility that latent fingerprints could be left on human skin. But the likelihood of recovering them had been so remote as to discourage most of us from trying. Skin is a difficult surface, for it is plastic and porous, and its moisture, hairs, and oils interfere. On the uncommon occasion that a print is successfully transferred from assailant to victim, the ridge detail is far too fragile to survive much time or exposure to the elements. Dr. Thomas Katz was a master forensic scientist who had maniacally pursued this elusive evidence for most of his career. He also was an expert in time of death, which he researched just as diligently with ways and means that were not commonly known to the hoi polloi. His laboratory was called The Body Farm, and I had been there many times. He was a small man with prepossessed blue eyes, a great shock of white hair, and a face amazingly benevolent for the atrocities he had seen. When I met him at the top of the stairs, he was carrying a box window fan, a tool chest, and what looked like a section of vacuum cleaner hose with several odd attachments. Marino was behind him with the rest of what Katz called his "Cyanoacrylate Blowing Contraption," a double-decker aluminum box fitted with a hot plate and a computer fan. He had spent hundreds of hours in his East Tennessee garage perfecting this rather simple mechanical implement.
"Where are we heading?" Katz asked me.
"The room at the end of the hall." I relieved him of the window fan.
"How was your trip?"
"More traffic than I bargained for. Tell me what all's been done to the body."
"He was cut down and covered with a wool afghan. I have not examined him."
"I promise not to delay you too much. It's a lot easier now that I'm not bothering with a tent."
"What do you mean, a tent?" Marino frowned as we entered the bedroom.
"I used to put a plastic tent over the body and do the fuming inside it. But too much vapor and the skin gets too frosted. Dr. Scarpetta, you can set the fan in that window." Katz looked around.
"I might have to use a part of water. It's a bit dry in here."
I gave him as much history as we had at this point.
"Do you have any reason to think this is something other than an accidental auto erotic asphyxiation?" he asked.
"Other than the circumstances," I replied, "no."
"He was working that little Steiner girl's case."
"That's what we mean by circumstances," Marino said.
"Lord, if that hasn't been in the news all over."
"We were in Quantico this morning meeting about that case," I added.
"And he comes straight home and then this." Katz looked thoughtfully at the body.
"You know, we found a prostitute in a Dumpster the other week and got a good outline of a hand on her ankle. She'd been dead four or five days."
"Kay?" Wesley stepped into the doorway.
"May I see you for a minute?"
"And you used this thing on her?" Marino's voice followed us into the hall.
"I did. She had painted fingernails, and as it turns out, they're real good, too."
"For what?"
"Prints."
"Where does this go?"
"Doesn't matter much. I'm going to fume the entire room. I'm afraid it's going to mess up the place."
"I don't think he's gonna complain." Downstairs in the kitchen, I noticed a chair by the phone where I supposed Mote had sat for hours waiting for us to arrive. Nearby on the floor was a glass of water and an ashtray crammed with cigarette butts.
"Take a look," said Wesley, who was accustomed to searching for odd evidence in odd places. He had filled the double sink with foods he had gotten out of the freezer. I moved closer to him as he opened the folds of a small, flat package wrapped in white freezer paper. Inside were shrunken pieces of frozen flesh, dry at the edges and reminiscent of yellowed waxy parchment.
"Any chance I'm thinking the wrong thing?" Wesle/s tone was grim.
"Good God, Benton," I said, stunned.
"They were in the freezer on top of these other things. Ground beef, pork chops, pizza." He nudged packages with a gloved finger.
"I was hoping you'd tell me it's chicken skin. Maybe something he uses for fish bait or who knows what."
"There are no feather holes, and the hair is fine like human hair."
He was silent.
"We need to pack this in dry ice and fly it back with us," I said.
"That won't be tonight."
"The sooner we can get immunological testing done, the sooner we can confirm it's human. DNA will confirm identity." He returned the package to the freezer.
"We need to check for prints."
"I'll put the tissue in plastic and we'll submit the freezer paper to the labs," I said.
"Good." We climbed the stairs. My pulse would not slow down. At the end of the hallway, Marino and Katz stood outside the shut door. They had threaded a hose through the hole where the doorknob had been, the contraption humming as it pumped Super Glue vapors into Ferguson's bedroom.
Wesley had yet to mention the obvious, so finally I did.
"Benton, I didn't see any bite marks or anything else someone may have tried to eradicate."
"I know," he said.
"We're almost done," Katz told us when we got to them.
"A room this size and you can get by with less than a hundred drops of Super Glue."
"Pete," Wesley said, "we've got an unexpected problem."
"I thought we'd already reached our quota for the day," he said, staring blandly at the hose pumping poison beyond the door.
"That should do it," said Katz, who was typically impervious to the moods of those around him.
"All I got to do now is clear out the fumes with the fan. That will take a minute or two." He opened the door and we backed away. The overpowering smell didn't seem to bother him in the least.
"He probably gets high off the stuff," Marino muttered as Katz walked into the room.
"Ferguson's got what appears to be human skin in his freezer." Wesley went straight to the point.
"You want to run that one by me again?" Marino said, startled.
"I don't know what we're dealing with here," Wesley added as the window fan inside the room began to whir.
"But we got one detective dead with incriminating evidence found with his frozen hamburgers and pizza. We got another detective with a heart attack. We've got a murdered eleven-year- old girl."
"Goddam," Marino said, his face turning red.
"I hope you brought enough clothes to stay for a while," Wesley added to both of us.
"Goddam," Marino said again.
"That son of a bitch." He looked straight at me and I knew exactly what he was thinking. A part of me hoped he was wrong. But if Gault wasn't playing his usual malignant games, I wasn't certain the alternative was better.
"Does this house have a basement?" I asked.
"Yes," Wesley answered.
"What about a big refrigerator?" I asked.
"I haven't seen one. But I haven't been in the basement." Inside the bedroom, Katz turned off the window fan. He motioned to us that it was all right to come in.
"Man, try getting this shit off," Marino said as he looked around. Super Glue dries white and is as stubborn as cement. Every surface in the room was lightly frosted with it, including Ferguson's body. With flashlight angled, Katz side lighted smudges on walls, furniture, windowsills, and the guns over the desk. But it was just one he found that brought him to his knees.
"It's the nylon," our friendly mad scientist said with pure delight as he knelt by the body and leaned close to Ferguson's pulled-down panties.
"You know, it's a good surface for prints because of the tight weave. He's got some kind of perfume on." He slipped the plastic sheath off his Magna brush, and the bristles fell open like a sea anemone. Unscrewing the lid from a jar of Delta Orange magnetic powder, Katz dusted a very good latent print that someone had left on the dead detective's shiny black nylon panties. Partial prints had materialized around Ferguson's neck, and Katz used contrasting black powder on them. But there wasn't enough ridge detail to matter. The strange frost everywhere I looked made the room seem cold.
"Of course, this print on his panties is probably his own," Katz mused as he continued to work.
"From when he pulled them down. He might have had something on his hands. The condom's probably lubricated, for example, and if some of that transferred to his fingers, he could have left a good print. You're going to want to take these?" He referred to the panties.
"I'm afraid so," I said. He nodded.
"That's all right. Pictures will do." He got out his camera.
"But I'd like the panties when you're finished with them. As long as you don't use scissors, the print will hold up fine. That's the good thing about Super Glue. Can't get it off with dynamite."
"How much more do you need to do here tonight?" Wesley said to me, and I could tell he was anxious to leave.
"I want to look for anything that might not survive the body's transport, and take care of what you found in the freezer," I said.
"Plus we need to check the basement." He nodded and said to Marino, "While we take care of these things, how about your being in charge of securing this place?" Marino didn't seem thrilled with the assignment.
"Tell them we'll need security around the clock," Wesley added firmly.
"Problem is, they don't got enough uniforms in this town to do anything around the clock," Marino said sourly as he walked off.
"The damn bastard's just wiped out half the police department." Katz looked up and spoke, his Magna brush poised midair.
"Seems like you're pretty certain who you're looking for."
"Nothing's certain," Wesley said.
"Thomas, I'm going to have to ask for another favor," I said to my dedicated colleague.
"I need you and Dr. Shade to run an experiment for me at The Farm."
"Dr. Shade?" Wesley said.
"Lyall Shade is an anthropologist at the University of Tennessee," I explained.
"When do we start?" Katz loaded a new roll of film into his camera.
"Immediately, if possible. It will take a week."
"Fresh bodies or old?"
"Fresh."
"That really is the guy's name?" Wesley went on.
It was Katz who answered as he took a photograph.
"Sure is. Spelled L-Y-A-L-L. Goes all the way back to his great-grandfather, a surgeon in the Civil War."