The Pusher полностью

"Something about Do you hope to recover…?"

"No, no, it's Have you no hope of recovery from the effects of the injury you have received?" Meyer shook his head. "Jesus, I hate this."

"And then the business about Are you willing to make a true statement of how you received the injury from which you are now suffering? That's all of it, isn't it?"

"Yes," Meyer said. "Jesus, that little girl in there…"

"Yeah," Willis said. Both men fell silent. They could hear the quiet thrum of the hospital all around them, like a giant white heart pumping blood. In a little while, they heard footsteps echoing down the corridor.

"Here's Fredericks now," Willis said.

Dr. Fredericks approached them. He was sweating, and his tunic looked rumpled and soiled.

"How about it?" Meyer said. "Did you get us permission?"

"It doesn't matter," Fredericks said.

"Huh?"

"The girl is dead."

Because the room in which Maria Hernandez kept her fatal assignation with a person or persons unknown was the last known place to have enclosed her murderer, it was open to particular scrutiny by the police.

This scrutiny was of a non-theoretical nature. The laboratory technicians who descended upon the premises were not interested in exercising their imaginations. They were interested solely in clues that might lead to the identity of the person or persons who had wantonly slashed and murdered the Hernandez girl. They were looking for facts. And so, after the room had been sketched and photographed, they got down to business, and their business was a slow and laborious one.

Chance impressions are, of course, fingerprints.

The three kinds of chance impressions are:

Latent prints-these are invisible. Sometimes they can be picked up with the naked eye unaided, provided they are on a smooth surface and provided indirect lighting is used.

Visible prints-which happen to be visible only because the person who left them behind was a slob. And, being a slob, he'd allowed his fingers to become smeared with something containing color. The color was usually provided by dirt or blood.

Plastic prints-which, as the definition implies, are left in some sort of a plastic material like putty, wax, tar, clay, or the inside of a banana peel.

Naturally, plastic prints and visible prints are the nicest kinds of chance impressions to find. At least, they entail the least amount of location work. But chance impressions being what they are-that is, fingerprints inadvertently and unconsciously left behind-the person leaving them is not always so considerate as to leave the easiest kind to find. Most chance impressions are latent prints, and latent prints must be made visible through the use of fine-grained, lumpless powders before they can be photographed or transferred on foils. This takes time. The lab boys had a lot of time, and they also had a lot of latents to play around with. The room in which Maria Hernandez had been slashed, you see, was a room used to the steady going and coming of men. Patiently, slowly, the lab boys dusted and dusted, and photographed and transferred, coming up with a total of ten different men who had left good clear latents around the room.

They did not know that none of these men was the one who'd killed Maria. They could not have known that Maria's murderer had worn gloves until he'd climbed into bed with her that night. They did not know, and so they passed the prints on to the detectives, who checked them through I.E. and then indulged in a time-consuming round-up of available possible killers, all of whom had readily accessible (and generally true) alibis. Some of the prints had been left by persons who had never had a brush with the police. The I.E. could not identify those prints. Those men were never pulled in for questioning.

Considering the nature of the murder room, the lab boys were not surprised to find a good many naked footprints here and there, especially in the dust-covered corners near the bed. Unfortunately, the I.E. did not keep an active footprint file. These footprints then were simply put away for possible comparison with suspects later on. One of the footprints, unsurprisingly, had been left by Maria Hernandez.

The lab boys could find no usable shoe impressions in the room.

They found many head hairs and several pubic hairs on the bloodstained sheets of the bed. They also found semen stains. The blanket that had been on the bed was vacuumed, and the dust collected on filter paper. The dust was then examined and analyzed carefully. The technicians found nothing in the dust that proved helpful to them.

They found one thing in the room that was of possible real value.

A feather.