The Third Print

The Third Print

The state lab sits in a business park north of Albany, between a fire training center and a fenced lot full of salt trucks. I drove. Deakins rode with the tank on the floor mat between his feet and didn't say anything for 40 minutes.

He sat up when we came off the highway.

"Don't ask her what it means," he said.

"What do I ask her?"

"What she did."

We signed a book behind glass and clipped on visitor badges, then waited nine minutes by the elevator.

* * *

The latent print unit was one long room with the blinds down, six workstations and two people working. A woman came around the end of the bench and shook our hands. Reading glasses up in gray hair, a paper cup of tea she set down and never touched again.

"Dana Ostrowski," she said. "I'm the examiner. Technicians process evidence. I do comparisons, so if it's the comparison you want, it's me."

"It's the comparison," Deakins said.

Two things lay under a swing-arm lamp. A brown evidence envelope cut open along the top, and a gray archival box with the lid off.

"One thing before we start," Ostrowski said. "I'll tell you what I did and what I saw. If you ask me about something I didn't see, I'm going to say I don't know, and I'd rather say that now than have it land like I'm hiding behind it."

"Go ahead," I said.

She turned the envelope so the label faced us.

"This is the lift off the dining room light switch. Black hinge lifter, taken the morning of October 18 by a tech who photographed the plate in place first, then powdered it with black granular. The photograph's in the box."

"How many prints were on that plate?" I asked.

"Five. Three were Walter Miller's. One was a partial with eight ridge characteristics in it, which is enough to be interesting and not enough to be anything, so I carried it as inconclusive."

"And the fifth."

"The fifth is the one you drove up here for."

Deakins set two fingers on the edge of the bench. "Whose?"

"I'd like to go in order. I'd rather you hear how it was done than only hear the end of it."

"In order," Deakins said.

Ostrowski woke the monitor. The print came up on a black field, white ridges, the core sitting low and off center.

"It reads as a thumb. I believe it's a thumb. I won't put a hand in a report, because the lift doesn't support it and that would be a guess with my name under it."

"Why wasn't this run at the time?" I asked.

"Because there was nothing to run it against. A latent search then meant you already had a suspect and two cards and somebody sat down with a glass."

"There were files," Deakins said.

"There were cabinets. You could ask for a classification search off the pattern type, and on a thumb that takes a file of millions and hands you back a file of hundreds of thousands. Nobody was searching one unknown finger against a state."

"I asked for it twice," Deakins said.

"Then you got what there was."

He didn't answer that. The tank hissed against his hip on its schedule.

"What did you do to the image?" I asked.

"Rephotographed the lift under oblique light at 1,000 pixels per inch, grayscale. Then I inverted it, because a lift reads backward, and I worked the contrast."

"How far?"

"Contrast and gray balance. That's the whole list. I can make a ridge easier to see. I can't make one that isn't there, and an examiner who tells you he can is describing a felony."

"Then what?"

"Then I marked it. Fourteen characteristics, ridge endings and bifurcations, 10 of them inside the core where the detail holds. I encoded those and launched the search."

"How many do you need?" Deakins asked.

"There's no number."

"There was a number."

"People said 12 for 40 years because their supervisors said 12. The national standard was dropped in 1973 and nobody replaced it."

"So what replaced it?" I asked.

"ACE-V. Analysis, comparison, evaluation, verification. Another examiner in this room verified my conclusion without ever seeing my notes."

"Searched against what?"

"SAFIS first. Every ten-print card New York has taken since the system went in, plus the paper backfile they converted out of those cabinets through the 2000s."

"Then?"

"NGI at the federal level. The criminal repository runs north of 70 million records. The civil side is about 50 million more. Applicant prints, licensing, military, federal employment."

"That's all of it?"

"That's everything I have a terminal for."

She brought up a second window. Rows of small gray thumbnails, each with a number beside it.

"The system returned a respondent list. Twenty candidates, ranked by score. The machine doesn't identify anybody. It hands me a list and I do the work by eye."

"And?" I said.

"I compared all 20 and I excluded all 20."

"Say it the way you'd say it on a stand," Deakins said.

"The latent was searched against the criminal and civil repositories available to this laboratory. No candidate was identified."

Thirty-one years, and the end of it was a sentence with nothing inside it.

"That's a smaller statement than it sounds like," Ostrowski said. "It means he isn't in the files. It doesn't mean he doesn't exist."

"Explain the difference," I said.

"About one adult in three in this country is in some print repository. A man who's never been arrested, never applied for work that prints you, never enlisted, never held a license that requires it, is nobody to that system. Two out of three people are nobody to it."

"So he could be anyone."

"He could be most people. I'm not going to dress that up for you."

"Is that the end of it?" I asked.

"No. It goes into the unsolved latent file and it gets searched again on a cycle, against every card that comes in after today."

"For how long?"

"Until somebody closes the case. I've had a hit come back on a 19-year-old latent."

"How often does that happen?"

"Once," Ostrowski said.

Deakins reached for the gray box. "You had comparison prints."

"Family cards out of the original file." She lifted the lid. "Walter Miller. Miriam Miller. And a juvenile card." She looked at me over the top of the glasses. "Yours."

She set it on the bench and turned it so it faced me.

The ink had gone brown at the edges of the 10 boxes. In the bottom left corner were the four fingers of my left hand rolled at once, and the loops in them were the loops in my hand now. Somebody had printed my age in the space for it in blue ballpoint. I was 46, looking at the hand I had at 15.

Then I looked at the lift card beside it, at the corner, where somebody had written in pencil, small and level, 2 of 2.

"What's that?" I asked, and put a finger down next to it.

Ostrowski turned the envelope over and read the front of it.

"Contents, one hinge lift, one photograph. One card in, one card out. That's what I signed for."

"There's a second card."

"There's a pencil mark," she said. "I log what's in the envelope."

Deakins looked at the corner of the card. He didn't ask her about it and he didn't write it down.

"There's the other half of this," Ostrowski said, and put the juvenile card back in the box. "I processed the Milton scene. The basement."

"Go ahead," Deakins said.

"Sixty-one items came out of there and through this lab. Porous material first, the paper and the cardboard and the composition books. Ninhydrin, then physical developer on the ones worth a second pass."

"And the rest?"

"Nonporous went into the fuming chamber. Cyanoacrylate, then a dye stain, then a forensic light source at 455 nanometers with orange filters. Metal that wouldn't take the dye got small particle reagent."

"The walls?" I asked.

"I didn't process brick and I didn't process the joist. Brick won't hold friction ridge detail. Anybody who tells you it does is selling something."

"And the 61 items," Deakins said.

"No latent of value on any of them."

"Not one."

"Not one."

She picked up a printout and set it back down without reading from it.

"I want you to hear which items," she said. "A steel spoon with the bowl broken off and both edges worn down. A tin cup. A composition book, 96 pages, filled front to back in pencil."

She counted the rest off on her fingers.

"A pair of boots. A glass jar with a screw lid. An iron door handle. The frame of a cot."

"The spoon gave the biology unit a full profile," I said.

"Off the handle. I read their report, and that's their side of the building, not mine."

"But," I said.

"A handle that sheds that much cellular material has been held. Held hard and held for years. I put it through the chamber and got smudging with no ridge detail in it."

"How does that happen?" I asked.

Deakins turned his head and looked at the side of my face. He let it go.

Ostrowski squared the printout against the edge of the bench before she answered.

"You're asking me to account for an absence," she said. "I don't report absences as findings. I can give you four ordinary reasons a surface comes back clean, and I'd be guessing at every one of them, and a guess in a report is how people do 20 years."

"Then give me the finding," Deakins said.

"The finding is that I examined 61 items and observed no friction ridge detail of value on any of them. That sentence is mine and I'll sign it. What sits behind it is yours."

"You've seen scenes come back empty."

"I've seen rooms come back empty. Wiped rooms. Gloved rooms. A flooded apartment in Utica that gave me nothing off 40 surfaces."

"And a person?" I asked.

She looked down the bench at the other two workstations.

"I've been doing this 26 years," Ostrowski said. "I've never written this report before."

Deakins put his hand out. "Thank you."

She shook it. "The packet goes down to Poughkeepsie tomorrow. The lift goes back in the vault tonight."

* * *

In the parking lot a 61-year-old man stood with one hand flat on the roof of the car and took four breaths before he tried the door.

"Kessler's 78 and he's been in the wind 22 days," Deakins said. "Your wife's attorney filed again this morning. Your friend at Westchester State hasn't come around."

"I know all three of those."

"I'm telling you anyway."

We came south on the Thruway with the river on our left. Deakins didn't talk. Somewhere around Kingston I quit thinking about the spoon and started thinking about the small level hand that had counted to two.

The latent from the dining room light switch went back into the unsolved file, where the system would search it again on the first of every month, against everything the state had added since, for as long as the state kept the file.