Steampunk!: An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories (14 page)

"Fingerprints," Constable Etreyo says. "Fingerprints."

Her words are met with an indulgent sigh (Detective Wilkins), eye rolls, and head wagging (the other officers.) Here goes Etreyo, they are all thinking, with her
science.

"Fingerprints are unique," Etreyo continues. "No two prints are the same."

"So you say," Detective Wilkins says, "but can you prove it? There are millions of people in the world. Have you looked at the fingerprints of all of those people? What is there to say that my fingerprints are not the same as, say, a hide tanner in Ticonderoga, or a fisherman in Kenai?"

More laughter. The very idea!

She's heard this argument before, and so had Professor Bertillo; of course, they haven't looked at the fingerprints of everyone in the world. But Professor Bertillo had examined the fingerprints of more than ten thousand people and found not a match among them, and that is a big enough sample to support his theory that fingerprints are unique. Not that snapperheads like Detective Wilkins or his cronies will ever be convinced.

"In this case it doesn't matter whether or not Norm's fingerprints are unique," Etreyo says. "What matters is that they were not at any of the crime scenes. There were plenty of fingerprints, but none of them was Norm's. Which means he cannot be the Califa Squeeze."

Detective Wilkins now stares at her, smile vanished. He says softly, smoke from his cigarillo fluttering as he speaks, "Someone has been detecting behind my back."

This is true. Detective Wilkins had not ordered any of the crime scenes to be dusted for fingerprints; Etreyo had visited them after Detective Wilkins's exit and had done the dusting herself. She says, "You cannot execute an innocent man! And it's a matter of public safety. The Squeeze has to be stopped."

Against Detective Wilkins's own vanity, public safety has not much of a chance. He says, "I do not like people who detect behind my back."

"And I do not like officers who squabble in public," a new voice says. Ylva Landadon, the chief of police, has been standing at the bar for the last ten minutes, but the officers have been so absorbed in their drama that they didn't notice. Now, realizing her presence, they begin a mad scramble of doffing hats, saluting.
Fiking great,
thinks Constable Etreyo.
Records room, here I come.

"You seem awfully certain that Norm is not the Squeeze, Constable Etreyo," Captain Landadon says.

"I am, Captain."

"But you can't prove it."

"Nutter Norm's fingerprints were not at any of the crime scenes."

"What does that prove?" Detective Wilkins says. "Perhaps he wore gloves! Did you think of that, Constable Etreyo?"

The other officers laugh, and Etreyo feels her cheeks flush with murderous rage. She swallows hard. "If he had worn gloves, he would have left smeared marks. But I didn't find any such marks."

Detective Wilkins scoffs. "All of this is irrelevant anyway. Norm confessed."

"Ayah, he did," Captain Landadon says. "Norm confessed, had a fair trial, and was found guilty. It is not the police's place to criticize the verdict. We uphold the law; we do not rule on it. Do you understand, Constable Etreyo? I will hear no more of these wild theories of yours. The case is closed."

Detective Wilkins and his cronies roar. They don't care if they send an innocent man to the drop. They care only for their reputations. They can laugh at her all they want; she knows she is right. But being right won't save Nutter Norm. Only proof that she is right will do that.

And, other than the fingerprints, she doesn't have any.

As you might guess from Etreyo's sudden declaration to Detective Wilkins, she's been following the case since the first murder was discovered. Unofficially, she's examined the crime scenes; unofficially, she's examined the bodies; and unofficially, she's read Detective Wilkins's reports. The man may be a snapperhead, but his reports are thorough. He doesn't follow the Bertillo protocols of measuring the crime scenes, or making sketches or photograves of evidence, nor does he dust for prints, but he looks for evidence, and he interviews witnesses. Now Etreyo feels she knows the case as well as Detective Wilkins does. Better, actually, for her understanding of the case is guided by the evidence. His is guided by his own opinions. There is no room in forensics, says Professor Bertillo, for opinion.

But she's gone over and over the case file a hundred times, and all she can do is eliminate Norm. She knows the answer to who the real killer is must be there, in the file, in the clues, somewhere, but she just can't see it. And so Norm will hang. She'd visited him in jail, a broken old man, crying for his life. He'd reminded her of her grandpa. He'd died, too, because her family couldn't afford the medicine to save him.

The case of the Califa Squeeze is a strange one. Four murders and no witnesses, this despite the fact that three of them took place in the middle of the day, with potential witnesses nearby. How could a murderer gain access to his victims and yet not be seen? In the case of the nanny, his charges were in the next room coloring when the crime happened, and they didn't hear or see a thing. In the lawyer's case, the only access to the murder room was through a door that was locked from the inside. There is no evidence that anyone had climbed in through the window.

There's no obvious motive, either. The petty nature of the items stolen would seem to preclude theft as a motive, particularly since they were all recovered. The Squeeze hadn't even tried to unload them. Detective Wilkins could find no connection between the victims, and neither could Constable Etreyo, following in his footsteps.

According to the Bertillo System, there is
always
a motive. But she has no idea what it could be.

The criminal, said Professor Bertillo, cannot hide himself completely. He leaves traces of himself behind, and his fingerprints are his signature. Etreyo had dusted all the crime scenes for prints. She'd used the prints she'd covertly collected from her colleagues to eliminate their prints, and she was then left with only a few unidentified prints. The same prints keep showing up at all the crime scenes. They don't belong to any of the detectives. Etreyo knows these prints belong to the killer. But that knowledge doesn't bring her any closer to discovering who the killer is.

Constable Etreyo wishes she could consult with Sieur Bertillo himself, but he's a thousand miles away, in Bexar, and she can't afford the price of a heliogram, anyway. Cast down, she returns to the station house to file her end-of-shift report and change out of her uniform. She should just go home.

Instead, we find Etreyo back at the station, standing outside the door to the Califa City Morgue, smearing the space between her nose and her lips with lavender pomade. No matter how many times she has been on the other side of that door, she cannot get used the smell: decaying meat, quicklime, stale blood. The pomade doesn't erase the smell completely, but it certainly does cut it some. Her nose now armored, she pushes through the heavy wooden doors into the white tile room beyond.

It's late and the morgue is shadowy and quiet. All the marble slabs are empty. The floor, newly cleaned, is slick and wet beneath her feet. Dr. Kuddle sits at the rolltop desk at the far end of the room, eating a donut and writing out a report. Etreyo's footsteps echo alarmingly as she walks past the occupied slab, past the zinc trough where the bodies are washed, past the scales, still faintly rimmed with red, where the organs are weighed. Now, with everything cleaned for the night, the morgue seems peaceful; hospital-like. Of course, during the busy part of the day, it most closely resembles a slaughterhouse.

"I have to finish this report," Dr. Kuddle says peevishly. "That's why I am still here, so late. I thought you were at the 'Naut, blowing your mouth off."

Dr. Kuddle doesn't believe in the Bertillo System, mostly because the system calls for extremely elaborate autopsies, and Kuddle is against anything that might increase her workload. But she likes Etreyo and humors her.

"How did you hear about that?"

"I hear about everything," Kuddle says. She hardly ever leaves the morgue, but she knows everything that is going on. "Don't bait Detective Gorgeous. He's an ass. His day will come."

"He's going to be responsible for an innocent man's death."

"I doubt he'll lose any beauty sleep over it."

"It's not right."

Instead of answering her, Kuddle stands up. "Come on. I have something to show you."

"What?" Etreyo asks, following her.

"You shall see," answers Kuddle, opening the door to the freeze room. "Leave the door open behind you, will you? It's freezing in here, and I'm getting a cold, I'm sure."

The freeze room is indeed freezing, but its occupants don't mind the cold. Constable Etreyo shivers; not because of the cold but because she has a vivid imagination and can easily imagine herself lying on one of the blocks of ice, her dark skin frosted white, her flesh as hard as stone. She banishes this vision from her imagination and turns her attention to the figure that Dr. Kuddle has just unveiled.

Jacobus Hermosa, lamplighter. Throttled as he made his rounds lighting the gas lamps on Abenfarax Avenue. His partner had been working the opposite side of the street and hadn't seen a thing. Taken: one signet ring. Kuddle hadn't bothered do an autopsy because the cause of death was so obvious: a crushed throat via manual strangulation.

"I've already looked at him. Twice," Etreyo says.

Kuddle holds up the lamp. "I was getting ready to release the body when I noticed something. Look. You can see how the killer gripped Hermosa by the neck; there's the shape of his thumb under the chin, and then the fingers, here, under the right ear. The killer used his left hand — his dominant hand, for sure, as he would hardly crush the life out of someone with his weaker hand."

"Nutter Norm is right-handed," Etreyo says. "So that proves something, I suppose, but it doesn't tell you who the killer is."

"But this will, or it will help. Look at the thumb mark. See, it's crooked, as though it has been broken and fixed, but the bone didn't set right."

Etreyo bends over the corpse. Hope is beginning to well up inside her. "That's a fantastic identifying mark. I can't believe I didn't see it before!" she says excitedly. "When I find a man with a broken thumb like that, I'll have him. And the fingerprints will prove it; they'll match some of the ones I found at the scene."

They leave Hermosa in the cold darkness. Back in the slicing room, Kuddle pours them both hot coffee. As they sip, and Etreyo contemplates the new lead, her excitement dampens. "It's a good clue, but it won't help Norm. I'm not going to find this guy before tomorrow afternoon."

"I've been thinking. The broken thumb brings to mind a recent corpse I had in here. An actor, he was, young fella. He fell during the rehearsal of that new melodrama that was going to open at the Odeon, the one about the Dainty Pirate."

"Did he fall off the stage?"

"No, out of the rigging. The scene was supposed to be on the ship, you know. Sixty feet down to the stage boards, and that was it for our young ingenue. Pity. He was pretty. He had a crooked thumb. I remember it because it was his only flaw."

"If he's dead, he could hardly be my murderer."

"Thirty years ago, I'd have said you were wrong. But I ain't seen a dead man walk in years. But it's still odd."

"Where's the corpse?"

"Well. No one claimed it, you know, and he wasn't a member of the theater company, so they wouldn't spring for a funeral. I got no budget for a potters' field; it ain't free, you know." Kuddle sounds a bit defensive. "Anyway, I sold it to a medico — dissection, I suppose."

She gets up, goes over to a filing cabinet, and yanks a drawer open. "Just for laughs, here. I read that Bertillo book you gave me, and it did seem interesting, so I started fingerprinting all the corpses that came in, to see if I ever ran across the same prints more than once." She pulls a card out of the drawer and whips it through the air toward Etreyo. "Pretty boy's prints."

Etreyo catches the card and lays it on the desk. She digs through her case and finds the cards she made of the prints she had taken from the crime scene, the prints she hasn't yet identified. And what do you fiking know? She finds a match.