"--shake it!" Cooper shouted.
"Sachs!" Rhyme gasped.
She shook harder. "Damn it."
"No!"
A tiny white thread fell out, followed by some grains of black powder.
"Okay," Cooper said, exhaling. "It's safe."
He walked over, and using a needle probe, rolled the plastic onto a glass slide. He walked in the smooth gait of criminalists around the world--back straight, hand buoyed and carrying the sample rock steady--to the microscope. He mounted the explosive.
"Magn
a-Brush?" Cooper asked, referring to a fine gray fingerprint powder.
"No," Rhyme responded. "Use gentian violet. It's a plastic print. We just need a little contrast."
Cooper sprayed it, then mounted the slide in the 'scope.
The image popped onto the screen of Rhyme's computer simultaneously.
"Yes!" he shouted. "There it is."
The whorls and bifurcations were very visible.
"You nailed it, Sachs. Good job."
As Cooper slowly rotated the plug of explosive, Rhyme made progressive screen captures--bitmap images--and saved them on the hard drive. He then assembled them and printed out a single, two-dimensional sliver of print.
But when the tech examined it he sighed.
"What?" Rhyme asked.
"Still not enough for a match. Only a quarter inch by five-eighths. No AFIS in the world could pick up anything from this."
"Jesus," Rhyme spat out. All that effort . . . wasted.
A sudden laugh.
From Amelia Sachs. She was staring at the wall, the evidence charts. CS-1, CS-2 . . .
"Put them together," she said.
"What?"
"We've got three partials," she explained. "They're probably all from his index finger. Can't you fit them together?"
Cooper looked at Rhyme. "I've never heard of doing that."
Neither had Rhyme. The bulk of forensic work was analyzing evidence for presentation at trial--"forensic" means "relating to legal proceedings"--and a defense lawyer'd go to town if cops started assembling fragments of perps' fingerprints.
But their priority was finding the Dancer, not making a case against him.
"Sure," Rhyme said. "Do it!"
Cooper grabbed the other pictures of the Dancer's prints from the wall and rested them on the table in front of him.