Cross Fire (Alex Cross 17)

“Knock yourself out, man. Cyanoacrylate’s in the drawer by the fuming chamber.”

That was fine by me. I like working in the lab every once in a while. It makes me feel smarter, even if printing is Forensics 101.

I went over to the fuming chamber and set the can upright inside. Then I put a few drops of cyanoacrylate, which is really just superglue, on a dish and sealed it all up to heat for a while.

In about fifteen minutes, I had a nice four-print set standing out on the surface of the can. Sampson’s paw print was there, too, but it was easy enough to differentiate, sizewise.

I dusted the ones I wanted with black powder and took a few pictures, just in case.

After that, it was only a matter of lifting them with clear tape and laying them back down on a card for scanning.

“Hey, Strings!” I shouted over. “Can I use your system?”

“Knock yourself out! Password’s B-I-G-B-U-T-Z.”

“Of course it is,” I said.

“Huh? What’s that?”

“Nothing.”

Once I got the prints onto the computer, it took IAFIS about half an hour to spit out four possible matches. A lot of the time, the final comparison is done by eye, which is good. It helps keep the process human.

And it didn’t take long for me to confirm one of the four.

The tented arch pattern on our man’s index finger was fairly distinctive, even as these little puzzles go.

With a few keystrokes, I had his name and record right there in front of me.

He was Stanislaw Wajda.

That explained the accent anyway. He’d been arrested just once, on a domestic assault charge in College Park, Maryland, a year and a half earlier. It didn’t seem like too much to go on.

But, in fact, I’d just stumbled onto a killer.

Chapter 88

AN INITIAL ONLINE search for “Stanislaw Wajda” brought up all kinds of different results. When I filtered for news reports, I got a whole slew of year-old stories about a missing-persons case.

That seemed promising, and I clicked on the first one, from the Baltimore Sun.

Questions Persist in Professor’s Disappearance

April 12, College Park — The search continues for University of Maryland professor Stanislaw Wajda, 51, who was last seen leaving the A. V. Williams Building on the university campus the evening of April 7.

Wajda’s mental state at the time of his disappearance has since become a matter of widespread speculation. While local police and UM officials have declined to comment on the issue, the professor’s erratic behavior over the last six months is a matter of public record.

In October, police were summoned to Wajda’s home on Radcliffe Drive for a domestic-disturbance call. Wajda, who had no previous criminal record, was charged with aggravated assault and held overnight, until the charges were dropped.

On campus, Professor Wajda has been brought before the university provost two times in the past year, once for unspecified aggressive behavior toward a graduate student, and a second time following what one eyewitness described as an explosive episode in the university library over a missing periodical.

Wajda, a professor of mathematics, came to the United States from Poland in 1983 to study at Boston University, where he won several top academic prizes in his field. More recently, he was featured in the PBS NOVA documentary “Ones to Watch” for his study of prime numbers, and specifically his pursuit of a proof for what many consider to be the holy grail of mathematics today: Riemann’s hypothesis.…

I stopped reading right there, got up, and dialed Sampson’s number on my way out the door.

“Strings, thanks much.”

“No problem. Glad to help out.”