"What a poet!" She frowned. "Finding the Luminol fingerprint is going to be harder than I thought. Fingerprint files have been centralized. It's all through FOMEX out of Neuilly."
"Try to interface with LanguedocZZ via Helsinki," Rene suggested. "The main menu originated with them."
"Good thinking, Cassidy," she said.
Twenty minutes later, she'd accessed FOMEX, the repository of files from the prefecture of police of every city or town in France that had its own prefecture. By the time she got to the main catalog of fingerprints, the only title that was close was FINGERPRINT, BLOODY, of which there were three subsets: Pending, Active, and Deceased, and thousands of files under each. It could fit all three. She called Morbier.
"Where did the bloody fingerprint go?" she said.
"With the experts," he said.
She heard the scrape of the wooden match on his desk. She knew the videoed fingerprint had been scanned and immediately catalogued on computer files.
"No kidding, Morbier. What's it under?"
"Pending and Interpol. What's it to you?"
She punched in Pending, then Paris, then 4th arrondissement/ 64 rue des Rosiers. Up came a giant index finger on her screen.
"Just like to be included in the twenty-eight percent of the informed population," she said. She'd like to see the expression on his face if he could see the display filling her screen.
"The higher-ups have spoken again. Seems whatever case I touch they like to take over," he said.
"Meaning that they didn't like your face on the evening news?"
"Meaning Luminol use falls under strict rules from the ministry at La Defense," he answered. "Which I didn't follow. So I'm pushed off that case."
"That doesn't make sense," she said.
"Leduc, just a word to the wise. Leave this thing alone."
"So only the big boys get to play and set up their own rules? Is that what you're saying, Morbier?" Aimee asked.
"They already have," he said. "Watch out."
The fingerprint hadn't even been classified or typed yet, but Aimee could tell by the whorls filling her computer screen that it was common to one third of the population. Such a clear readable print; the swirls over the hump of the center finger pad were unique, as everyone's were. But she could start to classify and discard two thirds of the millions of prints that were stored based on what she saw. She punched into FOMEX on Rene's terminal and scanned the known fingerprints of Nazis from Nuremberg trial files into the computer. That would give her a base to start from. On the other terminal hooked to his Minitel she downloaded the R.F. SS Sicherheits-Dienst Memorandum file emblazoned with thick black Gestapo lightning bolts she'd accessed through the Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.
But that turned into a dead end. She checked other memorandums from the file. Nothing. The Nuremberg trials only yielded prints of those already executed for war crimes and the R.F. SS file was limited.
At a loss as to where to go, she delved into Republic of Germany classified documents. After forty more minutes of searching, she accessed the Third Reich database, which flooded the screen with a whole plethora of Nazism. Many of the entries had come from charred remnants scanned and entered into the database from the remains left in the burned Reichstag basement smoldering as Berlin fell. Countrywide lists of Hitler Youth group members and the alliance of German Girls were catalogued alongside SA brown shirt organizations, fingerprint files of Gestapo members, and even the names of German women awarded gold crosses for having the most children.
She entered Gestapo files and searched by surname. Nothing came up that matched the ones she wanted. Then she tried locale, searching the three main headquarters in Munich, Hanover, and Berlin. A "Volpe, Reiner" aged eight years old came up but that was the closest. Then she decided to go year by year. She began in 1933, the first known year on file of an established Gestapo. After an hour and a half she'd found the fingerprints in the Gestapo file of the SS chief and underlings in Paris: Rausch, Oblath, and Volpe. She printed them, amazed at the clear imprints that existed after all this time.
After pulling up the Luminol fingerprints from the FRAPOL 1 file, she peered through her magnifying glass at the two screens full of whorls and swirls. She inputted them together, counted to ten, then pressed the command REQUEST COMPARISON. A soft whir, then a series of small clicks. REQUEST RECEIVED appeared on the screen, then a flashing signal indicating request backlog. All she could do now was wait until the match was or wasn't made.
When the flashing light disappeared from Rene's terminal and the message came up "No Match of Verified Fingerprints," Aimee wasn't too surprised. She'd eliminated Rausch, Oblath, and Volpe as Arlette's murderer. But they'd been responsible for so many other murders, it didn't mean much. Primitive elimination. She still didn't know Hartmuth Griffe's true identity. Generally, new identities had been found that were close to the person's real name for easier remembrance and to avoid mistakes. He could be Rausch or either of the underlings: Oblath or Volpe.
A configuration of jumbled letters appeared on her screen, followed by clicking noises. Alarmed, she looked up. "Rene, something weird is happening."
"Mine too," he said. "Something is either scrambling transmission or we've been hit by a virus."
"I'll check the backup server link. Did you confirm our new access codes with them?" she said.
"I haven't gotten around to it yet," Rene moaned. "We're cooked! Our whole system's down."
Aimee quickly started the automated backup retrieval system, so files wouldn't be lost or deleted. Automated backup retrieval cost them a lot, but the system was guaranteed to be fail-safe.
She breathed a sigh of relief after she'd checked the system. "The fingerprints are saved."
Rene looked worried as he climbed down from his chair. "I think you kicked off some warning device in the FOMEX system."
"I think you're right." She glanced at her screen. "That means I dug deep enough to flip off an alarm."
For the first time she admitted to herself that she might be in over her head. Way over her head.
"Go home," Rene said, as he put on his coat. "I'm going to visit a friend who deals with this kind of thing. Just stay off the system and wait until you hear from me."
"I'm going to walk home," she said.
"Stay off the phone." He looked grim. "And make sure you're not followed."
AS SHE walked along the Seine kicking pebbles into the water, she checked to see that she wasn't being followed. Uneasily, she forced herself to mentally catalog her recent discoveries.
She'd discovered that a fifty-year-old bloody fingerprint found at the murder scene of Lili's concierge hadn't matched any Si-Po officers in occupied Paris. However, she knew that these officers had been listed as dead in the Battle of Stalingrad while they were still signing deportation orders for Jews in Paris. Her office had been broken into, files about Lili and a collabo taken, and a swastika painted on her wall along with a threat. She had heard Soli's last utterance in the hospital of "Ka. . .za" and was almost run over. Not to mention discovering Thierry's real parentage and Javel's statement about the Jew with the bright blue eyes. More of the puzzle pieces had surfaced—fragments and images. They all fit together. Only she didn't know how.
Now she needed to stir things up. Throw her idea in the frying pan and see what happened. Test her suspicions about Hartmuth Griffe. She pulled out her cell phone and called Thierry.
"Meet me in the rear courtyard of the Picasso Museum," she said.
"What for?" His voice sounded flat.
"Has to do with your parentage," she said slowly. "We need to—"