He opened the lab door. Glanced around. Then motioned her inside. “Remind me why I’m helping you. Again.”
“Can you spell M-O-T-L-E-Y C-R-U-E?”
His eyes popped. “You got the tickets?”
Scalper prices for a sold-out show at the new Stade de France next month had emptied her worn Vuitton wallet. And then some.
“For you, Benoit, the best. Front stage section in arena seating.”
“We’ll rock the place.”
“Better you than me.” Not her type of music.
The green-walled laboratory, small by some standards, housed up-to-date forensic fingerprint wonder machines, many of them British.
“Tell me you got a good set of latents.”
She held out her rouge-noir nail polish bottle. “At least he held the whole thing in his hand.”
“Position it for me the way your perp did.”
She donned a set of blue plastic surgical gloves from the box on the counter. Careful not to smudge the bottle, she showed him, shaping her hand around the baggie.
He got to work dusting the glass surface with powder.
Nothing. Her heart dropped.
“Patience.” Benoit redusted from another pot, then flipped on a blue light. “For you, Aimée, the works. Any idea what he’d been touching before?”
She thought back. “Plastic bags and synthetic materials.”
“Meaning?”
“Those faux designer bags. Fuchsia, if that helps. The shop counter, a ledger written with a ballpoint pen.”
He pulled a swing-arm magnifier over the bag, studied it. “Voilà. Micro traces of blue ink, I’d say, in the index fingerprint ridges. A little smudged on the thumb whorl.”
“You’ll run them now?” she said. “I need the works, Benoit.”
He shrugged. “I’ll need some help.”
“That’s on you.” She held up the tickets. “But this guarantees you a hot date.” Now she knew what it looked like when fingerprint techs salivated. “By the works, bien sûr you’ll include the police database registry listing all cartes de séjour and pending applications, business permits and licenses.”
Government bureaucrats loved paper. Logged applications, maintained files, registries and databanks. Any official request or form left a paper trail. Even the objets trouvés, or lost-and-found, had ledgers corresponding with police reports dating back over a hundred years. And that was just in the on-site storeroom.
“So how soon …?”
“You’re in luck.” He snorted. “Demontellan’s playing the piano now.”
Playing the piano, the old term used for checking fingerprint files.
“He’s the best,” Benoit said. “Knows the cards by heart.”
Her heart fell. “Don’t tell me you still match prints manually?”
“We use three match systems in total. More than the cowboys, the Brits, or Interpol.”
Thorough. No doubt he could do more. It never hurt to ask.
“Impressive.” She wrote down Meizi’s name in the spilled, white fingerprint powder. “Run this name while you’re at it, eh?”
Benoit pushed his hair behind his ears. Winced.
She waved the tickets, still in the FNAC ticket envelope, until he nodded.
“This way.”
“WE GOT A HIT. Now I call this synchronicity,” said Demontellan. “My wife bought her bag in one of those places. A faux Fendi, whatever that means.” Reddish-pink keloid scars ribbed what had once been Demontellan’s ear and trailed down his neck into his shirt collar. A victim of the bombing, a few years earlier, in the Saint-Michel RER station, he’d been luckier than the others on the train. Demontellan wore thick-lensed, seventies-style glasses. His magnified eyes reminded her of an unblinking mackerel. His index finger stabbed a file labeled Wu, Feng, age 29.
He opened it to the record within. Domiciled Ivry, owner of Lucky Luggage, rue au Maire.
“But he’s not twenty-nine years old,” Aimée said loudly to Demontellan’s ruined ear.
“Don’t shout,” he said. “My hearing’s superb.”
“Desolée,” she said, abashed, averting her gaze from the painful-looking scar tissue.
“Everyone does that at first,” he grinned. “Bet my hearing’s better than yours. I’m bionic. Cochlear implants.”
Not knowing whether to laugh or applaud, she shrugged. “We’re all special, Demontellan. Any photo of him?”
“For that let’s take a little stroll.” He led her to a bank of metal file cabinets, chose the W section, and pulled open a drawer at shoulder height. Oatmeal-colored fingerprint cards, filed by surname, stretched before her, some with worn, dog-eared edges, others crisp.
“My father used these,” she said, amazed.
“For cross verification purposes, and individuals not entered into the main system, it does the job. Zut, I can match a card’s prints faster than anyone can boot up, log in, enter the system, and search a database.”
She nodded.
“That’s if we had a current computer database,” he grinned. “Alors, the Brigade Criminelle still types reports on Remingtons.”
Archaic, like everything else at 36 Quai des Orfèvres.
“Plus I know the smell. I sniff better with these.”
For any good flic, it came down to the nose. One’s sense of smell developed over years, illustrating Oscar Wilde’s aphorism, “Nothing worth knowing can be taught.” A good flic could pull out a detail cataloged in the recesses of his mind. A name or an address cross-referenced to a memory, a whisper in a bar from an informer. The methodical, painstaking accumulation of details—piecing them together, building evidence, a case.
Computers didn’t do that.
“W. Woo. Wu.” Pause. “Here we go.” Demontellan pulled out three cards. “Wu, Meizi, age 36; Wu, Feng, age 29; and Wu, Jui, age 30.”
Aimée stared at the cards. None of the photos matched Meizi or her parents. What in hell was going on here?
“Demontellan, I suggest you route these to Prévost at the commissariat in the third.”
“Think I do magic, too?”
She grinned. “You could head the report, ‘Question of identity regarding witnesses and suspect in the homicide case reported last night.” And conclude that the identity is inconsistent with fingerprints on file.”
“Did Prévost request this?”
“He should have,” she said. “But I’m sure you’ll craft it so he thinks one of his men did. Cite a paperwork request lost in the shuffle. I’m sure you know how to word it.”
Demontellan took off his glasses and wiped them with a handkerchief. “You must hold something over that boy.”
“And he must hold something bigger over you,” she said.
Demontellan gave a knowing smile. “It’s evened out.” He paused. “That help you?”
“The more I dig, the deeper the hole.” Her finger traced the stiff edge of the Meizi Wu card. “Proving no one is who they say. But this gets me no closer to finding Meizi Wu.”
He jerked his thumb toward his desk. “Benoit left you a file. On the house, he said.”
She thumbed through photocopied business licenses, carte de séjour applications, work permits. All faux Wus. Ching Wao probably drove a Mercedes with the proceeds.
Disappointed, she picked up her bag from Demontellan’s desk, and saw that a paper had slipped out.
A national museum employment application for a maintenance position at the Musée des Arts et Métiers. The application was for a Wu, Meizi, dated two weeks earlier, and listing as a reference Pascal Samour, faculty department head at CNAM.
Her heart raced. Pascal Samour had given Meizi a recommendation. While Demontellan was photocopying the application and fingerprint cards, Aimée checked the in-box on his desk.