Trace

20

Trudy has been gone from the house for a while, and in the kitchen JL Vlucy picks up a copy of a Broward County Sheriff's Office offense report. It doesn't say much. A prowler was reported and it might be connected to an alleged breaking and entering that happened at the same residence.

Next to the report is a large manila envelope, and inside it is the pencil drawing of the eye that was taped to the door. The cop didn't take it. Good job, Rudy. She can do destructive testing on the drawing, and she looks out the window at her neighbor's house and wonders if Kate has begun her return trip from drunk, believing that going around the bend will somehow make her less drunk, or whatever it is that people believe when they are drunk. The remembered smell of champagne makes Lucy queasy and fills her with dread. She knows all about champagne and rubbing up on strangers who look better the more the alcohol flows. She knows all about it and never wants to make that trip again, and when she is reminded, she cringes and feels a deep, sick remorse.

She is grateful that Rudy has gone off somewhere. If he knew what just happened, he would be reminded, and both of them would fall silent, and the silences would only get deeper and more impenetrable until they finally have a fight and get beyond one more bad memory. When she was drunk she took what she thought she wanted, only to find out later that she didn't want what she had taken and was repulsed by it or simply indifferent. This is assuming she could always remember what she did or took, and after a while, she rarely remembered. For someone still in her twenties, Lucy has forgotten a lot in life. The last time she forgot, she began to remember when she was standing out on an apartment balcony some thirty stories up, dressed in nothing but a pair of running shorts in the dead of a very cold night in New York, a January night after a day of partying in Greenwich Village, just where in Greenwich Village she still has no idea and doesn't want to know.

Why she was out on the balcony she still isn't sure, but she might have thought she was going to the bathroom and took a wrong turn and opened the wrong door, and had she decided to step over the balcony, assuming it was the tub or who knows what, she would have fallen thirty stories to her death. Her aunt would have gotten the autopsy reports and determined along with the rest of the forensic profession that Lucy committed suicide while drunk. No test on earth would have revealed that all Lucy did was stumble out of bed to use the bathroom inside a strange apartment that belonged to a stranger she met somewhere in the Village. But that is another story and one she does not care to dwell on.

After those stories there are no others. She turned on alcohol to pay it back for all the times it turned on her, and now she doesn't drink. Now the smell of drink reminds her of the sour odor of lovers she did not love and would not have touched sober. She looks out at her neighbor's house, then walks out of the kitchen and upstairs to the second floor. At least she can be grateful that Henri was a decision that drinking did not make. At least Lucy can be grateful for that.

Inside her office, Lucy turns on a light and snaps open a black briefcase that is no bigger than a regular briefcase, but it is a rugged hard shell and inside is a Global Remote Surveillance Command Center that allows her to access covert remote wireless receivers from anywhere in the world. She checks to make sure the battery is charged and operational, and that the four channel repeaters are repeating and that the dual tape decks are dually capable of recording. She plugs in the command center to a telephone line, turns on the receiver, and slips on headphones to see if Kate might be talking to anyone from inside the gym or her bedroom, but she isn't and nothing has been recorded yet. Lucy sits at a table inside her office, looking out at the sun playing on the water and the palm trees plaving in the wind, and she listens. Adjusting the sensitivity level, she waits.

A few minutes of silence pass, and she slips off the headphones and places them on the table. She gets up and moves the command center to the table where she has set up the Krimesite Imager. The light in the room changes as clouds touch the sun and move on, and then more clouds drift past the sun and the light dims and brightens inside the office. Lucy pulls on white cotton gloves. She removes the drawing of the eye from its envelope and places it on a large sheet of clean black paper, and she sits down again, puts on the headphones again, and removes a can of ninhydrin from a fingerprint kit. She takes the top off the can and begins to spray the drawing, moistening it, but not too much. Although the spray contains no chlorofluorocarbons and is environment friendly, she has never found it especially human friendly. The mist bites her lungs and she coughs.

She takes off the headphones again and gets up again, carrying the chemical-smelling damp paper over to a countertop where a steam iron is plugged in and resting upright on top of a heat-resistant pad. She turns on the iron and it heats up fast, and she pushes the steam button to test it and steam hisses out. Placing the drawing of the eye on the heat resistant pad, she holds the iron no less than four inches above the paper and starts the steam. Within seconds, areas of the paper begin to turn purple, and right away she can see purple marks from fingers, marks that she didn't leave because she knows where she touched the paper when she removed it from the door, and she didn't touch it with her bare hands, and the cop from Broward didn't touch the drawing because Rudy wouldn't have allowed that. She is careful not to steam the piece of tape, which is nonporous and will not react to ninhydrin, and the heat will melt the adhesive and any possible ridge detail on it.

Back at her work table, she seats herself, puts on the headphones and a pair of glasses, and slides the purple-spotted drawing under the lens of the Imager scope. She turns it on, then turns on the UV lamp and looks into the eyepiece at a field of bright green, and she smells the unpleasant odor of the cooked chemical and paper. The pencil marks of the eye are thin white lines, and then there is pale ridge detail in a finger mark near the iris of the eye. She adjusts the focus, making the image as sharp as possible, and the ridge detail shows several characteristics and is more than enough to run in the FBI's Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System. When she ran the latent prints she lifted from the bedroom after Henri was almost murdered, the search produced nothing because the beast has no ten-print card on file. This time, she'll do a latent-to-latent search against more than two billion prints in the IAFIS database, and she'll also make sure her office does a manual comparison of the latents from the bedroom and the ones from the drawing. She mounts a digital camera on top of the scope's eyepiece and begins taking photographs.

Not five minutes later, when she is taking more pictures of another finger mark, this one a smudge with partial ridge detail, the first human sound comes through her headphones, and she turns up the volume and tinkers with the sensitivity level and makes sure one of the recorders is capturing what she is hearing live.

"What are you doing?" Kate's drunk voice sounds clearly in Lucy's headphones, and she leans forward in her chair and checks to make sure everything in the command center is up and running fine. "I can't play tennis today," Kate slurs, and her one-sided conversation is picked up clearly by the transmitter hidden in the adapter Lucy plugged into the wall socket near the window that overlooks the back of Lucy's house.

Kate is in the gym and there is no background noise of the treadmill or elliptical machine, not that Lucy expects her neighbor to be working out when she is drunk. But Kate isn't too drunk to spy. She is looking out the window at Lucy's house and has nothing better to do than spy, and she probably never has had anything better to do than spy and get drunk.

"No, you know I think I'm getting a cold. You hear it too. You should luive heard me earlier. I'm so stopped up and you should have heard me when I got up."

Lucy stares at the red light on the tape recorder. Her eyes wander to the sheet of paper beneath the lens of the mounted crime scope. The paper is curled from the heat, and the purple smudges on it are large, large enough to be a man's maybe, but she knows better than to make assumptions. What matters is there are prints, assuming they are the prints of the beast who taped his beastly drawing to Lucy's door, assuming it is the one who came into her house and tried to kill Henri. Lucy stares at the purple remnants of him, his tracks, his amino acids from his perspiring oily skin.

"Well, I have a movie star next door, how 'bout them apples?" Kate's voice violates the inside of Lucy's head. "Heck no, honey, not surprised in the least. Let me tell you, I thought so all along. People in and out, all those fancy cars and pretty people in a house that cost what? Eight, nine, ten million? And a gaudy house, you ask me. Just like you expect with gaudy people."

He doesn't care if he leaves prints. He doesn't care, and Lucy's heart feels hollow, because if he cared she would be better off. If he cared, it would indicate that he very likely has a criminal record. He has no ten print card in IAFIS or anywhere. He isn't worried, damn him. He doesn't care because he believes a match isn't going to happen. We'll see about that, Lucy thinks, and she feels his beastly presence as she looks at the purple smudges on the heat-curled drawing of the eye. She feels him watching and she feels Kate watching, and anger seethes inside Lucy, deep inside where her anger crawls and hides and sleeps until something pokes it.

"… Tina… Now do you believe it? Her last name's flown right out of my head. If she ever told me. Of course she would have. She told me all about it, and her boyfriend and that girl that was attacked and moved back to Hollywood…"

Lucy turns up the volume and the purple on the paper blurs as she stares hard and listens closely to her neighbor talk about Henri. How did she know Henri was attacked? it wasn't in the news, All Lucy tolci Kate was that there was a stalker. Lucy never said a word about anyone being attacked.

"A cute thing, very cute. Blonde, nice face and nice figure, nice and thin. They're all like that, those Hollywood types. Now that part I'm not sure of. But my feeling is he's the other one's boyfriend, Tina's boyfriend. Why? Well now that's pretty obvious, hon. If he was the blonde's beau, don't you think he would have left when she did, and she's not been here since the house got broken into and all those police cars and the ambulance showed up."

The ambulance, damn it. Kate saw the ambulance, saw a stretcher being carried out, and she assumes this means Henri was assaulted. I'm not thinking straight, Lucy thinks. I'm not making the connections, she thinks angrily and in growing frustration and panic. What's wrong with you, she says to herself as she listens and stares at the tape recorder inside the briefcase on top of the table near the Krimesite Imager. What the hell is wrong with you, she says to herself, and she thinks of her stupidity in the Ferrari when the Latino was following her.

"I wondered the same thing, why not a word in the news. I looked for it, believe you me," Kate talks on, her words chewy and distorted because she is around the bend and more drunk than before. "Yes, you would think so," she says with emphasis, the slurring more emphatic. "Movie stars and nothing in the news. But that's what I'm getting at. They're here in secret, so the media doesn't know. Well, it does too make sense. It does if you think about it, you silly goose…"

"Oh for God's sake, say something important," Lucy mutters to the room.

I've got to get a grip, she thinks. Lucy, get a grip. Think, think, think!

The long curly dark hairs on the,.bed. Oh dammit, she thinks. Dammit, I didn't ask her.

She pulls off the headphones and places them on the table. She stares around the room as the tape recorder continues to capture her neighbor's one-sided conversation. "Shit," she says out loud, realizing she doesn't have Kate's phone number or even know her last name, and she doesn't feel like spending the time and energy to find out either. Not that Kate will answer the phone if Lucy calls her.

Moving to a different desk, Lucy seats herself before a computer and creates a simple document from a template. She fabricates two VIP tickets to the premiere of her movie, Jump Out, which will be shown June 6 in Los Angeles, with a private party for the cast and special friends to follow. She prints out the tickets on glossy photographic paper and cuts them to size, and tucks them inside an envelope with a note that reads, "Dear Kate, loved our chat! Here's a movie trivia quiz: Who's the one with the long dark curly hair? (Can you figure it out?)," and she includes a cell phone number.

Lucy hurries outside and back to Kate's house, but Kate isn't answering the door or even the intercom. She is around the bend, past drunk and on her way to unconscious, if she isn't already unconscious, and Lucy places the envelope inside Kate's mailbox.