As a piece of architecture, the Forensic Centre is of no interest whatsoever. It’s just a slab tossed up, like so many other government buildings, in the era when poured concrete replaced brick and stone as the material of choice. Inside, it’s a collection of putty-coloured dividers, tweedy carpet, and mordant cartoons cut from newspapers and taped above people’s desks.
Cardinal had been here many times, though not to the documents section, and the very familiarity of the place unnerved him. He was drowning in the deepest agony of his life; everything should have been changed. And yet the security guards, the rattling elevator, the plain offices, desks, charts and displays were exactly as before.
‘Okay, so we got three little items here,’ Tommy Hunn said, laying them out on the laboratory counter. Unlike the building, Tommy had changed. His hair had got thinner, and his belt was hidden beneath a roll of flab, as if there were a dachshund asleep under his shirt.
‘We got one suicide note. We got one notebook in which said suicide note may or may not have been written. And we have one nasty sympathy card with a typed message inside.’
‘Why don’t we start with the sympathy card?’ Cardinal said. ‘It’s not going to be related to the other two items.’
‘Sympathy card first,’ Hunn said. He put on a pair of latex gloves, removed the card from its plastic folder and opened it. ‘“How does it feel, asshole?”’ he read in a flat monotone. ‘“Just no telling how things will turn out, is there?” Cute.’
He held the note next to the window, tilting it to catch the light.
‘Well, it’s an ink-jet printer, I can see that right off. No idiosyncrasies visible to the naked eye. Not my eye, anyway. But let’s do a little detecting.’ He held a loupe to his eye and brought the note up to his face. ‘Here we go. Printer flaw on the second line. Look at the h’s and the t’s.’
He handed Cardinal the loupe. At first Cardinal couldn’t see anything, but when his eye adjusted he could make out a pale, threadlike line running through the crossbars of the h’s and the t’s.
‘The good news is, if a printer does something like that, it does it consistently. You notice there’s no flaw through the first line of type. But if we had another page the guy printed out, it would show the same flaw on the second line.’
‘How helpful is that going to be?’ Cardinal asked.
‘Without another sample to compare it to? Not helpful at all. And the bad news is, they change the cartridge, they change the flaws. Far as we’re concerned, it’s like they’ve bought themselves a whole new printer.’
Cardinal pointed to the notebook. ‘What can you do with these?’
‘Depends what you want to know.’
‘I’d like to be sure the note was written with the same pen as the rest of the notebook. And when it was written in relation to the last entries. If you open it to the one that mentions “John’s birthday”.’
‘John’s birthday. Ha! Maybe she was addressing it to you!’ Hunn flicked through the pages, then held the notebook up to the light the way he had the card. ‘Oh, yeah. You’ve got impressions here. I can make out “Dear John”. First thing we do is stick ’em both in the comparator.’
He lifted a wide door on something labelled VSC 2000.
‘Look through the window there, when I flick the switch. I can shine several different kinds of light on the samples, see what kicks up. Ink may look identical to the human eye, but even the same make and model of pen will show differences under infrared. The chemistry of different ink batches reacts differently. I can’t tell you how many fraudulent wills I’ve busted using this gizmo. “Dear John.” Gotta love it.’
Cardinal bent over to peer through the window. The writing on the pages glowed.
‘These are identical,’ Hunn said from behind him. ‘Same pen wrote the suicide note and the birthday note.’
‘Can you tell me which one was written first?’
‘Sure. First thing we do is stick it in the humidifier.’ Hunn put the notebook into a small machine with a glass front that looked like a toaster oven. ‘Just needs a minute or so. Indentations will show up way better if the paper is humid.’
The machine beeped, and he took out the notebook. ‘Now we’ll run a little ESDA magic on it, see what we can see.’
‘A little what?’
‘E-S-D-A. Electrostatic detection apparatus.’
This was a hulk of a machine with a venting hood on top. Hunn laid the notebook down so that the single page was flat against a layer of foam. Then he spread a sheet of plastic wrap over it.
‘Underneath the foam we got a vacuum that pulls the air through. It’ll hold the document and the plastic down tight. Now I take my Corona unit – don’t worry, I’m not gonna open my pants …’
Hunn picked up a wandlike instrument and flicked a switch. ‘Little mother puts out several thousand volts,’ he said over the hum. He waved it over the plastic sheet a few times. There was no change that Cardinal could see.
‘Now I take my fairy dust …’ Hunn shook what looked like iron filings out of a small canister. ‘Actually, these are tiny glass beads covered in toner. I’m just gonna cascade ’em over my set-up here …’
He poured the black powder over the plastic that covered the notebook page. The beads slid off, leaving toner behind in the impressions. There was a flash of light.
‘Now I got us a picture,’ Hunn said, ‘and we shall see what we shall see. Have these been dusted for fingerprints?’
‘Not yet. Why?’
‘The toner’ll often pick up prints – not as good as dusting powder. They have to be pretty good prints for it to work. Take a look.’
A photograph scrolled out of a slot. Cardinal reached for it.
There was a small dark thumbprint to the left of “John’s birthday”, which now appeared in white. There was a short straight line across the whorls where Catherine had cut herself in the kitchen years ago. Catherine’s thumbprint, where she braced the notebook on her lap. She was alive. She was thinking of me, planning for my birthday, imagining a future. Cardinal coughed to cover the cry that threatened to escape his throat. The impression of the suicide note was now complete, clearly inscribed in black toner. By the time you read this …
It’s her handwriting. You know it’s her handwriting. Why are you putting yourself through this?
‘Okay,’ Cardinal said. ‘So we know the suicide note was written on top of the later page, which makes sense. The later pages should have been blank when she wrote the suicide note. But can you tell if the ink on the later page, I mean the ink of the birthday note, is on top of the impressions left from the suicide note? Or underneath them?’
‘Oh, I like a man who thinks dirty,’ Hunn said. ‘Let’s pop it under the microscope. If the white lines of the birthday note are interrupted
