Black notice by Patricia Cornwell Page A

wandering around somewhere."
    "I'll do it;" Marino said.
    "I gotta admit, it still blows my mind a little to see chicks chasing after killers." Ruffin directed this at Marino. "Back when you got started, they probably did nothing but check parking meters."
    Marino went to the phone.
    "Take off your gloves;" I called after him, because be always forgot, no matter how many Clean Hands signs I posted.
    I moved the lens slowly and stopped. The knees looked abraded and dirty, as if he had been kneeling on a rough, dirty surface without his pants on. I checked his elbows. They looked dirty and abraded, too, but it was hard to tell with certainty because his skin was in such bad shape. I dipped a cotton swab in sterile water as Marino hung up the phone. I heard him tear open another pair of gloves.
    "Anderson ain't here," he said. "Cleta said she left about a half hour ago."
    "So what do you think about women lifting weights?" Ruffin asked Marino. "You see the muscles in Anderson's arms?"
    I used a six-inch ruler as a scale. and started taking photographs with a thirty-five-millimeter camera and a macro lens. I found more dirty areas on the underside of the arms, and I swabbed them.
    "I'm wondering if it was a full moon when the ship left Antwerp," Marino said to me.
    "I guess if you want to live in a man's world you gotta be as strong as one;" Ruffin went on.
    Running water was relentless and steel clanged against steel and overhead lights allowed no shadows.
    "Well, it will be a new moon tonight;" I said. "Belgium's in the eastern hemisphere, but the lunar cycle would be the same there."
    "So it could have been a full moon," Marino said.
    I knew where he was going with this and my silence told him to stay away from the subject of werewolves.
    "So what happened, Marino? The two of you arm-wrestle over your job?" Ruffin asked, cutting the twine around a bale of towels.
    Marino's eyes were double barrels pointed at him.
    "And I guess we know who won since she's the detective now and you're back in uniform," Ruffin said, smirking:
    "You talking to me?"
    "You heard me." Ruffin slid open a glass cabinet door.
    "You know; it must be I'm getting old:" Marino snatched off his surgical cap and slammed it into the trash. "My hearing ain't what it used to be. But if I'm not mistaken, I believe you just pissed me off."
    "What do you think of those iron women on TV? What about women wrestlers?" Ruffin kept going.
    "Shut the fuck up," Marino told him.
    "You're single, Marino. Would you go out with a woman like that?"
    Ruffin had always resented. Marino, and now he had a chance to do something about it, or so he thought, because Ruffin's egocentric world turned on a very weak axis. In his dim way of seeing things, Marino was down and wounded. It was a good time to kick him around.
    "Question is, would a woman like that go out with you?" Ruffin didn't have sense enough to run out of the room. "Or would any woman go out with you?"
    Marino walked up to him. He got so close to Ruffin, they were face shield to face shield.
    "I got a few little words of advice for you, asshole," Marino said, fogging up the plastic protecting his dangerous face. "Zip those sissy lips of yours before they kiss my fist. And put that tiny dick back in its holster before you hurt yourself with it."
    Chuck's face turned scarlet, all this going on while the doors slid open and Neils Vander walked in carrying ink, a roller and ten print cards.
    "Straighten up, and I mean now," I ordered Marino and Ruffin. "Or I'm throwing both of you out of here."
    "Good morning," Vander said, as if it were.
    "His skin's slipping badly," I told him.
    "Just makes it easier."
    Vander was the section chief of the fingerprints and impression lab, and wasn't bothered by much. It wasn't uncommon for him to shoo maggots away while he fingerprinted decomposed bodies, and he didn't flinch in burn cases when it was necessary to cut off the victim's fingers and carry them upstairs in ajar.
    I had known