Black notice by Patricia Cornwell Page B

him since the beginning of my time here, and he never seemed to get any older or change at all. He was still bald, tall and gangly and always lost in oversized lab coats that swirled and flapped around him as he hurried up and down halls.
    Vander put on a pair of latex gloves and lightly held the dead man's hands, studying them, turning them this way and that.
    "Easiest thing's gonna be to slide off the skin," he decided.
    When a body was as decomposed as this one, the hand's top layer of skin slips off like a glove and, in fact, is called a glove. Vander worked fast, sliding off the gloves intact from each hand and working his own latex-sheathed hands inside them: Wearing the dead man's hands, in a sense, he inked each finger and rolled it onto a ten-print card. He removed the skin gloves and left them neatly on a surgical tray, then popped off his latex ones, before heading back upstairs.
    "Chuck, put those in formalin," I said. "We'll want to save them."
    He was sullen, screwing the lid off a plastic quart jar.
    "Let's turn him," I said.
    Marino helped us flip the body facedown. I found more dirt, mostly on the buttocks, and got swabs of that, too. I saw no injuries, only an area over the right upper back that seemed darker than the skin around it. I looked at it through a lens, staring, blanking out my thought process as I always did when looking for pattern injuries, bite marks or other elusive evidence. It was like scuba diving in water with almost no visibility. All I could make out were shades and shapes and wait until I bumped into something.
    "Do you see this, Marino? Or is it just my imagination?" I asked.
    He sniffed more Vicks vapors up his nose and leaned against the table. He looked and looked.
    "Maybe," he said. "I don't know."
    I wiped off the skin with a wet towel, and the outer layer, or epidermis, slipped right off. The flesh beneath, or dermis, looked like soggy brown corrugated paper stained with dark ink.
    "A tattoo." I was pretty sure. "The ink penetrated to the dermis, but I can't make out anything. Just a big splotch."
    "Like one of those purple birthmarks some people have," Marino offered.
    I leaned closer with the lens and adjusted a surgical lamp to its best advantage. Ruffin was obsessively polishing a stainless steel countertop and pouting.
    "Let's try UV," I decided.
    The multiband ultraviolet lamp was very simple to use and looked rather much like the handheld scanners in airports. We dimmed the lights and I tried longwave UV first, holding the lamp close to the area I was interested in. Nothing fluoresced, but a hint of purple seemed to feather out in a pattern, and I wondered if this might mean we were picking up white ink. Under UV light, anything white, such as the sheet on the nearby gurney, will radiate like snow in moonlight and possibly pick up a blush of violet from the lamp. I slid the selector down and tried shortwave next. I could see no difference between the two.
    "Lights;" I said.
    Ruffin turned them up.
    "I would think tattoo ink would light up like neon," Marino said.
    "Fluorescent inks do," I replied. "But since high concentrations of iodine and mercury aren't so great for your health, they're not used anymore."
    It was past noon when I finally began the autopsy, making the Y incision and removing the breastplate of ribs. I found pretty much what I expected. The organs were soft and friable. They virtually fell apart at the touch and I had to be very careful when weighing and sectioning them. I couldn't tell much about the coronary arteries except that they were not occluded. There was no blood left, only the putrefied fluid called oily effusate that I collected from the pleural cavity. The brain was liquefied.
    "Samples of the brain and the effusate go to tox for a STAT alcohol," I said to Ruffin as I worked.
    Urine and bile had seeped through the cells of their hollow organs and were gone, and there .was nothing left of the stomach. But when I reflected back flesh from the