The Queen's Accomplice (Maggie Hope Mystery #6)(64)

Collins gave her a curious look, then frowned. “Unfortunately, no. Someday, I hope we’ll be able to test for what, if any, drugs are in the bloodstream, but for now, if it’s not in the stomach and recognizable, we don’t know.”

“Find any fingerprints?” Maggie asked.

“No.” Durgin was still staring at her. “Still nothing. You know, I’m considered to be rather an expert on fingerprinting—and the cheeky bastard’s not leaving any.”

Maggie circled the woman’s body lying on the gurney. “In the original Jack the Ripper killings, the police examined the eyes of those killed—they believed the victims’ retinas might have somehow retained an image of the killer….”

“I already checked her eyes,” Collins snapped. “You think I don’t know how to do me job? Of course I checked her eyes. I checked the eyes of all the girls.”

Maggie had an odd feeling in her stomach. Could this be “the gut”? “No, no,” she clarified, “not the eyelids. The eyeballs.”

“There’s no way in hell she could have fingerprints on her eyeballs! In all my days of working on the dead—”

Maggie dug her fingernails into the palms of her hands.

“Shut up, Collins,” Durgin interrupted. “Did you check?”

“Well, no—”

“Then, I’m going to dust her eyeballs for prints,” Durgin declared. He went to the metal counter and took out a feather brush and a glass jar filled with dark gray powder, as well as a small paper printed with the words ADHESIVE STRIPS and a blank leather-bound notebook. Dabbing the brush into the powder, he approached the corpse. “Would you do the honors?” he asked Collins.



“Sir! Yes, sir!” Collins responded, still aggrieved. He went to the body and pried open the left eyelid, then gestured theatrically to the detective.

Maggie’s stomach churned, and she was suddenly glad all she’d had that morning was tea.

As Durgin gently brushed the powder over the exposed eyeball, an image began to appear. Maggie moved closer to watch, mourning the murdered woman, disgusted by the physicality, but also undeniably and irresistibly fascinated by the science.

Durgin continued to move his wrist with delicate grace and guide the brush with his fingers. More and more lines began to emerge, like a photograph developing in its chemical bath. “The chemical composition of fingerprint powders can vary,” he murmured, “but they all basically work the same way. Latent prints are created by the natural secretion of sweat and oils from the skin that leave behind an outline of the ridges found on one’s fingers. A person’s fingerprints remain constant from womb to grave. Only damage to the skin of the finger can alter the print. So each print is wholly unique—even the prints of identical twins differ.”

The Detective Chief Inspector tapped his brush back into the powder and began again. Faint swirls began to take shape on the eyeball.

“My goodness,” Maggie breathed.

“I’ll be damned,” Collins muttered. “The murdering devil did leave a print on her eyeball. Deliberate, I’d say. Like a bloody calling card.”

Durgin selected an adhesive strip and placed it on the powdery eyeball. He waited, peeled the strip off, then pressed it to a blank white page in his notebook. There it was. A fingerprint, as distinctive as a snowflake.



“Good job, Miss Hope. What I’m using,” Durgin told Maggie, “is Henry Faulds’s classic method of recovering prints from a crime scene.”

Through a magnifying glass, he examined the print in the book. “It’s a good one,” he assured them. “So we can take it back to the Yard and see if we have a match.

“You were right this time, Miss Tiger,” he said, straightening. “Good on you. But don’t get your hopes up. First of all, there are hundreds of thousands of prints and no way to match them, except going through all of them one by one. And we have limited manpower. And, even if we could go through all of them, there’s no guarantee there’ll be a match in our records. And, even if there is a match, a positive latent match doesn’t guarantee a conviction.”

“Still, when we catch our Blackout Beast, we’ll have solid evidence for his arrest and conviction,” Maggie mused. “Detective, you did say serial killers—er, sequential murderers—have the same sorts of victims, the same ways of murder, and always a calling card? We thought the Ripper graffiti was his calling card—but here’s a far more personal one.”

“Glad to see you’ve been paying attention,” Collins muttered.

“Collins,” Durgin said. “You’ll check the eyeballs of the other Blackout Beast’s victims for prints, yes?” It was not a question.

“Oh, the things I do for lurve…” the shorter man grumbled, but went to pull on gloves nonetheless.

Durgin peeled off his, tossed them into a garbage bin, then scrubbed his hands with soap and water in the sink. “Good job, Miss Tiger.”

Maggie tamped down her surge of pride—she didn’t want the men to see any emotion, good or bad, in her expression. No smiles. No reactions. To exist in a man’s world, you need a face like a poker player’s.



Durgin dried his hands and picked up the notebook with the print. “And now let’s head to the Yard. Maybe we’ll get lucky and this devil’s print will match something in our books.”