“We got some grants, you know. One of these days, I want to move us into ultraviolet imaging. I can’t even tell you what I could do with cyanoacrylate,” he went on about Super Glue, which reacted to components in human perspiration and was excellent for developing fingerprints difficult to see with the unaided eye.

“Well, good luck,” I said, because money was always tight no matter who was in office.

Repositioning the photograph again, he placed a blue filter over the camera lens, and dilated the lighter pixel elements, brightening the image. He enhanced horizontal details, removing vertical ones. Two torsos were now side by side. Shadows appeared, gruesome details sharper and in contrast.

“You can see the bony ends.” I pointed. “Left leg severed just proximal to the lesser trochanter. Right leg”—I moved my finger on the screen—“about an inch lower, right through the shaft.”

“I wish I could correct the camera angle, the perspective distortion,” he muttered, talking to himself, which he often did. “But I don’t know the measurements of anything. Too bad whoever took this didn’t include a nice little ruler as a scale.”

“Then I would really worry about who we were dealing with,” I commented.

“That’s all we need. A killer who’s like us.” He defined the edges, and readjusted the positions of the photographs one more time. “Let’s see what happens if I superimpose them.”

He did, and the overlay was amazing, bone ends and even the ragged flesh around the severed neck, identical.

“That does it for me,” I announced.

“No question about it in my mind,” he agreed. “Let’s print this out.”

He clicked the mouse and the laser printer hummed on.

Removing the photographs from the scanner, he replaced them with the one of the feet and hands, moving it around until it was perfectly centered. As he began to enlarge images, the sight became even more grotesque, blood staining the sheet bright red, as if it had just been spilled. The killer had neatly lined up feet like a pair of shoes, hands side by side like gloves.

“He should have turned them palm down,” Vander said. “I wonder why he didn’t?”

Using spatial filtering to retain important details, he began eliminating interference, such as the blood and the texture of the blue table cover.

“Can you get any ridge detail?” I asked, leaning so close, I could smell his spicy aftershave.

“I think I can,” he said.

His voice was suddenly cheerful, for there was nothing he liked better than reading the hieroglyphics of fingers and feet. Beneath his gentle, distracted demeanor was a man who had sent thousands of people to the penitentiary, and dozens to the electric chair. He enlarged the photograph and assigned arbitrary colors to various intensities of gray, so we could see them better. Thumbs were small and pale like old parchment. There were ridges.

“The other fingers aren’t going to work,” he said, staring, as if in a trance. “They’re too curled for me to see. But thumbs look pretty darn good. Let’s capture this.” Clicking into a menu, he saved the image on the computer’s hard disk. “I’m going to want to work on this for a while.”