Well, now Beaufort felt like a man who’d been sitting for a long time underneath a hundred-pound pillow, heavy and suffocating. And now it was gone. One of the things that had preyed on his mind all those decades. Gone. They never took your palm print, just your fingertips. They only had his fingerprints on file. Even his voice felt lighter when he said, “Too bad. No way you can match it to anyone, right?”

“Sure we can,” Meadows said. “But not necessarily in the way you’re thinking. Even at the time it helped exclude about sixty people who didn’t match to it. Now fingerprints, that would be a little easier, but…”

Beaufort didn’t much care about the “buts” of it, and he stopped listening to Meadows while thinking about how the colors in the room were a little brighter and even his Bud tasted a little more beery than it had before. He picked up the bottle with three fingers around the neck and thought of the unlikelihood of anything catching his palm print. His palm print! Shit!

Meadows couldn’t tell he hadn’t been paying attention. “… still adding prints to the IAFIS database, but there are millions of them. Just think, two million people in prison right this minute, and that doesn’t count the convicted felons who have come and gone over the past fifty years. Then if you add in the prints taken upon the arrest of a suspect, it’s like a needle in a haystack, see what I mean?”

“Yeah, I see,” Beaufort said. “Funny how this thing that happened so long ago, people are still interested.”

Meadows took a package of unfiltered Camels out of his back pocket, and offered, “Cigarette?”

“No thanks, I’m trying to quit,” Beaufort said when he was finally able to speak, yearning with all his soul to wrap his lips around a cancer stick. He wished he hadn’t left his antacid tablets back in his room.

Meadows shook a cigarette out of the package and lit it with the flick of his Bic.

“I didn’t think that was legal anymore,” Beaufort said, lip twitching as he watched. Meadows being a smoker himself wouldn’t be able to smell it on Beaufort, but just to be on the safe side he kept his nicotine-stained fingers snug around his beer bottle.

Meadows inhaled luxuriously and blew the smoke in Beaufort’s direction. “Nobody but cops frequent this place, mostly. If anyone complains I just put it out,” he said.

Beaufort nodded like he knew that. “What’s your next move?”