Mistress of Justice

initials. She should—
    “Can I help you?” a man’s voice snapped.
    Taylor forced herself not to jump. She kept her finger on the
Reporter
to mark her spot and looked up slowly.
    A young man she didn’t recognize stood in the doorway. Blond, scrubbed, chubby. And peeved.
    “Ralph had this
Reporter
checked out from the library,” she said, nodding at the book. “I needed to look up a case.” Taking the offensive, she asked bluntly, “Who’re you?”
    “Me? I’m Todd Stanton. I work for Mr. Dudley.” He squinted. “Who are
you?”
    “Taylor Lockwood. A paralegal.” She forced indignation into her voice.
    “A paralegal.” His tone said, Oh, well, that doesn’t really count. “Does Mr. Dudley know you’re here?”
    “No.”
    “If you need anything, you can ask me for it. Mr. Dudley doesn’t like”—he sought the least disparaging term—“anyone in his office when he’s not here.”
    “Ah,” Taylor said and then turned back to the book and slowly finished reading a long paragraph.
    Stanton shifted then said with irritation, “Excuse me but—”
    Taylor closed the book softly. “Hey,” she said, offering a concerned glance. “Don’t sweat it. You’re excused.” And walked past him back into the deserted corridor.

CHAPTER EIGHT
     
    “Dactyloscopy,” the man said. “Repeat after me: dactyloscopy.”
    Taylor did.
    More or less.
    “Good,” the man said. “Now you know the first thing about fingerprinting. It’s called dactyloscopy. The second is that it is a royal pain in the butt.”
    She sat in the office of John Silbert Hemming. His card explained that he was a vice president in the corporate security department at Manhattan Allied Security, Inc.
    The man, in his mid-thirties, had been recommended by a friend from the music world who did word processing for Allied Security to support his addiction to the saxophone.
    Taylor had spent most of the day at Hubbard, White, poring over records of the
New Amsterdam Bank v. Hanover & Stiver
case, trying to find a reference to anyone who might have shown unusual interest in the promissory note or who’d requested files on the deal when there didn’t seem to be a reason for them to do so.
    But after nearly eight hours of mind-numbing legal babble Taylor found not a shred of evidence to suggest that Ralph Dudley or Thom Sebastian—or anyone else—was the thief.
    She’d decided to give up on the subtle approach and try a more traditional tack, à la
Kojak
or
Rockford Files
.
    Hence, the tall shamus she was now sitting across from.
    When Hemming had come to meet her in the reception area she’d blinked and looked up. He was six feet ten. His height had led, he had explained on their way back to his office, to his becoming a backroom security man—the company technical and forensic expert.
    “You’ve got to be unobstrusive in private detective work. A lot of what we do is surveillance, you know.”
    She said, “Tailing.”
    “Pardon?”
    “Don’t you say ‘tailing’? You know, like you tail somebody?”
    “Hmmm, no, we say say ‘surveillance.’ ”
    “Oh.”
    “If you stand out like me that’s not so good. When we recruit we have a space on our evaluation form—‘Is subject unobtrusive?’ We mean ‘boring.’ ”
    His hair was tawny and unruly and Taylor’s impression of Hemming was that he was a huge little boy. He had eyes that seemed perpetually amused and that belied a face that was dramatically long (what else could it be, given that it sat atop a body like his?). Despite this quirky appearance there was something rather appealing about him.
    Now, John Silbert Hemming was aiming a startlingly long finger at her and saying, “I hope you mean that, about wanting to know everything. Because there’s a lot, and here it comes. Let’s start with: What
are
fingerprints?”
    “Uh—”
    “I know. You paid the money, I’ve got the answers. But I like people to participate. I like interaction. Time’s up. No idea? I’d suggest you avoid
Jeopardy!
Now: Fingerprints are the impressions left by the papillary ridges of the fingers and thumb, primarily in perspiration. Also called frictionridges. There are no sebaceous glands in the fingertips themselves but people sometimes leave fingerprints in human oils picked up elsewhere on the body. Yes, in answer to the first most-often-asked question, they are all different. Even more different than snowflakes, I can say safely, because for hundreds of years people have