Without Fail

inserted unfolded. The flap gum was wetted with faucet water. No saliva, no DNA. No fingerprints on the metal closure. There were five sets of prints on the envelope itself. Three of them were postal workers. Their prints are on file as government workers. It’s a condition of their employment. The fourth was the Senate mail handler who passed it on to us. And the fifth was our agent who opened it.”
    Neagley nodded. “So forget the envelope. Except inasmuch as the faucet water was pretty thoughtful. This guy’s a reader, keeps up with the times.”
    “What about the letter itself?” Reacher asked.
    Froelich picked up the photograph and tilted it toward the room light.
    “Very weird,” she said. “The FBI lab says the paper was made by the Georgia-Pacific company, their high-bright, twenty-four-pound heavyweight, smooth finish, acid-free laser stock, standard eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch letter size. Georgia-Pacific is the third-largest supplier into the office market. They sell hundreds of tons a week. So a single sheet is completely untraceable. But it’s a buck or two more expensive per ream than basic paper, so that might mean something. Or it might not.”
    “What about the printing?”
    “It’s a Hewlett-Packard laser. They can tell by the toner chemistry. Can’t tell which model, because all their black-and-white lasers use the same basic toner powder. The typeface is Times New Roman, from Microsoft Works 4.5 for Windows 95, fourteen point, printed bold.”
    “They can narrow it down to a single computer program?”
    Froelich nodded. “They’ve got a guy who specializes in that. Typefaces tend to change very subtly between different word processors. The software writers fiddle with the kerning, which is the spacing between individual letters, as opposed to the spacing between words. If you look long enough, you can kind of sense it. Then you can measure it and identify the program. But it doesn’t help us much. There must be a million zillion PCs out there with Works 4.5 bundled in.”
    “No prints, I guess,” Neagley said.
    “Well, this is where it gets weird,” Froelich answered. She moved the coffee tray an inch and laid the photograph flat. Pointed to the top edge. “Right here on the actual edge we’ve got microscopic traces of talcum dust.” Then she pointed to a spot an inch below the top edge. “And here we’ve got two definite smudges of talcum dust, one on the back, one on the front.”
    “Latex gloves,” Neagley said.
    “Exactly,” Froelich said. “Disposable latex gloves, like a doctor’s or a dentist’s. They come in boxes of fifty or a hundred pairs. Talcum powder inside the gloves, to help them slip on. But there’s always some loose talcum in the box, so it transfers from the outside of the glove, too. The dust on the top edge is baked, but the smudges aren’t.”
    “OK,” Neagley said. “So the guy puts on his gloves, breaks open a new ream of paper, fans it out so it won’t jam, which puts talcum dust on the top edge where he flips it, then he loads the printer, prints out his message, whereby he bakes the dust.”
    “Because a laser printer uses heat,” Froelich said. “The toner powder is attracted to the paper by an electrostatic charge in the shape of the required letters, and then a heater bakes it into place permanently. Somewhere around two hundred degrees, I think, momentarily.”
    Neagley leaned close. “Then he lifts the paper out of the output tray by clamping it between his finger and thumb, which accounts for the smudges front and back near the top, which aren’t baked because it’s after the heat treatment. And you know what? This is a home office, not a work office.”
    “Why?”
    “The front and back finger-clamping thing means the paper is coming out of the printer vertically. Popping up, like a toaster. If it was feeding out flat the marks would be different. There would be a smear on the front where he slides it. Less of a mark on the back. And the only Hewlett-Packard lasers that feed the paper vertically are the little ones. Home-office things. I’ve got one myself. It’s too slow to use high-volume. And the toner cartridge only lasts twenty-five hundred pages. Strictly amateur. So this guy did this in his den at home.”
    Froelich nodded. “Stands to reason, I guess. He’s going to look a little strange using latex gloves in front of other people in an office.”
    Neagley smiled, like she was making progress. “OK,