The Tsunami File Read Online Free PDF Page A

appearance of limbs and hands, but this was not clear.
    More troubling still was that when Smith returned to the file another time, some of the fingerprints themselves were gone. The Phuket pathology teams, in lifting prints from the dead, used rectangular gummed paper labels pressed against the fingertips. The labels were then stuck onto the postmortem forms for inclusion in the victim’s file. Three of these labels, Smith saw when he returned to the file one day, were missing, pulled away from the page in question. Seven prints remained, none of those usable at all. The three that were gone, Smith was certain he recalled, had been poor but of possible, just possible, use if good AM marks could be obtained and if someone like him applied all his skills and the best AFIS electronic enhancement methods.
    The last straw, for Smith, was when the file itself disappeared altogether. He was willing to acknowledge that the filing system set up in Phuket was far from ideal. In the chaotic early days just after the disaster there was no real filing system at all. Gradually, as DVI teams and Interpol arrived on the scene and agreed on procedures and as Thai clerical staff arrived from Bangkok and as cabinets and stationery and tags were brought into use, a system of sorts was established.
    Files could be borrowed by investigators such as himself and were to be returned after use to a central storage area. Officially, this was to be at the end of each working day but many on the police teams kept difficult files, or incomplete identifications, on their desks for days at time. The file of the man with the Deutschland tattoo was one such item that Smith himself had frequently kept on his desk overnight . No, perhaps the missing file folder was not in itself the last straw. The last straw was when Smith, annoyed that the paper file had disappeared, opened up the AFIS system to retrieve the scanned electronic copy of the prints that he had used previously to seek possible matches from the growing bank of antemortem fingerprint data. He could not immediately remember the dead man’s body bag number, of course, but he found that after some searching in his notebook. He also remembered approximately what week he had first implemented the AFIS search and he was confident he would recognize the exceptionally poor quality prints, especially because the set had shown only one or two faint whorls on three fingers and the other seven were mere shadows, of no forensic use at all.
    He flicked through series after series of AFIS images that he and others had entered into the system around the dates in question. He saw evidence of his many searches, his system interrogations, all with body bag code numbers and other details intact. He saw many, many fingerprints pass before his eyes on the computer screen. But of the record of his search for matches to the Deutschland prints, and of the scanned versions of the missing original prints themselves, and of any reference whatsoever to body bag PM68-TA0386, he found no trace at all. It was as if he had never created such a search request. It was as if an electronic search had never taken place. It was as if fingerprints had never been lifted from the Deutschland corpse at all.
    Jonah Smith was a fingerprint man. And he hardly knew himself in Thailand. But one thing that would never change, despite his new habits and new style and his new colleagues and his new Spanish lover, was his dogged determination to do things right, to do his job as he had always done it—methodically, thoroughly, completely. He was not a man to lose a file or to compromise an investigation or to allow a possible identification, any possible identification, to remain unresolved.
    However, the real problem before him this time, the fundamental question, Smith thought over and over again—as he rode his bike to work or as he sat on his balcony at sunset looking at islands or as he lay awake beside Conchi on the nights when