Part Eight: The Print
The physical evidence that broke the case open was not sophisticated.
On the outer surface of the black plastic sheeting, on the underside of one folded corner, was a partial print from a latex glove. Not a fingerprint — gloved hands typically left nothing — but a glove print, the specific pattern of the material’s surface texture combined with the particular pressure of the grip that had folded and sealed the edge.
Glove prints were not standard forensic evidence. They were more limited than fingerprints, not searchable in the same way, not individually identifying in the manner that fingerprints were. But they were useful in a different way: they could confirm or exclude, they could link a specific glove to a specific print, and they could, when combined with other circumstantial evidence, construct a chain.
The chain was built over eleven weeks.
Spokój i Godność, the fake funeral company, led to a registered address that was a mail forwarding service, which led to a name that was false, which led to a payment trace that was partly in cash and partly in electronic transfers that had been carefully routed. The routing was careful but not perfect — the investigator assigned to the financial tracking, a woman named Inspector Halina Czerwińska who had specialized in money movement for sixteen years, found a single junction point where the layering had been done in haste, and that junction pointed toward a specific account and a specific entity.
That entity had a connection to Horyzont Development that was two degrees removed and required a particular willingness to follow the thread.
Czerwińska followed it.
The glove print connected, eventually, to a supplier of industrial materials — including specific grades of chemical preservative and specific grades of latex glove — who had made a delivery to a warehouse in Praga-Południe six weeks before Marta’s funeral. The warehouse was not registered to anyone connected to Horyzont directly. But the man who had signed for the delivery was, and his signature was in a ledger, and the ledger had not been destroyed because the warehouse’s operators had not anticipated that the ledger would be relevant.
The case resulted in seven arrests.
Two of those arrested were officers of Horyzont Development. One was the intermediary who had placed the coffin order. Two were connected to the physical commission of Słowik’s death. One was the individual within the CBA’s administration who had provided early warning. The seventh was the owner of Spokój i Godność, who had believed, when he accepted the arrangement, that the term technical delivery had described something other than what it was, and who was partially believed on this point and partially not.
