The wineglass in Carolyn's apartment

The wineglass in Carolyn Polhemus’s apartment is a small, visible object that turns an image of the crime scene into a forensic lead. Dan Lipranzer notices latent prints from three fingers on the glass, and Rusty Sabich immediately asks whose they might be. The marks are not Carolyn’s, but their owner remains unidentified; the glass therefore offers a direction for inquiry without supplying an answer.

Appearance and Discovery

The glass enters the investigation through a photograph. Rusty points to the image and asks Dan Lipranzer whether the police dusted the glass table; Lipranzer confirms that they did. Looking more closely at the picture, he identifies a bar and a tall glass standing undisturbed on it. That ordinary, intact appearance is precisely what makes the detail consequential: the glass has not been described as broken or displaced, yet its surface preserves marks that can be examined as possible evidence.

Lipranzer identifies latent prints from three fingers on the glass and says they are not Carolyn’s. The distinction is important but limited. The prints establish that the glass carries impressions other than the victim’s; they do not, at this point, establish who left them, when they were deposited, or what connection their owner had to Carolyn or the crime. The object is a clue, not a conclusion.

The Search for an Identity

Rusty asks whether the prints have been identified. Lipranzer answers that the identification division estimates three weeks, citing its backlog. Rusty makes a note and presses for a faster, broader comparison: fingerprints should be checked against every known person in the county, not just against a narrow set of likely suspects. His request makes the glass a practical investigative lead, one that calls for a search across the department’s records rather than an interpretation based on appearance alone.

The delay reflects how identification works in the department. Its records preserve digit-by-digit fingerprint classifications based on points of comparison—the ridges and valleys of each fingertip, assigned numerical values. In the older system, investigators could not identify an unknown print unless a person had left impressions of all ten fingers, because the catalogue had to be searched through those existing records. Computerized searching changes that possibility: a laser reads a print and compares it with the fingerprints in memory in minutes. Yet the department does not own all the necessary equipment. Budget limits leave it borrowing components from the state police for special cases, so the speed of the technology does not translate into a swift result for this case.

An Object Caught in an Institutional Delay

Lipranzer has already asked that the comparison be rushed, but the identification division cites technical procedures and its workload. He suggests that a call from the prosecuting attorney’s office could help move the request forward. Rusty responds by asking for comparisons against every known fingerprint in the county, including those of anyone previously printed. The exchange places the glass between two kinds of uncertainty: the physical trace may be searchable in minutes, while access to the means of searching it is constrained by the department’s resources and priorities.

The conversation then broadens to other investigative records. Lipranzer asks Rusty to obtain Message Unit Detail sheets for people Carolyn called during the preceding six months, and Rusty begins drafting a grand-jury subpoena. Those telephone records are a separate line of inquiry, not a result of the glass’s fingerprints. Their appearance alongside the glass nevertheless shows the investigation accumulating different kinds of trace: a bodily impression on an everyday object, and a record of calls maintained by the telephone company. The glass is one element in this wider effort to reconstruct connections from records left behind.

Evidentiary and Narrative Significance

The wineglass matters because it makes the gap between finding a trace and knowing what it means tangible. Lipranzer can point to the prints in the photograph and distinguish them from Carolyn’s, but the identification process has not yet attached a name to them. The glass thus sharpens the investigation without resolving it: the object seems to hold information, while the institution charged with reading that information cannot promptly deliver an identity.

Its stillness also contrasts with the labor required to interpret it. The tall glass stands undisturbed in the image; around that fixed detail, investigators must check records, seek equipment, request an accelerated comparison, and decide how widely to search. Nothing in the exchange confirms that the prints belong to the killer, that they were left during the murder, or that they were ultimately identified. The glass remains a suggestive but incomplete clue, and its importance lies in both what it preserves and what the investigation has not yet been able to establish.