I am not a police investigator or lawyer, but those are what I understand as a layman to be the uses of fingerprints in practice.

Sorry, I guess I just read your phrasing to have more authoritative intent than you were going for. As I (also not a lawyer) understand it, there's nothing in particular that limits how intermediate/circumstantial pieces of evidence can be used/combined to find more evidence as long as each piece of evidence in the chain was acquired legally.