Trace (27 page)

    
Once a person, particularly a child, has been reduced to a tongue on a cutting board, he becomes nameless. That's the way it goes, without exception. You don't say, we worked our hands into Gilly Paulsson's throat and reflected back tissue with a scalpel and finally removed the organs of Gilly's throat and Gilly's tongue, pulled them right out of that little girl's mouth, or we stuck a needle in little Timmy's left eye and drew vitreous fluid for toxicological testing, or we sawed off the top of Mrs. Jones's skull, removed her brain and discovered a ruptured berry aneurysm, or it took two doctors to sever the mastoid muscles in Mr. Ford's jaws because he was fully rigorous, very muscular, and we couldn't pry open his mouth.

    
This is one of those moments of awareness that passes over Eise's thoughts like the shadow of the Dark Bird. That's what he calls it. If he looks up, nothing is there, just an awareness. He won't go any further with truths of this sort because when people's lives become pieces and parts and eventually end up on his slides, it's best not to look too hard for the Dark Bird. The bird's shadow is awful enough.

    
"I thought Dr. Marcus was too busy and too important to do autopsies," Kit says. "In fact, I can count on one hand the number of times I've even laid eyes on him since he was hired."

    
"Doesn't matter. He's in charge and makes the policies. He's the one who authorizes all those orders for Q-tips or their generic and cheap equivalent. As far as I'm concerned, everything's his fault."

    
"Well, I don't think he did the autopsy on the girl. Not on the tractor driver who got killed at the old building either," Kit replies. "No way he would do either one. He'd rather be in charge and boss everybody around."

    
"How you doing for 'Eise Picks'?" Eise asks her, his slender hand agile and steady with the tungsten needle.

    
He's been known to go through obsessive-compulsive spells of handcrafting his tungsten needles, which somewhat magically appear on the desks of his colleagues.

    
"I can always use another Eise Pick," Kit dubiously replies, as if she really doesn't want one, but in his fantasies, she is reticent because she doesn't want to inconvenience him. "You know what? I'm not going to permanently mount this hair." She screws the cap back on the bottle of Permount.

    
"How many you got from the sick girl?"

    
"Three," Kit replies. "It'll be just my luck DNA will decide to do something with the hairs, although they didn't seem interested last week. So I'm not going to permanently mount this one or the others. Everybody's acting weird these days. Jessie was in a scraping room when I got here. They've got all the linens in there. Apparently DNA's looking for something they must not have found the first time, and Jessie about bit my head off and all I did was ask what was going on. Something strange is going on. They already had those linens in the scraping room more than a week ago, as you and I both know. Where do you think I got these hairs from? Strange. Maybe it's the holidays. I haven't even thought about Christmas shopping."

    
She dips needle-tipped forceps into a small transparent plastic evidence bag and gently lifts out another hair. It looks five or six inches long and black and curly from where Eise sits, and he watches Kit drape it over a slide and add a drop of xylene and a cover slip, mounting a weightless, barely visible piece of evidence that was recovered from the bed linens of the same dead girl who had paint chips and strange brown-gray particles of dust in her mouth.

    
"Well, Dr. Marcus certainly isn't Dr. Scarpetta," Kit then says.

    
"Only took you half a decade to realize they aren't one and the same? Let me see. You thought Dr. Scarpetta had a complete makeover and turned into that squirrelly little old maid Chief Bozo down there in the corner office, and now you've had an aha moment and realize they're two totally different people. And you figured it out without DNA, God bless you, girl. Why, you're so smart you should star in your own TV show."

    
"You're a crazy man," Kit says, laughing so hard she leans back from the microscope, worried her evidence will blow away on gusts of her breathy guffaws.

    
"Too many years of sniffing xylene, girl. I got cancer of the personality."

    
"Oh God," she says, taking a deep breath. "My point is, you wouldn't be picking cotton fibers off your slides if Dr. Scarpetta had done the case, any of the cases. She's here, you know. She was brought in because of the sick girl, the Paulsson girl. That's the buzz."

    
"You're fooling me." Eise can't believe it.

    
"If you didn't always leave before everybody else and weren't so antisocial, maybe you would be in on a few secrets," she says.

    
"Ho Ho Ho and a bottle of rum, girl." While it is true that Eise is not one to linger in the lab beyond five
p.m.,
he is also the first scientist to arrive in the morning, rarely later than 6:15. "I would think Dr. Big Shot would be the last person called in for any reason," he says.

    
"Dr. Big Shot? Where'd that come from?"

    
"Peanut Gallery."

    
"You must not know her. People who do don't call her that." Kit places the slide on the microscope's stage. "Me? I'd call her in a heartbeat. And I wouldn't wait two weeks or even two minutes. This hair's dyed black as pitch, just like the other two. Shoot. Forget my doing anything with it. Can't see the pigment granules and might have some surface anti-frizz-type product on it, too. Bet they're going to decide on mitochondrial. Suddenly, DNA's going to send off my three precious hairs to the Almighty Bode Lab. You wait. Strange, strange. Maybe Dr. Scarpetta's figured out that poor little girl was murdered. Maybe that's what's going on."

    
"Don't mount the hairs," Eise says, and in the old days, DNA was just forensic science. Now DNA is the silver bullet, the platinum record, the superstar, and gets all the money and all the glory. Eise never offers his "Eise Picks" to anyone in DNA.

    
"Don't worry, I'm not mounting anything," Kit says, peering into her microscope. "No line of demarcation, now that's interesting. A little weird for a dyed hair. Means it didn't grow out any after it was dyed. Not even a micron."

    
She moves the slide around under the objective lens as Eise looks on, somewhat interested. "No root? Fall out or been pulled, broken, buckled, damaged by a curling iron, singed, tapered, or split distal tip? Or cut, squared, or angled? Come on girl, wake me up," he says.

    
"Definitely clean as a whistle, no root. Distal tip is cut at an angle. All three hairs are dyed black, no root, and that's weird. Both ends are cut in all three of them. Not just one hair but all three of them. Not pulled, broken, or pulled out by the root. The hairs didn't just fall out. They were cut. Now tell me why hair would be cut on both ends?"

    
"Maybe the person just came from the hairdresser and maybe some of the stray cut hair was on this person's clothing or still in his hair or had been on the rug or wherever for a while."

    
Kit is frowning. "If Dr. Scarpetta's in the building, I'd like to see her. Just say hi. I hated when she left. In my opinion, it was the second time this damn city lost the War. That damn fool Dr. Marcus. You know what? I'm not feeling too good. I woke up with a headache and my joints hurt."

    
"So maybe she's coming back to Richmond," Eise supposes. "Maybe that's really why she's here. At least when she used to send us samples, she never mislabeled them and we knew exactly where they came from. She didn't mind discussing cases, would come up here herself instead of treating us like robots at General Motors because we're not great and a mighty doctor-lawyer-Indian Chief. She didn't swab the hell out of everything if she could lift it with tape, Post-its, whatever we recommended. I guess you're right. Peanut Gallery's dead wrong."

    
"What the hell's a peanut gallery?"

    
"Don't know, really."

    
"Obscured cortical texture, totally," Kit says, peering at a magnified dyed black hair that looks as big as a dark winter tree in the circle of light. "Like someone dipped this hair in a pot of black ink. No line of demarcation, no sir, so either recently dyed or was cut off below the grown-out undyed roots."

    
She is making notes as she moves the slide around and adjusts the focus and magnification, doing her best to make a dyed hair speak.

    
It won't say much. The distinctive characteristics of the pigment in the cuticle have been obscured by dye, like an over-inked fingerprint that blots out ridge detail. Dyed, bleached, and gray hair are pretty worthless in microscopic comparison, and half the human population has dyed, bleached, gray, or permed hair. But these days in court, jurors expect a hair to announce who, what, when, where, why, and how.

    
Eise hates what the entertainment industry has done to his profession. People he meets say they want to be him, what an exciting profession he has, and it isn't true, it just isn't. He doesn't go to crime scenes or wear a gun. He never has. He doesn't get a special phone call and put on a special uniform or jumpsuit and rush out in a special all-terrain crime scene vehicle to look for fibers or fingerprints or DNA or Martians. Cops and crime scene technicians do that. Medical examiners and death investigators do that. In the old days when life was simpler and the public left forensic people alone, homicide detectives like Pete Marino drove their beat-up junkers to the scene, gathered the evidence themselves, and not only knew what to collect but what to leave.

    
Don't vacuum the whole goddamn parking lot. Don't stuff the poor woman's entire bedroom inside fifty-gallon plastic bags and bring all that shit in here. It's like someone panning for gold and bringing home the entire stream bed instead of carefully sifting through it first. A lot of the nonsense that goes on these days is laziness. But there are other problems, more insidious ones, and Eise keeps thinking that maybe he ought to retire. He has no time for research or just plain fun and is nagged by paperwork that must be perfect, just as his analysis must be perfect. He suffers from eyestrain and insomnia. Rarely is he thanked or given credit when a case is solved and the guilty person gets what he deserves. What kind of world do we live in? It has gotten worse. Yes it has.

    
"If you do run into Dr. Scarpetta," Eise remarks, "ask her about Marino. He and I used to pal around when he came down here, used to put away a few beers at the FOP lounge."

    
"He's here," Kit says. "He came with her. You know, I'm feeling a little weird, that tickle in my throat, and I'm aching. Hope I'm not getting the damn flu."

    
"He's here? Holy cow. I'm gonna call that boy right away. Well, hallelujah! So he's working on the Sick Girl too."

    
Gilly Paulsson now goes by that name, if she is referred to by a name at all. It's easier not to use a real name, assuming one can remember it. Victims become where they were found or what was done to them. The Suitcase Lady. The Sewer Lady. The Landfill Baby. The Rat Man. The Duct Tape Man. As for the real birth names of these dead people, most of the time Eise hasn't a clue. He prefers not to have a clue.

    
"If Scarpetta has any opinions about why Sick Girl has red, white, and blue paint and some other weirdo dust in her mouth, I'm listening," he says. "Apparently metal painted red, white, and blue. There's unpainted metal, too, bits of shiny metal. And something else. I don't know what the something else is." He manipulates the trace evidence on the slide, obsessively moving it around. "I'll run SEM/EDX next, see what kind of metal. Anything red, white, and blue at Sick Girl's house? Guess I'll be tracking down that boy Marino and buy him a few cool ones. Lord, I could use a few myself."

    
"Don't talk about cool ones right now," Kit says. "I'm feeling kind of sick. I know we can't catch things from swabs and tape lifts and all the rest. But sometimes I wonder when they send up all that crap from the morgue."