Trace Page 17

  “Take a load off,” the policeman dressed in black says to her with a smile that really doesn’t make him look any friendlier, but she likes the way he looks. She likes him. She doesn’t know why. She likes to look at him and she feels something when she looks at him or gets close to him. “Sit down, Mrs. Paulsson, and try to relax,” he says.

  “Did you open the window?” she asks, sitting in the chair and folding her hands in her lap.

  “I was wondering if it might have been open when you came home from the drugstore,” he replies. “When you walked in this bedroom, was the window open or shut?”

  “It gets hot in here. The heat’s hard to regulate in these old houses.” She is looking up at the policeman and the woman doctor. It doesn’t seem right to be sitting near the bed and looking up at them. She feels nervous and frightened and small as she sits looking up at them. “Gilly used to open that window all the time. It might have been open when I got home. I’m trying to remember.” Curtains stir. The white gauzy curtains flutter like ghosts in the sharp cold air. “Yes,” she says. “I think the window might have been open.”

  “Did you know the lock is broke?” the big policeman asks, standing perfectly still, his eyes on her. She can’t remember his name. What was it? Marinara or something.

  “No,” she answers, and fear is cold around her heart.

  The woman doctor walks over to the open window and shuts it with her white-gloved hands. She looks out at the backyard.

  “It’s not very pretty this time of year,” Mrs. Paulsson says as her heart thuds. “Now in the spring, you should see it.”

  “I can tell,” the woman doctor replies, and she has a way about her that Mrs. Paulsson finds fascinating but a little scary. Everything is scary now. “I love to garden. Do you?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Do you think someone came in the window?” Mrs. Paulsson asks, noticing black dust on the windowsill and around the window frame. She notices more black dust and what look like tape marks on the inside and outside of the glass.

  “I lifted some prints,” the big policeman says. “Don’t know why the cops didn’t bother, but I got some. We’ll see if they’re anything. I’m going to need to take yours for exclusionary purposes. I don’t guess the cops took your prints?”

  She shakes her head no as she stares at the window and the black dust everywhere.

  “Who lives behind your house, Mrs. Paulsson?” asks the big policeman in black. “That old house behind the fence.”

  “A woman, an elderly woman. I haven’t seen her in a while, a long while. Many years. In fact, I can’t say she still lives back there. Last time I saw anyone back there was maybe six months ago. Yes, six months ago or so, because I was picking tomatoes. I have a little vegetable garden back there by the fence, and last summer I had more tomatoes than I could shake a stick at. Someone was on the other side of the fence, just walking back there, doing what I don’t know. My impression was that whoever’s back there isn’t especially friendly. Well, I doubt it’s the woman who used to live there, who lived there eight, nine, ten years ago. She was very old. I suppose she might be dead by now.”

  “Do you know if the police might have talked to her, assuming she ain’t dead?” asks the big policeman.

  “I thought you’re the police.”

  “Not the same kind of police who’ve been here already. No, ma’am. We’re not the same as them.”

  “I see,” she says, although she doesn’t see at all. “Well, I believe the detective, Detective Brown…”

  “Browning,” says the policeman in black, and she notices that his baseball cap is tucked into the back of his pants. His head is shaved and she imagines running her hand over his smooth, shaven head.

  “He did ask me about the neighbors,” she replies. “I said the old woman lived back there or used to. I’m not sure anybody lives there now. I guess I just said that. I never hear anybody back there, hardly ever, and you can see through the cracks in the fence that the grass is overgrown.”

  “You came home from the drugstore,” the woman doctor gets back to that. “Then what? Please try to go step by step, Mrs. Paulsson.”

  “I carried things into the kitchen and then went to check on Gilly. I thought she was asleep.”

  After a pause, the lady doctor asks another question. She wants to know why Mrs. Paulsson thought her daughter was asleep, what position she was in, and the questions are confusing. Each one hurts like a cramp, like a spasm in a deep place. Why does it matter? What kind of doctor asks questions like this? She is an attractive woman in a powerful way, not a big woman but strong-looking in a midnight-blue pantsuit and midnight-blue blouse that sharpen her handsome features and set off her short blond hair. Her hands are strong but graceful and she wears no rings. Mrs. Paulsson stares at the doctor’s hands and imagines them taking care of Gilly and starts to cry again.

  “I moved her. I tried to wake her up.” She hears herself saying the same thing again and again. Why are your pajamas on the floor, Gilly? What is this? Oh Lord oh Lord!

  “Describe what you saw when you walked in,” the doctor asks the same question in a different way. “I know this is hard. Marino? Would you please get her some tissues and a glass of water?”

  Where’s Sweetie? Oh Lord, where’s Sweetie? Not in bed with you again!

  “She just looked like she was asleep,” Mrs. Paulsson hears herself say.

  “On her back? On her front? What was her position on the bed? Please try to remember. I know this is terribly hard,” the woman doctor says.

  “She slept on her side.”

  “She was on her side when you walked into the room?” the woman doctor says.

  Oh dear, Sweetie pee-peed in the bed. Sweetie? Where are you? Are you hiding under the bed, Sweetie? You were in the bed again, weren’t you? You aren’t supposed to do that! I’m going to give you away! Don’t you try to hide things from me!

  “No,” Mrs. Paulsson says, crying.

  Gilly, please wake up, oh please wake up. This can’t be! This can’t be!

  The lady doctor is squatting by her chair, looking her in the eye. She is holding her hand. The lady doctor is holding her hand and saying something.

  “No!” Mrs. Paulsson sobs uncontrollably. “She didn’t have anything on. Oh dear God! Gilly wouldn’t be lying there with nothing on. She wouldn’t even get dressed without locking her door.”

  “It’s all right,” the lady doctor is saying, and her eyes and touch are kind. There is no fear in her eyes. “Take deep breaths. Come on. Breathe deeply. There. That’s good. Slow, deep breaths.”

  “Oh Lord, am I having a heart attack?” Mrs. Paulsson blurts out in terror. “They took my little girl. She’s gone. Oh, where’s my little girl?”

  The big cop in black is back in the doorway, holding a handful of tissues and a glass of water. “Who’s they?” he asks.

  “Oh no, she didn’t die of the flu, did she? Oh no. Oh no. My baby girl. She didn’t die of the flu. They took her from me.”

  “Who’s they?” he asks. “You think more than one person had something to do with this?” He steps into the room and the lady doctor takes the water from him.

  She helps Mrs. Paulsson sip it slowly. “That’s good. Drink slowly. Slow breaths. Try to calm down. Do you have someone who can come stay with you? I don’t want you staying alone right now.”

  “Who’s they?” Her voice rises as she repeats the policeman’s question. “Who’s they?” She tries to get up from the chair but her legs won’t work. They don’t seem to belong to her anymore. “I’ll tell you who they are.” Grief turns to rage, such a terrible rage that she is afraid of it. “Those people he invited over here. Them. You ask Frank who they are. He knows.”

  22.

  IN THE TRACE EVIDENCE LAB, forensic scientist Junius Eise holds a tungsten filament in the flame of an alcohol lamp.

  He prides himself that his favorite tool-making trick has been used by master microscopists for hundreds
of years. That fact, among others, makes him a purist, a Renaissance man, a lover of science, history, beauty, and women. Gripping the short strand of stiff, fine wire with forceps, he watches the grayish metal quickly incandesce bright red and imagines that it is impassioned or enraged. He removes the wire from the flame and rolls the tip into sodium nitrite, oxidizing the tungsten and sharpening it. A dip in a petri dish of water, and the sharp-tipped wire cools with a quick hiss.

  He screws the wire into a stainless-steel needle holder, knowing that taking time out to make a tool this time was procrastination. Taking time out to make a tool meant he could take himself out of service for a moment, focus on something else, briefly regain a sense of control. He peers into the binocular lenses of his microscope. Chaos and conundrums are right where he left them, only magnified fifty times.

  “I don’t understand this,” he says to no one in particular.

  Using his new tungsten tool, he manipulates paint and glass particles recovered from the body of a man who was crushed to death by his tractor a few hours ago. One would have to be brain damaged not to know that the chief medical examiner worries that the man’s family is going to sue somebody, otherwise trace evidence would not be relevant in an accidental death, a careless one at that. The problem is, if you look, you might find something, and what Eise has found doesn’t make sense. At times like this he remembers he is sixty-three, could have retired two years ago, and has repeatedly refused promotion to Trace Evidence Section Chief because there is no place he would rather be than inside a microscope. His idea of fulfillment is disconnected from wrestling with budgets and personnel problems, and his relationship with the chief medical examiner is the worst it has ever been.

  In the polarized light of the microscope, he uses his new tungsten tool to manipulate paint and metal particles on a dry glass slide. They are mixed with other debris, some sort of dust that is gray-brown and strange, unlike anything he has seen before with one very significant exception. He saw this same sort of trace evidence two weeks ago in a completely unrelated case, and he assumes that the sudden, mysterious death of a fourteen-year-old girl is unrelated to the death of a tractor driver.

  Eise scarcely blinks, his upper body tense. The chips of paint, about the size of dandruff, are red, white, and blue. They aren’t automotive, not from a tractor, that’s for sure, not that he would expect them to be automotive in the accidental death of a tractor driver named Theodore Whitby. The paint chips and the strange gray-brown dust were adhering to a gash on his face. Similar if not identical paint chips and a similar if not identical strange gray-brown dust were found on the inside of the fourteen-year-old girl’s mouth, mainly on her tongue. The dust bothers Eise the most. It is a very odd dust. He has never seen dust like this dust. Its shape is irregular and crusty, like dried mud, but it isn’t mud. This dust has fissures and blisters and smooth areas and thin transparent edges like the surface of a parched planet. Some particles have holes in them.

  “What the hell is this?” he says. “I don’t know what this is. How can this same weird stuff be in two cases? They can’t be related. I don’t know what’s happened here.”

  He reaches for a pair of needle-tip tweezers and carefully removes several cotton fibers from the particles on the slide. Light passes through lenses and a congregation of magnified fibers look like snippets of bent white thread.

  “You know how much I hate cotton swabs?” he asks the virtually empty laboratory. “You know what a pain in the ass cotton swabs are?” he asks the large angular area of black countertops, chemical hoods, workstations, and dozens of microscopes and all of the glass, metal, and chemical accoutrements that they demand.

  Most of the lab’s workers aren’t at their work stations but are in other labs on this floor, preoccupied with atomic absorption, gas chromatography and mass spectroscopy, x-ray diffraction, the Fourier Transform Infrared Spectrophotometer, the scanning electron microscope or SEM/Energy Dispersive X-ray Spectrometer, and other instruments. In a world of endless backlogs and little money, scientists grab what they can, jumping onto instruments as if they are horses and riding the life out of them.

  “Everybody knows how much you hate cotton swabs,” remarks Kit Thompson, Eise’s nearest neighbor at the moment.

  “I could make a giant quilt out of all the cotton fibers I’ve collected in my short life,” he says.

  “I wish you would. I’ve been waiting to see one of your giant quilts,” she replies.

  Eise grips another fiber. They’re not easy to catch. When he moves the tweezers or tungsten needle, just the slightest fan of air moves the fiber. He readjusts the focus and bumps down the magnification to 40X, sharpening his depth of focus. He barely breathes as he stares into the bright circle of light, trying to find the clues it holds. What law of physics dictates that when a disturbance of air dislodges a fiber, it moves away from you as if it is alive and on the lam? Why doesn’t the fiber drift closer to captivity?

  He backs off the objective lens several millimeters, and the tips of his needle-sharp tweezers hugely invade the field of view. The circle of light reminds him of a brightly lit circus ring, even after all he’s been through. For an instant he sees trick elephants and clowns in a light so bright it hurts the eyes. He remembers sitting in wooden bleachers and watching big pink puffs of cotton candy float by. He gently grabs another cotton fiber and airlifts it off the slide. He unceremoniously shakes it loose inside a small transparent plastic bag filled with other spidery cotton debris that most certainly is Q-tip-type contaminants and of no evidentiary value.

  Dr. Marcus is the worst litterbug of all. What the hell is wrong with that man? Eise has sent him numerous memos insisting that his staff tape-lift trace evidence whenever possible, and please, please, don’t use cotton-tipped swabs because they have zillions of fibers that are lighter than angel kisses and get all tangled up with the evidence.

  Like white Angora cat hair on black velvet pants, he wrote Dr. Marcus several months back. Like picking pepper out of your mashed potatoes. Like spooning the creamer back out of your coffee. And other lame analogies and exaggerations.

  “Last week I sent him two rolls of low-tack tape,” Eise is saying. “And another package of Post-its, reminding him that low-tack adhesives are perfect for pulling hairs and fibers off things because they don’t break or distort them or shed cotton fibers all over the ranch. Or, not to mention, interfere with x-ray diffraction and other results. So we’re not just being finicky when we sit here picking them out of a sample all the livelong day.”

  Kit frowns at him as she unscrews the cap from a bottle of Permount. “Picking pepper out of mashed potatoes? You sent Post-its to Dr. Marcus?”

  When Eise gets impassioned, he says exactly what he thinks. He isn’t always aware, and probably doesn’t really care, that what is inside his head is also escaping from his lips and audible to all. “My point,” he says, “is when Marcus or whoever checked the inside of that little girl’s mouth, he swabbed it thoroughly with those cotton-tip swabs. Now, he didn’t need to do that with the tongue. He cut the tongue out, now didn’t he? Had it lying right there on the cutting board and could plainly see there’s some sort of residue on it. He could have used a tape lift, but he kept on with the Q-tips, and all I do these days is pick out cotton fibers.”

  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.
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br />   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.”