Trace Read online

  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. 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 wei
rdo 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.”

  “Nope. All those little bacteria are as dead as doornails when they get to us,” Eise says, looking up at her. “You look at ’em close enough, they all got on teeny-weeny toe tags. You look pale, girl.” He hates to encourage her sudden bout of illness. It’s lonely up here when Kit isn’t around, but she doesn’t feel good. It’s obvious. It’s not right of him to pretend otherwise. “Why don’t you take a break, girl? Did you get a flu shot? They ran out by the time I got around to it.”

  “Me too. Couldn’t get one anywhere,” she says, getting up from her chair. “I think I’ll go make some hot tea.”

  23.

  LUCY DOES NOT LIKE to trust other people to do her work. As much as she relies on Rudy, she doesn’t trust him with her work, not these days, because of Henri and the way he feels about her. Lucy looks at the printed results from the IAFIS search by herself while she sits in her office, headphones on, skipping through banal recordings of her neighbor Kate’s banal telephone conversations. It is early Thursday morning.

  Late yesterday, Kate called her back. She left a message on Lucy’s cell phone. “Hugs and kisses for the tickets,” and “Who is the pool lady? Someone famous?” Lucy does have a pool lady and she is nobody famous. She is a brunette in her fifties and looks much too small to use a skimmer, and she’s not a movie star and she’s not a beast. Lucy’s bad luck holds strong with IAFIS, which returned no good candidates, meaning the automated search came up empty-handed. Matching latent prints to latent prints, especially when some of the prints are partial ones, is a crapshoot.

  Each of a person’s ten fingerprints is unique. For example, a person’s left thumbprint does not match his right thumbprint. With no ten-print card on file, IAFIS could only get a hit on unknown latents if the perpetrator left a latent print of his right thumb at one crime scene and a latent of the same thumb at another crime scene, and both latents were entered into IAFIS, and both latents were either complete prints or just so happened to include the same friction ridge characteristics in each print.

  A manual or visual comparison of the latent prints tells another story, however, and here Lucy’s luck gets a little better. Latent partial prints she recovered from the drawing of the eye do match some of the partial prints she recovered from the bedroom after Henri was attacked. This doesn’t surprise Lucy, but she is happy for the verification. The beast who entered her house is the same beast who left the drawing of the eye, and the same beast also scratched her black Ferrari, although no print was recovered from the car. But how many beasts go around drawing eyes? So he did it, although none of these matches tell Lucy who he is. All she knows is that the same beast is causing all this trouble, and he does not have a ten-print card on file in IAFIS or anywhere else, it seems, and he continues to stalk Henri and must not know that she is far away from here. Or maybe he assumes Henri is coming back or at least hears about his latest exploits.

  In the beast’s mind, if Henri at least knows he taped a drawing on the door, then Henri is frightened and upset again and maybe she will never come back. What matters to the beast is that he overpower her. That is what stalking is all about. It is an overpowering of another person. In a sense, the stalker takes his victim hostage without ever laying a finger on her or in some cases ever meeting her. As far as Lucy knows, the beast has never met Henri. As far as Lucy knows. What does she know, really? Not a hell of a lot.

  She flips through a printout from a different computer search she ran last night, and she deliberates over whether to call her aunt. It has been a while since Lucy called Scarpetta, and there is no good excuse, although Lucy has made plenty of excuses. She and her aunt both spend much of their time in South Florida, not even an hour from each other. Scarpetta moved from Del Ray to Los Olas last summer, and Lucy has visited her new home only once, and that was months ago. The more time that has passed, the harder it is to call her. Unspoken questions will hover between them and it will be awkward, but Lucy decides it isn’t right if she doesn’t call her under the circumstances. So she does.

  “This is your wake-up call,” she says when her aunt picks up.

  “If that’s the best you can do, you won’t fool anyone,” Scarpetta replies.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You don’t sound like the front desk and I didn’t ask for a wake-up call. How are you? And where are you?”

  “Still in Florida,” Lucy says.

  “Still? As in maybe you’re leaving again?”

  “I don’t know. Probably.”

  “Where to?”

  “I’m not sure,” Lucy says.

  “Okay. What are you working on?”

  “A stalking case,” Lucy replies.

  “Those are very hard.”

  “No kidding. This one especially. But I can’t talk about “You never can.”

  “You don’t talk about your cases,” Lucy says.

  “Usually not.”

  “So then what else is new?”

  “Not a thing. When am I going to see you? I haven’t seen you since September.”

  “I know. What have you been doing in the big bad city of Richmond?” Lucy asks. “What are they fighting over up there these days? Any new monuments? Maybe the latest artwork on the flood wall?”

  “I’ve been trying to figure out what’s going on with the death of this girl. Last night I was supposed to have dinner with Dr. Fielding. You remember him.”

  “Oh sure. How is he? I didn’t know he was still there.”

  “Not so good,” Scarpetta replies.

  “Remember when he used to take me to his gym and we’d lift weights together?”

  “He doesn’t go to the gym anymore.”

  “Damn. I’m shocked. Jack not go to the gym? That’s like…Well, I don’t know what it’s like. It’s not like anything, I guess. I’m shocked beyond words. See what happens when you leave? Everything and everybody fall apart.”

  “You won’t be flattering me this morning. I’m not in a very good mood,” Scarpetta replies.

  Lucy feels a twinge of guilt. It is her fault Scarpetta isn’t in Aspen.

  “Have you talked to Benton?” Lucy asks casually.

  “He’s busy working.”

  “That doesn’t mean you can’t call him.” Guilt grips Lucy’s stomach hard.

  “Right now it does mean that.”

  “He told you not to call him?” Lucy imagines Henri in Benton’s town home. She would eavesdrop. Yes, she would, and Lucy feels sick with guilt and anxiety.

  “I got to Jack’s house last night and he didn’t answer the door.” Scarpetta changes the subject. “I have this funny feeling he was home. But he didn’t come to the door.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I left. Maybe he forgot. Certainly, he’s got his share of stress. Definitely, he’s preoccupied.”

  “That’s not what this is about. He probably didn’t want to see you. Maybe it’s too late for him to see you. Maybe everything’s too screwed up. I took it upon myself to do a little background check on Dr. Joel Marcus,” Lucy then says. “I know you didn’t ask me to. But you probably wouldn’t have asked, am I right?”

  Scarpetta doesn’t answer.

  “Look, he probably knows a hell of a lot about you, Aunt Kay. You may as well know something about him,” she says, and sh
e is stung. She can’t help the way she feels, and she is angry and hurt.

  “All right,” Scarpetta says. “I don’t feel this is necessarily the right thing to do, but you may as well tell me. I’d be the first to say I’m not having an easy time working with him.”

  “What interests me most,” Lucy says, feeling a little better, “is how little there is on him. This guy’s got no life. He was born in Charlottesville, father was a public school teacher, mother died in an automobile accident in 1965, went to University of Virginia for undergrad and medical school, so he’s from Virginia and trained there but he never worked in the Virginia medical examiner system until he was appointed chief four months ago.”

  “I could tell you he never worked in the Virginia medical examiner system before last summer,” Scarpetta replies. “You didn’t need to launch some expensive background check or hack into the Pentagon or whatever you did for me to know that. I’m not sure I should be listening to this.”

  “His being appointed chief, by the way,” Lucy says, “is totally bizarre, makes no sense. He was a private pathologist in some little hospital in Maryland for a while, and he didn’t do a forensic fellowship or pass his boards until he was in his early forties and, by the way, he flunked his boards the first time he took them.”

  “Where did he do his fellowship?”

  “Oklahoma City,” Lucy replies.

  “I’m not sure I should be listening to this.”