The lightening of her mood didn’t last one flight of stairs, and by the time she reached the trace evidence lab, she could feel the wrinkle forming between her eyebrows. Don spotted it too. “What are you looking so glum about?”
She perched on a task chair, hoping the hard rubber seat would massage out the imprint on her butt left by the ammo box handle, and rolled a few feet closer to him. “Jillian Perry.”
“The suicide-by-freezing?”
“Alleged suicide. Maybe accidental. Maybe homicide. I don’t know.”
He unwrapped a sterile, disposable scalpel and used it to cut a tiny square from a swab. The white cotton had barely been stained. “You know, you give me swabs for DNA analysis, you could at least make sure they have some DNA on them first.”
“That’s from the straps of the bra used to strangle Sarah Taylor. No blood, sorry. I’m hoping for some skin cells from the killer’s hands.”
“This was her bra,” he stated.
“Yep.”
“Which she wore right up against her skin.”
“Hey, I don’t make the circumstances, I just react to them. Sure, you’ll probably find a mixture, but the other half of it will most likely be male and then you can do Y-STRs.” She rested her chin on one hand.
“Which we don’t have a database of yet.” Y-STRs were the target strands on the Y chromosome used for DNA testing. They were useful for separating male-female mixtures of the same type of cells, but the results hadn’t been compiled into a database for years and years, as with the older PCR and STR analyses. They would need a suspect to compare to any Y-STRs found, and so far the cops didn’t have one.
“It can’t be that hard. They do it on TV all the time.”
He dropped the tuft of cotton into a microtube, squeezed the flip cap shut, and wrote a number on it with a thin Sharpie marker. “Did your Jillian Perry have any signs of violence?”
“Not a one.”
“Well then.”
Theresa sat up and buttoned her lab coat. “Yeah. I should probably just write it up and forget about it.”
“You probably should.”
“Yeah.”
“But you’re not going to.”
“No one can figure out what she died of. How often does that happen?”
“Lots of times. Heart attacks, SIDS…often there’s no obvious pathology.”
“It’s bugging Christine too.”
He folded the shirt back into its original packaging and pulled out the red evidence tape. “Oh, boy. You and Christine together. Jillian Perry’s case will remain open for the next hundred years.”
She watched him fill his row of microtubes, using a repeater pipette to dispense a reagent to break down the cells and release the DNA. “Don, do you like video games?”
He looked askance at her, but, as always, rolled with her shifts of mind. “They kept me sane during board exams. Why?”
“Jillian Perry’s husband has a game called Polizei. I mean, he created it, owns it, sells it, whatever you call it.”
“The guy who made that lives in Cleveland? I didn’t know that.”
“You’ve played it?”
“I never got all the way through. I get stuck at the banquet hall every time. At first you think these army-guard-looking guys are there to protect you, but once you close the doors they turn on you because they’re actually vampires, and-”
“Whoa. I’m not going to be playing it, thanks.”
“-it’s pretty cool,” he finished after gesturing with the pipette.
“Could I borrow it?”
“I thought you weren’t going to be playing it.”
“I’ll have Rachael handle the shooting and finding the secret passageways. How popular is this game?”
“It’s big. And getting bigger every day. If you’re a teenager and you’ve never heard of it, you’ll probably get beat up at school.”
“What a lovely analogy. So the guy who makes it must be pretty rich.”
“And getting richer.” He finished placing microtubes, one by one, into the incubator. “Why?”
“It kind of knocks out money as a motive.”
“Motive for what?”
“The perfect murder, apparently. One that doesn’t seem to be a murder, and probably isn’t.”
“You’re not making a lot of sense.”
“I know. Tell me more about this game. I promise not to interrupt you this time.”
“I’d love to, but it’s time for lunch and I’m supposed to meet Janelle for a pizza. Want to join us?”
“No, thanks. I’ve got some samples from the clothing that I want to run through the FTIR.”
He slipped a timer into the pocket of his lab coat to remind him of when the DNA samples would be ready to come out of the incubator and stood up. Then he added, without looking at her, “It’s nice to see you semi-obsessing over a case again. But I wouldn’t let Leo catch you after you stuck him with that defense expert’s visit on Friday.”
“Catch me doing what?”
“Breathing.”
She watched him leave. His current girlfriend worked at the Rainbow and Babies & Children’s Hospital next door, and the attached medical school had a food court. Theresa felt a twinge of guilt at not being able to recall the last time she’d accompanied him to lunch; she usually liked to meet his girlfriends. Not one had yet lived up to her standards, any more than had Rachael’s boyfriends. She wanted perfection for the people she cared about, and she cared about Don.
She sat in front of the stereomicroscope and opened the envelope of the tapings she’d collected at the scene from Jillian Perry’s clothing. A second envelope held the tapings she’d collected from the clothing after it had been removed. The stereomicroscope functioned as a very powerful magnifying glass, and the squiggles of color caught in the adhesive turned into hairs and fibers, pieces of leaves, and even one tiny metallic sphere.
The surface of the acrylic aqua sweatshirt had given up, naturally enough, a number of aqua fibers, and also some pink ones, most likely from the polo shirt. Dark blue cotton fibers probably belonged to the jeans, but one dark, smooth fiber lacked the irregular convolutions of cotton. Theresa removed it, cleaned any residue of tape adhesive with xylene, and mounted it on a glass slide. Then she took the housekeeping step of mounting fibers from every item of clothing Jillian Perry had worn on her body. All this took some time, but it had to be done. Evidence meant nothing without a standard to compare it to.
Using the comparison microscope, which transmitted light through an item instead of shining a light onto an item the way the stereomicroscope did, Theresa could magnify the fibers up to forty times. She could even cheat and put the tapings directly on the stage to observe the fibers in transmitted light without mounting them on glass slides first-the quality lacked, but it was good enough for a quick elimination. She took the sphere over to the toxicology department and gave it to Oliver. He had gone into his usual charade of refusing to waste the mass spectrometer’s time on it, as if the large machine had a busy social calendar, but after five minute of goading he relented and said he would get to it when he had time. Oliver also gave her the distinct impression that this condition would not occur in any sort of timely manner.
Over the next hour or so, between the microscope and the infrared spectrometer, she learned that the aqua fibers belonged to the aqua sweatshirt-or rather, in the correct parlance, were consistent with having originated from the aqua sweatshirt. She could never prove they did, since there could easily be two aqua sweatshirts floating around Cleveland’s west side. Some of the pink cotton fibers on the aqua sweatshirt belonged to the polo shirt but some did not, though with Jillian’s penchant for pink there must be plenty of sources at the apartment. The blue cotton had come from her jeans. There were a few other fibers, a purple trilobal nylon, a black round nylon, and two black fibers that confused her at first. Their composition seemed to vary along the length, which eliminated synthetic fibers, but the shaft appeared too regular to be natural. A third strand of the same type of fiber had been snagged by the blackberry bush.
Could Jillian have had a blanket with her, which someone-perhaps a homeless person who figured she wouldn’t need it anymore-later removed? Theresa moved to her computer and clicked on the folder with the photos from the scene, but saw no signs of her temporary theory. The snow had settled on Jillian’s body and the surrounding area evenly. If she had originally been covered, the cover must have been removed promptly after her death.
Theresa took a minute to separate out the photos from Jacob Wheeler’s scene and place them in a new folder. Before moving them to the hard drive, though, she took another look at the shots of his bedroom, zooming in on the stacked cases in front of his TV stand. Sure enough, Polizei sat right on top. Don hadn’t been wrong when he said the game had become insidiously popular.
She closed that folder and took another look at the pictures of Jillian’s apartment. She had taken only a few, and only to document from where she had collected the items for possible DNA analysis. All her towels, bedding, and other textiles seemed to be pink or brown. No black. The rest of Jillian’s bedroom appeared as innocuous in the photos as it had in real life. Theresa hit the magnifying glass icon and zoomed in.
Perfume bottles, a bra, the book of crossword puzzles. Pillows in disarray. A few pieces of paper, half folded and tucked behind the baseball cap on one of the end tables. Theresa zoomed in further. The resolution did not allow her to read the paper, but since the information had been arranged in columns she took it to be a financial statement, particularly since the tidy letterhead featured a green-and-yellow circle with a dollar sign. It didn’t seem a bit familiar or like any local bank’s logo. Theresa hit the printer icon, lost in a happy fantasy that she would both find the Kovacics’ accountant and that he would be an extremely garrulous one.
“What are you doing?” Leo asked, his face next to her shoulder. She shot a few inches straight up, bumping his chin and sending her heart rate off the charts.
“Just looking something up…I was working on Jillian Perry’s fibers. I’ve got kind of a strange one here-”
“That hooker who froze to death? You’re still working on that?”
“She wasn’t a hooker, and Christine can’t find a cause of death.”
“She also isn’t a homicide. We have people here who are. Plus your old friend Richard Springer is going to be here any minute, with entourage.”
“I thought he came Friday.”
“Oh no, my dear. I put him off. I wasn’t going to endure a visit from that weasel all by my lonesome. Besides, I’m not paying you to work closed cases.”
“Odd. I thought the taxpayers of Cuyahoga County were paying me.”
“They’re not paying you to work closed cases either.”
“It’s not closed. It’s still very, very open,” she insisted, but to empty air. Leo had darted off again.
She took advantage of the quiet to place the tapings back into their envelopes and remove the piece of aqua sweatshirt with the oil stain on it. She carefully smeared the stain onto a round, flat circle made of potassium bromide and dropped this into a slot on the stage of the FTIR. The Fourier transform infrared spectrometer pitched a beam of light through her sample and provided a single colored line on the results graph. The peaks identified the functional groups present in the molecules of the sample. She stared, consulted her library of spectra, stared again.
It wasn’t oil. It wasn’t paint, adhesive, dirt, or lip gloss. So what the hell was it?
The only familiar compound seemed to be phenol, a corrosive often used in the DNA process. It hadn’t been strong enough to damage the sweatshirt, but had left just a spot.
She repackaged the piece of sweatshirt, still puzzled. Now only the envelope Christine had given her remained on the counter, so she examined the tiny pieces of wood left in Jacob Wheeler’s scalp. The particles appeared, under strong magnification, as irregular chunks of dark and bloodstained matter, with sharp edges. Theresa did not consider herself an expert on wood, but she had seen particles over the years-baseball bats and two-by-fours remained popular murder weapons-and though she would not swear to it in court, this did not appear to be treated wood. It seemed too porous, with no trace of an adhering varnish or other polishes.
Well, Christine had said the wound had been irregular, which would not indicate a smooth surface like a baseball bat. More likely, the killer had picked up a handy, hefty tree branch and brained young Jacob with it. It knocked out premeditation. It also made recovery of the weapon nearly impossible, for where does a wise man hide a stick? In a forest. Preferably a forest where it has snowed all night, so that the murder weapon, if tossed away, would be covered with a layer of white by the time the body was found, and would be impossible to distinguish from all the other fallen branches and leaves and twigs and underbrush around. It probably didn’t have any blood on it either, since the first blow usually doesn’t bleed quickly enough to transfer to the weapon, though it might have hairs or skin snatched up by its rough surface-
“You remember our trace analyst, Theresa MacLean.”
She looked up to see Leo guiding three men to her workstation. The defense expert and the defense attorney both glowed in smug victory, while the judge looked irritated. Theresa focused on his shirt, a light blue designer job with minuscule burgundy stripes.
“Tencel,” she said.
The attorney stepped back, as if she were raving and possibly dangerous.
“I beg your pardon?” the judge asked.
“Tencel. It’s a cellulosic fiber, made of wood pulp but very strong. Retains dye better than rayon and drapes nicely when combined with wool or silk. Good afternoon, Mr. Springer. Awful weather we’re having, isn’t it?”