Black Notice

26

By early afternoon, roads had thawed enough so that other diligent, hopelessly behind forensic scientists could come to work. I decided to make my rounds because I was frantic.

My first stop was the Forensic Biology Section, a tenthousand-square-foot area where only an authorized few had access to electronic cards for the locks. People didn't drop by to chat. They traversed the corridor and glanced at intense scientists in white behind glass but rarely got any closer than that.

I pressed an intercom button to see if Jamie Kuhn was in.

"Let me find him," a voice called back.

The instant he opened the door, Kuhn held out a clean, long white lab coat, gloves and mask. Contamination was the enemy of DNA, especially in an era when every pipette, microtome, glove, refrigerator and even pen used for labeling might be questioned in court. The degree of laboratory precautions had become just about as stringent as the sterile procedures found in the operating room.

"I hate to do this to you, Jamie," I said.

"You always say that," he said. "Come on in."

There were three sets of doors to pass through, and fresh lab coats hung in each airlocked space to make sure you exchanged the one you'd just put on for yet another one. Tacky paper on the floors was for the bottom of your shoes. The process was repeated twice more to make sure no one carried contaminants from one area into another.

The examiners' work area was an open, bright room of black counterspace and computers, water baths, containment units and laminar flow hoods. Individual stations were neatly arranged with mineral oil, autopipettes, polypropylene tubes and tube racks. Reagents, or the substances used to cause reactions, were made in big batches from molecular biology-grade chemicals. They were given unique identification numbers and stored in small aliquots away from chemicals kept for general use.

Contamination was managed primarily through serialization, heat denaturation, enzymatic digestion, screening, repeated analysis, ultraviolet irradiation, iodinizing irradiation, use of controls and samples taken from a healthy volunteer. If all else failed, the examiner just quit on certain samples. Maybe he tried again in a few months. Maybe he didn't.

Polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, had made it possible to get DNA results in days instead of weeks. Now with short tandem repeat typing, STR, it was theoretically possible that Kuhn could get results in a day. That was, if there was cellular tissue for testing, and in the case of the pale hair from the unidentified man found in the container, there was not.

"That's a damn shame," I said. "Because it looks like I've found more of it. This time adhering to the body of the woman murdered last night at the Quik Cary."

"Wait a minute. Am I hearing this right? The hair from the container guy's clothing matches hair on her?"

"Looks like it. You can see my urgency."

"Your urgency's about to get more urgent," he said. "Because the hair's not cat hair, dog hair. It's not animal hair. It's human."

"It can't be," I said.

"It absolutely is."

Kuhn was a wiry young man who didn't get excited by much. I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen his eyes light up.

"Fine, unpigmented, rudimentary," he went on. "Baby hair. I figured maybe the guy has a baby at home. But now, two cases? Maybe the same hair on the murdered lady?"

"Baby hair isn't six or seven inches long," I told him. "That's what I collected from her body."

"Maybe it grows longer in Belgium," he dryly said.

"Let's talk about the unidentified man in the container first. What would baby hair be doing all over him?" I asked. "Even if he does have a baby back home? And even if it were possible for baby hair to be that long?"

"Not all of them are that long. Some are extremely short. Like stubble when you shave:' "Any of the hair forcibly removed?" I asked.

"I'm not seeing any roots with follicular tissues still adhering-mostly the bulbous-shaped roots you associate with hair naturally falling out. Shedding, in other words. Which is why I can't do DNA."

"But some of it's been cut or shaved?" I thought out loud, drawing a blank.

"Right. Some's been cut, some hasn't. Like those weird styles. You've seen them-short on top and long and wispy on the sides."

"Not on a baby I haven't," I answered.

"What if he had triplets, quintuplets, sextuplets because his wife had been on a fertility drug?" Kuhn suggested. "The hair would be the same but if it's coming from, different kids that might explain the different lengths., The DNA would be the same, too, saying you had anything to test."

In identical twins, triplets, sextuplets, the DNA was identical, only the fingerprints were different.

"Dr. Scarpetta," Kuhn said, "all I can tell you is the hairs are alike visually, their morphology the same, in other words."

"Well, these hairs on this lady are alike visually, too."

"Any short ones, as if they were cut?"

"No," I replied.

"Sony I don't have more to tell you," he said.

"Believe me, Jamie, you've just told me quite a lot," I said. "I just don't know what any of it means."

"You figure it out," he tried to lighten up, "we'll write a paper on it."

I tried the trace evidence lab next and didn't even bother saying hello to Larry Posner. He was peering into a microscope that probably was more sharply focused than he was when he looked up at me.

"Larry," I said, "everything's going to hell."

"Always has been."

"What about our unidentified guy? Anything?" I asked. "Because let me tell you, I'm really groping:' "I'm relieved. I thought you dropped by to ask me about your lady downstairs," he replied. "And I was going to have to break the news that I'm not Mercury with winged feet."

"There may be a link between the two cases. Same weird hair found on the bodies. Human hair, Larry."

He thought about this.for a long moment.

"I don't get it," he finally said. "And I hate to tell you, but I don't have anything quite so dramatic to report to you."

"Anything you can tell me at all?" I asked.

"Start with the soil samples from the container. PLM picked up the usual," he began, referring to the polarized light nъcroscopy. "Quartz, sand, diatomite, flint and elements like iron and aluminum. Lots of trash. Glass, paint chips, vegetable debris, rodent hairs. You can only begin to imagine all the crap inside a cargo container like that.

"And diatoms all over the place, but what's a little off-beat is what I found when I examined the ones swept up from the container's floor, and the ones from the'surface of the body and exterior of the clothes. They're a mixture of saltwater and freshwater diatoms."

"Makes sense if the ship started out in the Scheldt River in Antwerp and then spent most of the voyage at sea," I remarked.

"But the inside of the clothing? That's exclusively freshwater. Don't get that unless he washed his clothes, shoes, socks, even underwear in a river, lake, whatever. And I wouldn't expect you to launder Armani and crocodile shoes in a river or lake, or swim in clothes like that, either.

"So it's like he's got freshwater diatoms against his skin, which is weird. And the mixture of salt and fresh on the outside, which you'd expect under the circumstances. You know, walking around on the dock, saltwater diatoms in the air, getting on his clothes, but not on the inside of them” "What about the vertebral bone?" I then asked.

"Freshwater diatoms. Consistent with freshwater drowning, maybe the river in Antwerp. And the hair on the guy's head-all freshwater diatoms. No saltwater ones mixed in."

Posner widened his eyes and rubbed them, as if they were very tired.

"This is really twisting my brain like a dishrag. Diatoms that don't add up, weirdo baby hair and the vertebral bone. Like an Oreo. One side chocolate, the otter vanilla, with chocolate and vanilla icing in the middle and a scoop of vanilla on top."

"Spare me the analogies, Larry. I'm confused enough."

"So how do you explain it?"

"I can only offer a scenario."

"Fire away."

"He might have only freshwater diatoms in his hair,if his head were immersed in fresh water," I said. "If he were put .headfirst inside a barrel with fresh water in the bottom, for example. You do that to somebody, they can't get out, just like toddlers who fall headfirst into buckets of waterthose five-gallon plastic kind detergent corRes in. Waisthigh and very stable. Impossible to topple it over. Or he could have been drowned in a normal-size bucket of fresh water if someone held him down."

"I'm going to have nightmares," Posner said.

"Don't stay here until the roads start freezing again," I said.

Marino gave me a ride home, and I took the jar of formalin with me because I would not give up hope that the flesh inside it had something else to say. I would keep it on my desk in my study and now and then put on gloves and study it in sidelight like an archaeologist trying to read crude symbols worn away on stone.

"You coming in?" I asked Marino.

"You know, my damn pager keeps going off and I can't figure out who it is," he said, shoving his truck in gear.

He held it up and squinted.

"Maybe if you turned on the overhead light:' I suggested.

"Probably some snitch too stoned to dial right," he replied.. "I'll eat something if you're offering. Then I gotta go."

As we stepped inside my house, his pager vibrated again. He grabbed it off his belt in exasperation, tilting it until he could read the display.

"Screwed up again! What's five-three-one? Anything you know that's got those numbers in it?" he asked, exasperated.

"Rose's home number does," I said.