Chaos

CHAPTER 40

I REACH THROUGH GEORGIA’S WINDOW to remove the handheld RFID reader from its charging cradle. Walking over to Cooler number two, I lift the big steel handle, and the huge polished door opens with a quiet suck and a puff of condensation that looks like fog but smells like death.

I move through the chilled foul air inside a huge frigid space filled with steel trays bearing body-shaped mounds, each pouch tagged with a chip embedded in a plastic sticker that should match the chip in the decedent’s yellow wristband. Redundancy. Because one of the worst things you can do is lose someone, and I scan with the reader, holding it like a gun until I locate Molly Hinders.

My breath smokes out as I unzip her pouch, and the sound of blowing air is loud. I grab a pair of gloves from the box on a gurney, and momentarily I’m working my purple-sheathed fingers through her short curly black hair. Everywhere I touch is refrigerated cold as I feel around the sutured autopsy incision that follows her hairline, over her ears and around the back of her head, where I find the small gaping wound in her scalp.

Dr. Lee Wier did exactly what she was trained to do and what I recommended to her when we discussed this case. She made sure to surgically remove the burned tissue so we could have Ernie check it for microscopic particles of metals or other materials that might have been transferred to the wounds. She should have sent these samples to the histology lab days ago, and I walk back out of the cooler. Shutting the heavy door, I hope for a good signal on my phone as I try Paula in the histology lab.

“I finished up everything on that yesterday afternoon,” she says in my earpiece after I ask how the case is coming. “Doctor Wier had asked me to get on it as soon as I could because of the prep time involved, so that’s what I did.”

“She specifically asked you to prepare wet samples for Ernie.”

“Absolutely. I prepped four separate specimens from the burn on the victim’s head.”

“I’m very happy to hear it,” I reply because the burned tissue would have to be dehydrated with acetone before it could be placed inside the vacuum chamber of an electron microscope, and this can take days.

Had Dr. Wier and Paula not been fast acting, there might not be anything to analyze until the weekend, and waiting couldn’t be a worse idea. Depending on what we’re dealing with, someone else might die, and up ahead I see the open door as I follow the empty corridor, passing labs and other work spaces that are dark at this early hour.

Inside the large-scale X-ray control room Anne’s desk is empty, her pocketbook and keys on top of it. Through a leaded-glass window I can see her in the room on the other side, standing at the creamy-white large-bore CT scanner, a lab coat on over her jeans, talking to Luke Zenner, who’s changed into scrubs. On the table in front of them is Elisa Vandersteel’s pouched body, and I open the door connecting the control and scan rooms.

“You’re just who I need to see,” I say to Luke as I walk in.

I explain it’s possible that Molly Hinders and Elisa Vandersteel aren’t accidental deaths. They may be homicides that are connected, and I also let them know about Briggs. Luke and Anne begin asking questions I can’t answer. They get increasingly upset.

“We can’t get into it now,” I finally tell them because we really can’t. “We need to save our feelings for later. We have to focus and find out what’s killing these people, and if it’s electrical malfunctions, flukes or deliberate, such as some weapon we’ve not seen before.”

“It’s hard to imagine everything suddenly happening is coincidental,” Luke says, and his eyes are hard and he’s clenching his jaw.

“When you’re done,” I continue, “photograph the burns before excising them, and the tissue goes straight to Paula. Of primary interest are the very fine linear whitish leathery burns on her upper back and lower posterior neck, and also the top of her right hand and wrist.”

“I’ll need to take off the paper bags anyway,” Luke says. “So I’ll just do all of it in here, get everything ready for the labs. Then I’ll have her moved into the decomp room.”

“I’m going upstairs to clean up,” I reply.

“Now that’s an idea. Nothing like cleaning up before you do an autopsy in the decomp room,” Anne says drolly, and she gives me an idea.

“I understand there have been some problems with the ventilation in there,” I point out, and Anne gets a blank look on her plain but pleasant face, then she frowns, and then she gets it.

“Oh that,” she says as if she suddenly remembers. “You must be talking about the downdraft table in there,” she recalls, but she’s making it up. “The airflow wasn’t pulling odors down and venting them away from people working, I believe that was the problem the other day, and I heard the stench was so bad it had legs,” she improvs. “So I hope for the sake of our guests that we don’t have a problem this morning.”

“That would be too bad,” I agree.

THIRTY MINUTES LATER, UPSTAIRS inside my office suite, I emerge from the bathroom drying my hair with a towel.

Dressed in clean blue scrubs and black rubber surgical clogs, I walk through my sitting area of leather furniture in soothing earth tones, a conference table, and my personal collection of anatomical drawings by Max Brödel, Edwin Landseer, Frank Netter, in addition to eighteenth-century prints of William Hogarth’s Four Stages of Cruelty.

Near my desk the data wall displays the time and other information in bright digits against glassy blackness. 3:08.45 AM EST… 3:09.50… 3:10.00… I watch the seconds silently advance as I select an app on my phone that offers a menu of CFC zones inside and out that are constantly monitored by security cameras. The data wall splits into screens that display live feeds, and my back parking lot has filled up considerably since I last checked.

There are several dark blue and black sedans and SUVs, and I pan and tilt, checking other zones and discovering the black Tahoe inside the bay where only Lucy is cheeky enough to leave her cars. Roger Mahant is already back, and he’s come with quite a posse, it seems. I wonder why Georgia didn’t let me know. Maybe she tried and I was in the shower.

I call her desk extension and it begins to ring as I watch digital seconds tick past. Ringing and ringing. 3:12.11… 3:13.10… 3:14.00… Oddly there’s no answer downstairs at her desk, and then my phone rings.

“What’s going on?” I assume it’s Georgia.

“Hello?” Ernie Koppel says. “Kay?”

“I’m sorry. I was trying to call downstairs…”

“Can you drop by?” he asks. “I don’t usually say something’s urgent but you need to see this before anybody else does. I’m waiting for a confirmation but if you’ve got a minute I think I’ve found something that’s a first. At least for a crime lab.”

He tells me where he is, which electron microscope, and I grab my lab coat off the back of my desk chair, hurrying out the door. I decide to avoid the elevator. Not only is it notoriously slow in my state-of-the-art biotech headquarters but I intend to duck and dodge the FBI every chance I get. A good way to start is by using the emergency stairs. While anyone can take them to exit the building, you can’t access our floors without an ID badge or a code.

So I’m not likely to run into anyone, and my clogs echo on the metal-edged concrete steps as I descend to the lower level. It’s as quiet as a bomb shelter in the stairwell as I go down and down, unlocking the door at the bottom. It opens into our evidence bay, where we process large items, typically cars and trucks, but we’ve also recovered evidence from supercars, motorcycles, Jet Skis, and even a homebuilt hang glider that obviously didn’t work very well or it and its owner wouldn’t have ended up here.

The lights are on a low, energy-saving setting, and I briskly walk through the gloom, passing exam spaces occupied by current cases. A boat under a tent will be fumed with superglue to develop possible latent prints, and two spaces down from that is the camper where a suspected murder-suicide occurred. Next to that, a stand-alone bay is covered in blood-spattered-and-streaked white paper from ceiling to floor to reconstruct a stabbing.

I head toward an illuminated red IN USE sign above the concrete bunker housing the transmission electron microscope, the TEM. Scanning my thumbprint on the biometric reader, I pass through the stainless-steel door as it slides open with a swoosh that always reminds me of Star Trek. I’m greeted by the familiar rush of positive-pressure air blowing my hair as I step inside, and the door whispers shut behind me.

“Howdy. Come on in and take a load off,” Ernie says in the near dark from the console of the half-ton microscope. “Because you’re going to want to sit down for this.”

My top trace-evidence examiner always reminds me of a submarine pilot as he sits in front of a periscope-like thick metal tube that rises nearly to the ceiling and is topped by the assembly of the cathode, what most people call an electron gun but I tend to think of as more like a lightbulb. Its simple hairpin-shaped tungsten wire fires thermo-ionic emissions at whatever we decide to analyze, and I always find it cavelike in here, stuffy and claustrophobic.

The thick concrete walls are acoustically dead, and the dark fabric-covered fiberglass insulation seems to suck in all light. I have the sensation of being at the bottom of the sea, underground or lost in the cosmos. I always feel as if I’m passing into the unknown like Alice through the looking glass. And in a way I am because the world Ernie navigates can’t be managed without instruments capable of detecting particles as small as one-billionth of a meter or seventy-five-thousandth the diameter of a human hair.

I could fit thousands of skin cells and specks of dust on such minuscule and ubiquitous evidence, what I think of as the universal detritus shed by negativity and bad karma. People leave all sorts of seemingly undetectable trash in their wake, and it’s constantly recycled. It can end up in the damnedest places as we track the tiniest tattletales in and out, passing them from one person or object to another, from one continent to the next.

I think back to when I saw Ernie last, maybe a month ago, and since then his blond-streaked graying hair has gotten longer. I notice that peeking out under his lab coat are a black suit and a bolo tie with a silver-and-turquoise arrowhead slide. He has on a black lizard belt, matching black cowboy boots, and I’m betting his black Stetson with its gambler crease is in his office. He must have court later today, a deposition or some other reason to dress up, and I ask him that.

“Nope.” His blue eyes sparkle in his weathered face. “Something much more important. I was planning on heading over to the Kennedy School after work to hear your talk. I doubt I’ll have time to go home first. A bunch of us are going from here.”

I’m touched and overwhelmed by sadness as I sit down. I tell him about Briggs.

“Goddamn,” Ernie swears under his breath as I brief him on what I fear we might be dealing with.

“Energy or electricity that’s been weaponized somehow,” I tell him what Benton suggested.

“Well in a bizarre way that would make sense,” Ernie says.

“You’ve found something that might hint at such a thing?”

“Not exactly and maybe. I actually got onto this yesterday before I left,” he refers to the Molly Hinders case as I continue scanning the bank of monitors overhead, not making much sense of what I’m seeing.

Displayed are peculiar shapes illuminated in black and white, some in the nano range and magnified two hundred thousand times. I’m confronted by spectra that are puzzling as I recognize the atomic symbols for nickel and aluminum recovered from the burn on the scalp, and also the presence of silica and iron.

I’m not sure why titanium would show up, and I’m baffled by the presence of zirconium and scandium. They aren’t everyday metals. One is commonly used in nuclear reactors, the other in the aerospace industry.

“I didn’t want to tell you what I’d found,” Ernie says, “until I’d verified it with a buddy of mine at ORNL.”

Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee is one place we turn when we have extraordinarily unusual questions in the field of materials science. In other words, if we can’t figure out what something is made of and why, then we reach out to ORNL, MIT, Caltech, even NASA. A good example is the very thing I’m supposed to talk about tonight-the Columbia space shuttle tragedy. A typical crime lab wasn’t going to determine why a heat shield failed.

“And he literally just called me as you were on your way down to see me,” Ernie is saying. “You’ve heard me mention Bill. He works in the superconductor lab they’ve got down there and sleeps about as much as you do,” he adds because it’s not even four in the morning. Do you know what panguite is?”

“I don’t think so,” I reply. “In fact, I don’t believe I know what you’re talking about.”

“This.” He indicates a black-and-white image on a monitor that at 500X looks white and lumpy like misshapen molars.