Patricia Cornwell - Trace

He leans in to see for himself, and then moves out of her way, and she peers into the lenses.

"In fact, I'm thinking this particle here is burned. Did you notice how fine it is? I'm seeing a little blackish margin. It looks carbonized, burned. Bet if I put my finger on this particle it would probably stick to the oil on my skin, and regular flaked bone won't," she says, intrigued. "I think some of what we're looking at is from cremains." She peers at the bluish white ragged particle with its carbonized margin in the bright circle of light. "It looks chalky and fractured but not necessarily heat fractured. I don't know. I've never had a reason to pay attention to bone dust, certainly not burned bone dust. An elemental analysis will tell you. With burned bone you should get different levels of calcium, higher levels of phosphorus," she explains without moving her eyes from the binocular lenses. "And by the way, I might expect dust from cremains in the rubble and dirt at the old building since there was a crematorium oven. God knows how many bodies were cremated in that place over the decades. But I'm a little perplexed that the debris from this soil I brought in would have bone dust in it. I scraped that soil from the pavement near the back door. They haven't started knocking down the back of the building and digging up the back parking lot yet. The Anatomical Division should still be completely intact. Remember the back door of the old building?"

"Sure I do."

"That's where it was. Why would dust from cremains be in the parking lot, right there on top of the parking lot? Unless it was tracked outside the building?"

"You mean someone stepped in it down there in the Anatomical Division and then tracked it out into the parking lot?"

"I don't know, possibly, but it appears Mr. Whitby's bloody face must have been against the pavement, the muddy dirty pavement, and this trace evidence adhered to his wound and the blood on his face."

"Take me back to the part about bone dust getting fractured," Eise says, mystified. "So you got burned bone and then how does it get fractured if not by heat?"

"As I said, I don't know for a fact, but dust from cremains mixed in with dirt on pavement and perhaps run over by a tractor and cars and even people stepping on it. Could bone dust exposed to that sort of traffic look traumatized? I just don't know the answer."

"But why the hell would there be cremated bone dust in Sick Girl's case?" Eise asks.

"That's right." She tries to clear her head and organize her thoughts. "That's right. This isn't from the Whitbycase. This burned-looking fractured dust isn't from his case. I'm looking at her trace."

"Dust from cremains inside Sick Girl's mouth? Holy Mother of God! I can't explain that. Sure as heck can't. Can you?"

"I don't have a clue why bone dust has turned up in her case to begin with," Scarpetta replies. "What else have you found? I understand they brought in a number of things from Gilly Paulsson's house."

"Just stuff from her bed. Kit and I were back there in the Scraping Room for ten hours, and then I spend half my life picking out cotton fibers because Dr. Marcus has a thing about cotton swabs. Must have stock in Q-tips," Eise complains. "Course, DNA had a crack at the linens too."

"I know about it," Scarpetta says. "They were looking for respiratory epithelium and found it."

"We also found hairs, dyed black hairs, on the sheets. I know Kit's been aggravated over those."

"Human, I presume. DNA?"

"Yes, human. They've been sent to Bode for mito."

"What about pet hairs? What about canine hair?"

"No," he says.

"Not from her bed linens or pajamas, not from anything they carried in from her house?"

"No. How about dust from an autopsy saw?" he says, obsessing over the bone dust. "That could be at your old building too."

"Nothing I'm seeing looks like that." She sits back in the chair and looks at him. "Dust from a saw would be fine granules mixed with chunks, and you might also find particles of metal from the blade."

"Okay. Can we talk about something I do know before I rupture something in my head?"

"Please," she says.

"Thank you, Lord. Now you're the bone expert, I'll grant you that." He returns several slides to Gilly Paulsson's folder. "But I do know about paint. In both the Sick Girl and the Tractor Man cases, there's not a sign of topcoat, not a trace of primer, so we know it isn't automotive. And the bits of metal underneath aren't attracted to a magnet, so they're not ferrous. I tried that out day one, and to cut to the chase, we're talking aluminum."

"Something aluminum painted with red, white, and blue enamel paint," Scarpetta thinks out loud. "Mixed with bone dust."

"I give up," Eise says.

"For the moment, so do I," she replies.

"Human bone dust?"

"Unless it's fresh, we're not going to know."

"How fresh is fresh?"

"Several years at most as opposed to decades," she replies. "We can swab fingerprints and get STR and mito, so it doesn't take much, assuming the sample isn't too old or in bad shape. With DNA it's quality versus quantity, but if I had to bet, I think we're out of luck. In the first place, with cremains you can forget DNA entirely. As for the unburned bone dust I'm seeing, I don't know why exactly, but it strikes me as old. It just looks eroded and old. Now, you can send some of this unburned dust off to Bode Laboratories for mito or even let them try STR, but with a sample this small it's going to be consumed. Do we want it consumed knowing we may not get anything anyway?"

"DNA ain't my department. If it was, my budget would be a hell of a lot bigger."

"Well, it's not my decision anyway," she says, getting up from the chair. "I suppose if it were, I would vote for preserving the integrity of the evidence in case we need it later. What matters is that bone dust has shown up in two cases that should not be even remotely related."

"That definitely matters."

"I'll let you pass on the happy news to Dr. Marcus," she says.

"He loves my e-mails. I'll send him another one," Eise replies. "Wish I had happy news for you, Dr. Scarpetta. But the fact is, all these bags of dirt are going to take me a while. Days. I'll spread all of it out on watch glasses, dry it good, then sieve it to separate the particles, and that's a pain in the neck because you have to bang the damn sieves on the counter every other minute to get them to drain into the receiver pan, and I've given up begging for particle separators that have automatic shakers because they can cost up to six grand, so forgete/.-vous that. The drying and the sieving will take a few days, then it's just me, myself, and I and the microscope, and then SEM and whatever else we try. By the way, did I ever give you one of my handmade tools? Around here, they're affectionately known as 'Eise Picks.'"

He finds several on his desk and decides on one, turning it slowly this way and that to make sure the tungsten isn't bent and doesn't need sharpening. Holding it up proudly, he presents it to her with a flourish as if he is giving her a long-stem rose.

"That's very nice of you, Junius," she says. "Thank you very much. And no. You never did give me one."

Unable to look at the problem from any angle that introduces clarity, Scarpetta stops thinking about the painted aluminum and bone dust. She decides she will soon drive herself into complete exhaustion if she continues to obsess about red, white, and blue chips of paint and particles of probable human bone that are smaller than cat dander.

The early afternoon is gray and the air is so heavy it threatens to collapse like a rain-soaked ceiling. She and Marino get out of the SUV and the doors sound muffled when they close them. She begins to lose faith when she sees no lights on in the brick house with the mossy slate roof that is on the other side of the Paulssons' backyard fence.