Patricia Cornwell - Body of Evidence

I called my mother as soon as I got home and for once was relieved to receive the usual lectures and reminders, to hear that strong voice loving me in its no-nonsense way.

"It's been in the eighties all week and I saw on the news it's been dropping as low as forty in Richmond," she said. "That's almost freezing. It hasn't snowed yet?"

"No, Mother. It hasn't snowed. How's your hip?"

"As well as can be expected. I'm crocheting a lap robe, thought you could cover your legs with it while you work in your office. Lucy's been asking about you."

I hadn't talked to my niece in weeks.

"She's working on some science project at school right now," my mother went on. "A talking robot, of all things. Brought it over the other night and scared poor Sinbad under the bed____________________"

Sinbad was a sinful, bad, mean, nasty cat, a gray- and black-striped stray who had tenaciously begun following Mother while she was shopping in Miami Beach one morning. Whenever I came to visit, Sinbad's hospitality extended to his perching on top of the refrigerator like a vulture and giving me the fish-eye.

"You'll never guess who I saw the other day," I began a little too breezily. The need to tell someone was overwhelming. My mother knew my past, or at least most of it. "Do you remember Mark James?"

Silence.

"He was in Washington and stopped by."

"Of course I remember him."

"He stopped by to discuss a case. You remember, he's a lawyer. Uh, in Chicago."

I was rapidly retreating. "He was on business in D.C."

The more I said, the more her disapproving silence closed in on me.

"Huh. What I remember is he nearly killed you, Katie."

When she called me "Katie" I was ten years old again.

An obvious advantage of having the forensic science labs inside my building was I didn't have to wait for paper reports. Like me, the scientists often knew a lot before they began writing anything down. I had submitted Beryl Madison's trace evidence exactly one week ago. It would probably be several more weeks before the report was on my desk, but Joni Hamm would already have her opinions and private interpretations. Having finished the morning's cases and in a mood to speculate, I keyed myself up to the fourth floor, a cup of coffee in hand.

Joni's "office" was little more than an alcove sandwiched between the trace and drug analysis labs at the end of the hall. When I walked in she was sitting at a black countertop peering into the ocular lens of a stereoscopic microscope, a spiral notebook at her elbow filled with neatly written notes. "A bad time?"

I inquired.

"No worse than any other time," she said, glancing around distractedly.

I pulled up a chair.

Joni was a petite young woman with short black hair and wide, dark eyes. A Ph.D. candidate taking classes at night and the mother of two young children, she always looked tired and a bit harried. But then, most of the lab workers did, and in fact the same was often said of me.

"Checking in on Beryl Madison," I said. "What have you found?"

"More than you bargained for, I have a feeling."

She turned back through pages in the notebook. "Beryl Madison's trace is a nightmare."

I wasn't surprised. I had turned in a multitude of envelopes and evidence buttons. Beryl's body was so bloody it had picked up debris like flypaper. Fibers, in particular, were difficult to examine because they had to be cleaned before Joni could put them under the scope. This required placing each individual fiber inside a container of soapy solution, which in turn was placed inside an ultrasound bath. After blood and dirt were gently agitated free, the solution was strained through sterile filter paper and each fiber was mounted on a glass slide.

Joni was scanning her notes. "If I didn't know better," she went on, "I'd suspect Beryl Madison was murdered somewhere other than her house."

"Not possible," I answered. "She was murdered upstairs, and she hadn't been dead long when the police got there."

"I understand that. We'll start with fibers indigenous to her house. There were three collected from the bloody areas of her knees and palms. They're wool. Two of them dark red, one gold."

"Consistent with the Oriental prayer rug in the upstairs hallway?"

I recalled from the scene photographs.

"Yes," she said. "A very good match with the exemplars brought in by the police. If Beryl Madison were on her hands and knees and on the rug, it would explain the fibers you collected and their location. That's the easy part."

Joni reached for a stack of stiff cardboard slide folders, sorting through them until she found what she was looking for. Opening the flaps, she perused rows of glass slides as she talked. "In addition to those fibers, there were a number of white cotton fibers. They're useless, could have come from anywhere and possibly were transferred from the white sheet covering her body. I also looked at ten other fibers collected from her hair, the bloody areas of her neck and chest, and her fingernail scrapings. Synthetics."

She glanced up at me. "And they aren't consistent with any of the exemplars the police sent in."

"They don't match up with her clothing or bed covers?" I asked.

Joni shook her head and said, "Not at all. They appear foreign to the scene, and because they were adhering to blood or were under her nails, the likelihood is strong they're the result of a passive transfer from the assailant to her."

This was an unexpected reward. When Deputy Chief Fielding finally got hold of me the night of Beryl's murder, I had instructed him to wait for me at the morgue. I got there shortly before one A.M. and we spent the next several hours examining Beryl's body under the laser and collecting every particle and fiber that lit up. I had just assumed most of what we found would prove worthless debris from Beryl's own clothing or house. The idea of finding ten fibers deposited by the assailant was astonishing. In most cases I was lucky to find one unknown fiber and considered myself blessed to find two or three. I frequently had cases where I didn't find any. Fibers are hard to see, even with a lens, and the slightest disturbance of the body or the faintest stirring of air can dislodge them long before the medical examiner arrives at the scene or the body is transported to the morgue.

"What sort of synthetics?" I asked.

"Olefin, acrylic, nylon, polyethylene, and Dynel, with the majority of them being nylon," Joni replied. "The colors vary: red, blue, green, gold, orange. Microscopically they're inconsistent with each other as well."

She began placing one slide after another on the stereoscope's stage and peering through the lens.

She explained, "Logitudinally, some are striated, some aren't. Most of them contain titanium dioxide in a variety of densities, meaning some are a semidull luster, others dull, a few bright. The diameters are all rather coarse, suggestive of carpet-type fibers, but on cross section the shapes vary."

"Ten different origins?"

I asked.

"That's the way it looks at this point," she said. "Definitely atypical. If these fibers were transferred by the assailant, he was carrying an unusual variety of fibers on his person. Obviously, the coarser ones aren't from his clothing because they're carpet-type fibers. And they're not from any of the carpets inside her house. For him to have such a variety is peculiar for another reason. You pick up fibers all day long, but they don't stay with you. You sit somewhere and pick up fibers, and a little later they're brushed off when you sit somewhere else. Or the air dislodges them."

It got more perplexing. Joni turned another page in her notebook and said, "I've also put the vacuumings under the scope, Dr. Scarpetta. The debris Marino vacuumed off the prayer rug, in particular, is a real hodgepodge."