Patricia Cornwell - The Bone Bed

Soft-sided carrying cases are set down close to me, scientists unpacking the cyanoacrylate monomer and cabling.

“Hardwood shredded mulch as opposed to mulch made from bark,” I specify.

“There’s no bark I can see,” Ernie tells me.

“Sort of like shredded wheat,” I describe, as I look at it. “Fibrous, hairy. Almost like cotton. Not milled like wood that’s sawed or cut with machines. But extremely fine. Without magnification it almost looks like soil, like dirt, like fine coffee grounds. Only dark red.”

“No, it’s not milled. It’s totally irregular. A red-colored mulch, and usually mulch is made from scrap pallets and other wood that’s chip-ground.” His head is ducked in the driver’s side. “Not popular with a lot of people, because it bleeds in the rain and the dye masks treated lumber, which you don’t want in your yard, certainly not near your vegetable garden. Recycled CCA, chromated copper arsenate, and whatever this stuff is, it doesn’t have a trace of CCA, that much I can say. Assuming it’s the same stuff you found on the body. I did find iron oxide, which could be from a dye or from good ole dirt.”

I tell him it would be very helpful if he could examine what he’s finding inside her car, to do it as quickly as possible. It might be quite important, I add, and he promises when he gets back to his lab he’ll take a look with the stereomicroscope, the polarized light scope, the Raman spectrometer.

He’s confident he’s going to find the same chemical fingerprint, he explains, the same interference colors and same birefringence he saw when he took a look at the reddish material I collected from Peggy Stanton’s body.

“Red-stained wood but not stained all the way through.” I study another stub he hands to me. “If it were ground up and sprayed with dye, would it look like this?”

“Maybe. I do know when I examined what Dr. Zenner submitted to me yesterday, I noted that some of the fibers are charred,” Ernie says. “And that I don’t necessarily expect to find in mulch. But it completely depends on what it’s made from. Scrap wood from a torn-down building where there may have been a fire, for example? I also found charcoal and a lot of minerals mixed in.”

“The question is whether the charcoal, the minerals are indigenous to this mulchlike material or are from dirt on a floor or carpet.”

“That’s exactly the question.” Ernie stands up and straightens his back as if it’s stiff. “You start looking at the world through a microscope and you see salt, silica, iron, arsenic, insect pieces and parts, skin cells, hair, fibers, a holy horror.”

“It certainly appears he drove her car.” I feel sure of it. “Wherever he took her must have this reddish debris on the floor, on the ground.”

“Maybe a landscaping business or an area where a lot of red-colored mulch is used. Golf courses, apartment complexes, a park. Or maybe a place they manufacture mulch. Did you see anything like this around her house?”

“No. She stepped in it wherever he took her, and he did, too, and he tracked it into her car. This splintery material would work its way into clothing, carpet, skin, hair, and stick to everything like Velcro.”

“Some synthetic fibers on the leather seats,” he lets me know as he looks. “Probably from clothing, and a fair amount of white hair everywhere.”

“Her hair was white. Long. Shoulder length.”

“A little bit of these same wooden fibers.” He finds more of them. “Possibly transferred from clothing. Hers or some other person’s.” He turns a knob on the ALS’s panel, changing wavelengths, and the light turns green-blue.

I put my goggles back on, the orange filter blocking light not absorbed by the evidence, and I return to the car. Ernie is painting the steering wheel, the dash, the console, and the seat belt’s metal buckle and tongue, areas that will be swabbed for DNA next. Some smudges light up, nothing discernible, no latent prints we can do anything with, and I’m not surprised.

Maybe we’ll get lucky when the car is fumed inside and out with cyanoacrylate, better known as superglue, but I don’t want to get my hopes up. I can’t imagine a killer driving Peggy Stanton’s Mercedes or exploring her house and not wearing gloves or covering his hands or wiping things down after the fact, but I also know better than to project what I think onto someone else. Bad people can be incredibly stupid, especially arrogant ones who have never been caught and aren’t in a database.

“I always feel like the abominable snowman in this damn stuff,” Sil Machado complains, as he walks up. “Or maybe the Pillsbury Doughboy.”

Ernie explains what we’ve found as another text message lands on my phone. A third one from Lucy, who wants to see me upstairs.

“I saw nothing like that anywhere inside her house,” Machado lets Ernie know. “Not in the basement. Not in the garage. Not in her yard. No red mulch. Not even old mulch. You got a minute?” he says to me. “Actually, I’m going to need more than one.”

“I was just heading up to take care of a few things,” I reply. “Come on.”

twenty-nine

HE SAYS HE WOULD HAVE GOT HERE SOONER, BUT LUKE called him earlier this morning, asking questions about Howard Roth. Apparently, Luke told Sil Machado it was urgent.

“Did he explain why?” I walk us through the evidence bay.

“Yeah, he said you don’t think Howie fell down the stairs.”

“Howie?”

“What people called him,” Machado replies.

“I’m not suggesting he didn’t go down the stairs. I’m suggesting he might have had some help,” I clarify. “His injuries aren’t consistent with a typical fall.”

“Dr. Zenner said you think maybe somebody beat the shit out of him.”

I hope Luke didn’t say it like that, and I take off the Tyvek and drop it in the trash.

“So I shot right back over to his place.” Machado yanks off his coveralls, booties, and gloves, as if he hates them. “And I admit I didn’t look through things the first time thinking homicide. But if ever there was an obvious scenario I’ve seen? A known drunk has an accident and there’s blood on the steps he fell down, I’m telling you, Doc, I don’t make assumptions. But this was straightforward. I’m still blown away you’re thinking he might be a homicide.”

“Who found him?”

“A buddy, a guy who works maintenance at Fayth House just a few blocks away. Said he had the day off, dropped by for a beer. Apparently, Howie did some odd jobs over there. General labor, when he was sober enough.”

Machado hands me a transparent plastic bag that has a check inside it. I again press the button for the elevator, which seems to be stuck on my floor.

“This was in his toolbox. I didn’t look the first time because he’s an alcoholic who fell down the stairs into the basement, right? I mean, that’s where his body was found. He was in his underwear like he’d been in bed. And he’s got scratches, a gash on his head, broke ribs, is banged up like he went down the steps, and like I said, there’s blood on them and at the bottom of them.”

Peggy Stanton’s choice of a design for her personal checks is folk art reminiscent of Charles Wysocki Americana, a brick house with a white picket fence, a horse and buggy going past.

“Every indication is he took a fall so there was no reason for me to go rooting around inside an old toolbox,” Machado says. “Not unless I was looking for something in particular, which I wasn’t at first.”

“He may have gone down the stairs, but he may have been injured first,” I reiterate, and now I’m more convinced of it because of the check.

It’s handwritten in black ink, made out to Howard Roth for one hundred dollars.