Book of the Dead (49 page)

    
Dr. Franz unwraps the window. He places it and the coin on top of a three-inch-thick steel turntable, and begins positioning an electron gun the size of a small missile, and the detectors lurking behind it, lowering them as close as he can to suspect areas of sand and glue and broken glass. With a remote axis control, he slides and tilts. Hums and clicks. Stopping at end stops – or switches – that prevent precious parts from crashing into samples or one another or going over the edge. He closes the door so he can vacuum down the chamber to ten-to-the-minus-six, he explains. Then he’ll backfill the rest of it to ten-to-the-minus-two, he adds, and you couldn’t open the door if you tried, he says. Showing her. And what they basically have are the conditions of outer space, he explains. No moisture, no oxygen, just the molecules of a crime.

    
The sound of vacuum pumps and an electrical smell, and the clean-room begins to heat up. Scarpetta and Dr. Franz leave, shutting an outer door, back in the lab now, and a column of red, yellow, green, and white lights remind them that no human is inside the chamber, because that would be almost instant death. It would be like a space walk without a suit, Dr. Franz says.

    
He sits before a computer console with multiple large flat video screens, and says to Scarpetta, “Let’s see. What magnification? We can go up to two hundred thousand X.” They could, but he’s being droll.

    
“And a grain of sand will look like a planet, and maybe we’ll discover little people living on it,” she says.

    
“Exactly what I was thinking.” He clicks through layers of menus.

    
She sits next to him, and the big roughing vacuum pumps remind Scarpetta of an MRI scanner, and then the turbo pump kicks in and is followed by a silence that is broken at intervals when the air dryer vents in a huge, heartfelt sigh that sounds like a whale. They wait for a while, and when they get a green light, they begin to look at what the instrument sees as the electron beam strikes an area of window glass.

    
“Sand,” Dr. Franz says. “And what the heck?”

    
Mingled with the different shapes and sizes of grains of sand that look like chips and shards of stone are spheres with craters that look like microscopic meteorites and moons. An elemental analysis confirms barium, antimony, and lead in addition to the silica of sand.

    
“Did this case involve a shooting?” Dr. Franz says.

    
“Not that I know of,” Scarpetta answers, and she adds, “It’s like Rome.”

    
“Could be environmental or occupational particulate,” he supposes. “The highest peak, of course, is silicon. Plus traces of potassium, sodium, calcium, and don’t know why, but a trace of aluminum. I’m going to subtract out the background, which is glass.” Now he’s talking to himself.

    
“This is similar – very similar – to what they found in Rome.” She says it again. “The sand in Drew Martin’s eye sockets. Same thing, and I’m repeating myself because I almost can’t believe it. Certainly, I don’t understand it. What appears to be gunshot residue. And these darkly shaded areas here?” She points. “These strata?”

    
“The glue,” he says. “I would venture to say that the sand isn’t from there – from Rome or its surrounds. What about the sand in Drew Martin’s case? Since there was no basalt, nothing to indicate volcanic activity, such as you’d expect in that area. So he brought his own sand with him to Rome?”

    
“I do know it’s never been assumed the sand came from there. At least not the nearby beaches of Ostia. I don’t know what he did. Maybe the sand is symbolic, has meaning. But I’ve seen magnified sand. I’ve seen magnified dirt. And I’ve never seen this.”

    
Dr. Franz manipulates the contrast and magnification some more. He says, “And now it gets stranger.”

    
“Maybe epithelial cells. Skin?” She scrutinizes what’s on the screen. “No mention of that in Drew Martin’s case. I need to call Captain Poma. It all depends on what was deemed important. Or noticed. And no matter how sophisticated the police lab, it’s not going to have R&D-quality instruments. It’s not going to have this.” She means the LC-SEM.

    
“Well, I hope they didn’t use mass spec and digest the entire sample in acid. Or there won’t be anything left to retest.”

    
“They didn’t,” she says. “Solid-phase x-ray analysis. Raman. Any skin cells should still be in the sand over there, but as I said, I’m not aware of it. There’s nothing on the report. No one mentioned it. I need to call Captain Poma.”

    
“It’s already seven p.m. over there.”

    
“He’s here. Well, in Charleston.”

    
“Now I’m more confused. I thought you told me earlier he’s Carabiniere. Not Charleston PD.”

    
“He showed up rather unexpectedly. In Charleston last night. Don’t ask me. I’m more confused than you are.”

    
She’s still stung. It wasn’t a pleasant surprise when Benton appeared at her house last night and had Captain Poma with him. For an instant, she was speechless with surprise, and after coffee and soup, they left just as abruptly as they had arrived. She hasn’t seen Benton since, and she’s unhappy and hurt, and not sure what to say to him when she sees him – whenever that might be. Before she flew here this morning, she considered taking off her ring.

    
“DNA,” Dr. Franz is saying. “So we don’t want to screw this up with bleach. But the signal would be better if we could get rid of skin debris and oils. If that’s what this is.”

    
It’s like looking at constellations of stars. Do they resemble animals or even a dipper? Does the moon have a face? What is she really seeing? And she pushes Benton from her thoughts so she can concentrate.

    
“No bleach, and to be safe, we definitely should try DNA,” she says. “And although epithelial cells are common in GSR, that’s only when a suspect’s hands are dabbed with double-sided sticky carbon tape. So what we’re seeing, if it’s skin, doesn’t make sense unless the skin cells were transferred by the killer’s hands. Or the cells were already on the windowpane. But what would be peculiar about the latter is the glass was cleaned, wiped off, and we’re seeing fibers from that. Consistent with white cotton, and the dirty T-shirt I found in the laundry basket is white cotton, but what does that mean? Not much, really. The laundry room would be a landfill of microscopic fibers.”

    
“At this magnification, everything becomes a landfill.” Dr. Franz clicks the mouse, and manipulates and repositions, and the electron beam strikes an area of broken glass.

    
Beneath the polyurethane foam, which dried clear, cracks look like canyons. Blurred white shapes might be more epithelial cells, and lines and pores are a skin imprint from some part of the body hitting the glass. There are fragments of hair.

    
“Someone ran into it or punched it?” Dr. Franz says. “That’s how it was broken, maybe?”

    
“Not with a hand or the bottom of a foot,” Scarpetta points out. “No friction ridge detail.” She can’t stop thinking about Rome. She says, “Instead of the GSR having been transferred from someone’s hands, maybe it was in the sand.”

    
“You mean before he touched it?”

    
“Maybe. Drew Martin wasn’t shot. We know that for a fact. Yet traces of barium, antimony, lead are in the sand found in her eye sockets.” She goes through it again, trying to sort it out. “He put the sand in there and then glued her eyelids shut. So what appears to be GSR could have been on his hands and was transferred to the sand, because certainly he touched it. But what if the GSR is there because it was already there?”

    
“First time I’ve ever heard of anybody doing something like that. What kind of world do we live in?”

    
“I hope it will be the last time we hear of somebody doing something like that, and I’ve been asking the same question most of my life,” she says.

    
“Nothing to say it wasn’t already there,” Dr. Franz says. “In other words, in this case” – he indicates the images on the screen – “is the sand on the glue or is the glue on the sand? And was the sand on his hands or were his hands in the sand? The glue in Rome. You said they didn’t use mass spec. Did they analyze it with FTIR?”

    
“I don’t think so. It’s cyanoacrylate. That’s as much as I know,” she says. “If we can try FTIR and see what molecular fingerprint we get.”

    
“Fine.”

    
“On the glue from the window and also the glue on the coin?”

    
“Certainly.”

    
Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy is a simpler concept than the name implies. Chemical bonds of a molecule absorb light wavelengths and produce an annotated spectrum that is as unique as a fingerprint. At first glance, what they find is no surprise. The spectra are the same for the glue used on the window and the glue on the coin: Both are a cyanoacrylate but not one either Scarpetta or Dr. Franz recognizes. The molecular structure isn’t the ethylcyanoacrylate of everyday superglue. It’s something different.

    
“Two-octylcyanoacrylate,” Dr. Franz says, and the day is running away from them. It’s half past two. “I have no idea what that is except, obviously, an adhesive. And the glue in Rome? The molecular structure of that?”

    
“I’m not sure anyone asked,” she says.

    
Historic buildings softly lit, and the white steeple of Saint Michael’s pointing sharply at the moon.

    
From her splendid room, Dr. Self can’t distinguish the harbor and the ocean from the sky because there are no stars. It has stopped raining, but not for long.

    
“I love the pineapple fountain, not that you can see it from here.” She talks to the city lights beyond her window because it’s more pleasant than talking to Shandy. “Way down there at the water, below the market. And little children, so many of them underprivileged, splash in it during the summer. I will say, if you have one of those expensive condos, the noise would rather much tarnish your mood. Listen, I hear a helicopter. Do you hear it?” Dr. Self says. “The Coast Guard. And those huge planes the Air Force has. They seem like flying battleships, overhead every other minute, but then you know about those big planes. Wasting more taxpayers’ money for what?”

    
“I wouldn’t have told you if I’d thought you’d stop paying me,” Shandy says from her chair near a window, where she has no interest in the view.

    
“For more waste, more death,” Dr. Self says. “We know what happens when these boys and girls come home. We know it all too well, don’t we, Shandy?”

    
“Give me what we talked about and maybe I’ll leave you alone. I just want what everybody else does. There’s nothing wrong with that. I don’t give a shit about Iraq,” Shandy says. “I’m not interested in sitting here for hours talking about your politics. You want to hear real politics, come hang out at the bar.” She laughs in a not-so-nice way. “Now, that’s a thought, you at the bar. You on a big ole hog.” She rattles ice in her drink. “A Bush-whacker in Bush country.”

    
“Or perhaps you’re shrubs.”

    
“Cause we hate A-rabs and queers and don’t believe in flushing little babies down the toilet or selling their pieces and parts to medical science. We love apple pie, buffalo wings, Budweiser, and Jesus. Oh, yeah – and fucking. Give me what I came here for and I’ll shut up and go home.”

    
“As a psychiatrist, I’ve always said know yourself. But not so with you, my dear. I recommend you do your best not to know yourself at all.”

    
“One thing’s for sure,” Shandy says snidely. “Marino sure got over you when he got all over me.”

    
“He did exactly what I predicted. He thought with the wrong head,” Dr. Self says.

    
“You may be as rich and famous as Oprah, but all the power and glory in the world can’t turn on a man like I do. I’m young and sweet and know what they want, and I can keep going as long as they can and make them go a lot longer than they ever dreamed they could,” Shandy says.

    
“Are you talking about sex or the Kentucky Derby?”

    
“I’m talking about you being old,” Shandy says.