The Stones Cry Out (12 page)

But mineralogy also took me places I didn't want to go. My very first case involved a pair of lungs so small the organs were unrecognizable. The lungs arrived with a local PD's homicide report, which said the body of a little girl named Ellie Mullins, age three, was discovered buried under a slag heap. When I examined her lungs, I found soil. Lots of soil. So much soil that it meant one thing: Ellie Mullins was buried alive. Raped, then buried alive.

After that case I drove home to Richmond. I wanted to talk to my dad; I was having doubts about my job. Rocks and minerals -- yes. But the nightmares that came with knowing a preschooler was violated before she choked to death on coal dust? No.

My father, a superior court judge, listened patiently.

"I don't always enjoy being a judge,” he said. “Some cases never let me forget the gruesome details. But we're called to live beyond fear, Raleigh. We can’t hide. We can’t pretend evil doesn't exist. Your job won’t be easy. But will be necessary. Because the stones cry out. And you have an obligation to listen."

So I stayed in the lab. I stayed until he was murdered. Until I heard louder cries.

Now, standing in the doorway of the lab, I watched Eric Duncan. My former colleague was hovering over a polarized light microscope with Kerr's Optical Mineralogy open on the desk beside him. The pages of mineral photographs looked shiny under the afternoon sunlight that cut into the room from the north window. When Eric's hand reached for the magnification dial, his fingers palsied. He stopped, shaking out his fingers like somebody flinging water.

At my knock, he looked up. He had a freckled face that made him seem much younger than his actual age, which was fifty-two.

He smiled. But then the smile went away. "What happened to your face?"

I reached up, touching my cheekbones. My fingers were covered with Band-Aids. "Nothing.”

I walked into the room, handing him the small box of evidence.

"For me?" He batted his eyes, feigning appreciation. "Oh, you shouldn't have."

Digging his heels into the white linoleum, he rolled his chair across the room to his desk. He pulled out the chain of custody forms then opened each film canister packed inside the box. The canisters contained the soil I collected from the roof.

With a Sharpie he initialed each cap with his initials. ZG. Lab techs never used real initials because different people could have identical initials. It also protected a technician's anonymity. With more and more criminals filing Freedom of Information Acts, the last thing an investigator wanted was his identity attached to a guilty verdict. But Eric's ZG looked strange. A backward S with a drunken C. And he capped the Sharpie using both hands.

"Let me guess," he said. "You brought me concrete block."

I was insulted. "It's not that boring."

"Glass fragments. No -- wait.
Safety
glass fragments."

I shook my head. "Think of Richmond, what do you see?"

"Cobblestones."

"You're warm."

"Brick."

"Bingo. And some mortar."

"Oh, mortar. Wonderful," he said without a trace of enthusiasm. "I see the Q on your paperwork. No K?"

Q stood for Question—what is this stuff? Where did it come from? K stood for Comparison. For example, Soil K1 came from the scene of the crime. Soil K2 from the suspect's home. Do the soils match? But since the police, specifically Owler, refused to release any evidence, I didn't have comparison samples. Yet.

"I'm hoping to get Ks to you soon. Right now I need the mineral composition of the brick and the mineral composition of the soil on the roof. And where the soil might come from."

"Provenance," he said.

"I don't use them fancy words no more." I smiled. It hurt my face.

"You look terrible," he said.

"Thanks. How long?"

He reached for the clipboard that dangled by a string on his desk. The backlog. His neck muscles twitched as he read it. "You'll never guess what I got from Iowa yesterday."

Eric liked guessing games. Probably because his work left no room for guessing. We played this game a lot when I was in the lab.

"Iowa?” I said. "Then my first guess is Farmer Brown's dirt."

"Here’s a hint. The local PD wants us to examine tire treads from a 1993 Chevy truck."

"It backed over a cow."

"No. The police suspect the driver took a joy-ride. Over the high school football field."

"Uh-oh."

"Right, Iowa football? They’re loaded for bear. Or hogs, or whatever the mascot is out there. But they sent me all four wheels and fifty comparison soils. Fifty, Raleigh. From one football field."

"You should be thankful it wasn't every ten yards."

He went back to reading the evidence schedule.

Eric Duncan once applied to Quantico, hoping to become an agent. But one morning he was shampooing his hair and couldn’t get his left hand to work. The next day it was his entire left arm. By week's end doctors diagnosed early stage multiple sclerosis. Eric came back to the mineralogy lab, and had been here ever since.

"Sorry the workload is overwhelming,” I said.

"I'm not looking for sympathy." He didn't even look up, tapping the Sharpie against the clipboard. "I see you marked this case an expedite."

"My supervisor wants it closed yesterday. And . . ."

I didn't finish the sentence.

"And what?"

"She's asking about agent transfers."

"Monday," he said. "I'll get something to you by Monday."

I sighed, relieved. "Thank you, Eric."

"But you have to return the favor."

“No more blind dates with your friends."

"How could I know he collected Transformers."

"The guy talked about Optimus Prime for two hours. Two hours of that is worse than Iowa football."

"I promise, no blind dates. Just tell me about your life as an agent."

"That's it?"

"Start with what happened to your face. Tonight. Dinner."

I agreed to meet back here later, then walked down the hall to the Hairs and Fibers department, looking for my former colleague Mike Rodriguez. I found him in one of the glass-fronted exam room wearing his safety glasses and white lab coat. In one hand, he held a metal spatula, scraping down a pair of jeans that hung from a metal bar over white butcher paper. The fibers freckled the paper.

I opened the door. “Hey, Mike.”

"Raleigh." Mike pushed up the safety glasses. "Are you okay?"

"Fine. Why?"

"That looks like a very serious sunburn."

"Oh, yeah, that. I’m okay."

"If you don’t use sunblock, you're going to wind up with ichthyderm."

Oh, the vocabulary of forensics.

"Ichthyderm,” I said. “That would be . . ."

"Translated literally from the Greek, ichthy means fish, and derm means skin. Sunbather’s skin. Smoker’s skin. Skin like you have scales."

Several minutes -- and several Greek translations -- later Mike moved on to scolding me for using First-Aid tape instead of adhesive lifts. I apologized profusely and tried to convey the urgency of this evidence, but he refused to promise anything by Monday. He did however tell me a long version of what was going on in his life, and it was almost as interesting as the two-hour lecture on Optimus Prime.

When I finally got back to the mineralogy lab, my head was pounding with hunger. I was debating moving my dinner date with Eric to lunch. But a hollow metallic clatter, like cheap spoons tossed in a diner’s cutlery bin, stopped me at the door.

Eric was strapping metal braces over his thin legs. At first he didn’t see me. But when he glanced up, his freckled face reflected all the grief that was squeezing my own heart.

"I hate to tell you this," he said, "but we can’t go dancing tonight."

"Eric—when?"

"I got them in April. Next up is my wheelchair. I'll probably be out of the lab by September."

"Why?"

"Oh, come on, Raleigh. Can you see me shuffling into a courtroom like this? The jury will take one look at me and slap 'handicapped' on the evidence too. I’m every defense attorney's dream for a forensics witness."

He bent down, continuing to buckle the braces. I wanted it to stop. I wanted him to stand up and walk. But that was beyond me, beyond my power. And the next words out of my mouth took every ounce of courage.

"Can I pray for you?"

“Go right ahead.” He continued to snap the braces. "At this point I'm in no position to reject prayers. Maybe those holy rollers your mother hangs out can pray for me, too."

"I mean, now."

He looked up. "Here. In the lab?"

I nodded.

"Raleigh." His face flushed. "I really do appreciate your faith. Really. I do. It's gotten you through some tough times, I know that. But I'm a scientist. You know? Big bang. The fossil record. Evolution of the Species -- that's my bible."

"I know."

He held my gaze a long moment. Then he glanced past me, into the examination area beyond the door. Where his esteemed fellow scientists calculated precise figures and devised cause and pinpointed effect. Everything based on fact. And only fact.

When his gray eyes returned to me, they were the color of ash.

He gave a short nod. I turned to close the door.

"Raleigh?"

I looked over my shoulder. "Yes?"

"Lock it," he said.

By the time I got back to Richmond that night a necklace of blue sapphire clouds had sutured themselves to an amethyst sky. And the downtown streets were tipping the fulcrum from light to dark. The pawnbrokers and ambulance-chasing lawyers had closed up shop for the day, setting alarms before the hookers and drug dealers stepped from the shadows with palpable impatience.

But Milky Lewis wasn’t afraid of the dark. During my early dinner with Eric he called my cellphone, asking me to meet him in the VCU art building.

He was alone in the sculpture studio. When I walked in, the wet plaster coated his dark muscular arms.

"Ruh-ruh-raleigh," he said. "What happened to your fuh-face?"

Every time I heard Milky's stutter, I wondered how childhood could wield so much influence over the rest of our lives. Medical experts might insist that stutters were just some weird glitch, random as birthmarks, but I was convinced Milky's speech impediment came from watching his mother sell her body around the Creighton Court housing project. Her furtive unions produced six younger siblings, all from different fathers, and all of whom were raised by Milky. He toilet-trained them as toddlers, and made sure they stayed in school. But he was also a pragmatic businessman, and when the time came, each of his siblings worked for him as a drug mule. Until one night his little brother was shot dead during a delivery.

That’s how the FBI "persuaded" Milky to flip. We offered to help his siblings. But even as he revealed the names and numbers and locations to our task force, Milky’s dark eyes held a soiled regret. His eyes had changed slightly since he got the art scholarship at VCU. Slightly. But not enough.

"You doing all right?" I asked.

"They put my sc-sc-sculpture out there."

I saw it on my way in. Set in the atrium, with his name on it. “The giraffe?"

He nodded.

"Is that some inside joke about sticking your neck out?"

He smiled. His large hands massaged a lump of chalky plaster, shaping it on a wooden board.

"I found some long puh-plastic tubes. Nuh-nuh-nothing to cut 'em with. So I made a juh-giraffe."

I wanted to warn him.
Don't tell the art snobs that last part
. They didn’t appreciate practicality. "Is this a good place to talk?" I asked.

"I got to luh-lock the door."

He wiped his hands on a dirty towel and left, and I strolled around the studio. The white plaster sculptures loomed like ghosts. Or maybe pieces of ghosts because I couldn't quite decipher them. Abstract, surreal. Nothing that resembled reality. To people like my sister Helen, reality was a shameful aesthetic. But as I was standing in front of what looked like an arm, my own reality struck.