gotten anywhere close to him for an analysis of Trixie's hair sample . .
. if he hadn't known Max when he was a skinny little geek in college, back when they were roommates and Bartholemew served as bodyguard in return for private tutorials in chemistry and physics.
He'd driven to Boston that night with a hank of Trixie Stone's hair on the seat beside him. The salon, Live and Let Dye, hadn't even sent the sample in to Locks of Love yet; it had been languishing in a drawer in the back room near the peroxide and the paraffin wax. Now he was sitting on top of a counter, waiting for Max to tell him something useful.
The lab was piled with boxes of dust and hair and fiber for comparison. A poster of Max's hero, Edmond Locard, hung over his polarized-light microscope. Bartholemew could remember Max reading books about Locard, the father of forensic science, even back at U
Maine. “He burned off his fingerprints,” Max had told him once with admiration, “just to see if they grew back in the same patterns!”
It had been almost thirty years since they'd graduated, but Max looked the same. Balder, but still skinny, with a permanent curve to his back that came from bending over a microscope. “Huh,” he said.
“What's that mean?”
Max pushed back from his workspace. “What do you know about hair?”
Bartholemew grinned at the other man's gleaming pate. “More than you do.”
“Hair's got three layers that are important, in terms of forensics,” Max said, ignoring his comment. “The cortex, the cuticle, and the medulla. If you think of a piece of hair as a pencil, the medulla is the graphite, the cortex is the wood, and the paint on the outside is the cuticle. The medulla is sometimes in pieces and differs from hair to hair on the same human head. The cells in the cortex have pigment, which is pretty much what I'm trying to match up between your two samples. You with me so far?”
Bartholemew nodded.
“I can tell you, by looking at a hair, if it's human or not. I can tell you if it came from someone of Caucasian, Negroid, or Mongolian origin. I can tell you where it came from on the body and whether the hair was forcibly removed or burned or crushed. I can tell you that a hair excludes a suspect, but I can't use it to pinpoint a particular one.”
He spoke as he bent over the microscope again. “What I'm seeing in both samples is a moderate shaft diameter and diameter variation, medulla continuous and relatively narrow, soft texture. That means they're both hairs from a human head. The hue, value, and intensity of the color are nearly identical. The tip of your known sample was cut with a pair of scissors; the other still has a root attached, which is soft and distorted . . . telling me it was yanked out. Pigment varies a bit between the two samples, although not enough for me to draw any conclusion. However, the cortex of the hair you found on the victim's body is much more prominent than the hairs in the known sample.”
“The known sample came from a haircut three weeks before the murder,” Bartholemew said. “Isn't it possible that during those three weeks, the cortex got more . . . what did you say again?”
“Prominent,” Max answered. “Yeah, it's possible, especially if the suspect had some kind of chemical hair treatment or was excessively exposed to sunlight or wind. Theoretically, it's also possible for two hairs from the same human head to just plain look different. But there's also the chance, here, that you're talking about two different heads.” He looked at Bartholemew. “If you asked me to get up in front of a jury, I couldn't tell them conclusively that these two hairs came from the same person.” Bartholemew felt like he'd been punched in the chest. He'd been so certain that he'd been on the right track here, that Trixie Stone's disappearance flagged her involvement in the murder of Jason Underhill.
“Hey,” Max said, looking at his face. “I don't admit this to many people, but microscopy's not always an exact science. Even when I think I do see a match, I tell detectives to get a DNA analysis to back up what the scope says.”
Mike sighed. “I have a root on only one of the hairs. That rules out DNA.”
“It rules out nuclear DNA,” Max corrected. He leaned over and took a card out of his desk. He scribbled something on the back and handed it to Bartholemew. “Skip's a friend of mine, at a private lab in Virginia. Make sure you say I sent you.” Bartholemew took the card. SKIPPER JOHANSSEN, he read. GENETTA LABS. MITOCHONDRIAL DNA.
* * *
By the time the storm blew in, Trixie had already lost feeling in her toes. She was nearly catatonic, lulled by the cold and the exhaust of the snow machine. At the first strike of ice against her cheek, Trixie blinked back to awareness. They were still somewhere on the river - the scenery looked no different than it had an hour ago, except that the lights in the sky had vanished, washed over by gray clouds that touched down at the line of the horizon.
Snow howled. Visibility grew even worse. Trixie began to imagine that she had fallen into one of her father's comic book panels, one filled with Kirby crackle - the burst of white bubbles that Jack Kirby, a penciler from years ago, had invented to show an energy field. The shapes in the darkness turned into villains from her father's art - twisted trees became the clawed arms of a witch; icicles were the bared fangs of a demon.
Willie slowed the snow machine to a crawl and then stopped it altogether. He shouted to Trixie over the roar of the wind. “We have to wait this out. It'll clear up by morning.” Trixie wanted to answer him, but she'd spent so long clenching her jaw shut that she couldn't pry it open wide enough for a word. Willie moved to the back of the machine, rummaging around. He handed her a blue tarp. “Tuck this under the treads,” he said. “We can use it to get out of the wind.”
He left her to her own devices and disappeared into the whorls of snow. Trixie wanted to cry. She was so cold that she couldn't even classify it as cold anymore; she had no idea what he meant by treads, and she wanted to go home. She clutched the tarp against her parka, not moving, wishing that Willie would come back. She saw him moving in and out of the beam cast by the snow machine's headlight. He seemed to be snapping off the branches of a dead tree next to the riverbank. When he saw her still sitting on the snow machine, he walked up to her. She expected him to scream about not pulling her weight, but instead his mouth tightened and he helped her off. “Get under here,” he said, and he had her sit with
her back to the snow machine before he wrapped it in the tarp and pulled it over her, an awning to cut the wind.
