It gives me the heebie-jeebies. When I worked as an OR nurse, I never did the eye cases if I could help it. Eyes creep me out.
“No problem,” Arnie says with a shrug. “How about we do the X-rays together and then I’ll collect the vitreous samples while you develop the film.”
“That would be great. Thanks.”
I get the X-ray processor turned on and warmed up while Arnie fetches Harold Minniver’s body from the fridge. After hoisting Minniver, still inside his body bag, onto the X-ray table, we shoot head-to-toe pictures of him. Then we put him back on the stretcher and wheel him into the autopsy room, where Arnie does the eye thing while I retreat to the dark room.
When I’m finished and carry the X-rays into the autopsy room, I see that Arnie has opened Minniver’s body bag but has only started with the vitreous samples. “Have you gone over any of the evidence from Callie Dunkirk yet?” I ask him, turning my back and hanging the films on a wall-mounted viewer.
“I typed the blood from her wound,” Arnie says. I shudder as I hear the faint squishy squeak of a needle entering an eyeball. “I also looked for fingerprints on the knife that killed her but the carved surface of the handle isn’t very conducive to retaining them. I found a very small partial and sent it to Madison but I don’t know if it will be enough. And those metal fragments we found in her hair? Turned out those are lead bits, most likely from soldering.”
I’d forgotten about the metal bits and as soon as Arnie says this, I recall Hurley’s workshop, where I saw both an acetylene torch and a soldering iron. I hadn’t made the connection when I was there last night; I was too distracted by Hurley’s presence. But I’m making it now and it seems a little too coincidental. The earrings Hurley gave me are still in my ears and my lobes feel hot all of a sudden.
“I also examined that hair we found in the congealed blood of the wound,” Arnie says.
This is the direction I wanted the discussion to go so I shake off my sense of dread and try to focus on my original plan.
“What, exactly, do you look for when you examine hair evidence?” I ask, trying to sound only mildly curious. Arnie loves talking about his work and he takes great pride in what he does. So I’m hoping for a basic rundown of hair as trace evidence to give me some idea of what to look for if I compare Hurley’s hair to the one found on Callie, assuming I can do so on the sly. But I forgot how extreme and varied Arnie’s interests are, and he gives me a whole lot more than the basics.
“You’d be amazed at the things you can learn from hair,” he starts. “Hair evidence has figured quite prominently in some very high-profile cases throughout history. For instance, an analysis of hairs from Napoleon’s body revealed that he may have died of arsenic poisoning. Hairs that were connected to the anthrax mailing several years ago were analyzed with the hope they would implicate a scientist named Bruce Ivins at Fort Detrick in Maryland who was the primary suspect, but they weren’t a match. The scientist then committed suicide, leaving that hair evidence as one of the biggest puzzles in the case.”
Arnie pauses a second and a twinkle appears in his eye, letting me know the best is yet to come.
“On a more abstract level there is a rumor that hair samples collected in the Pacific Northwest prove the existence of a Big Foot type creature.”
“And there are some who believe that redheads are actually alien-human hybrids.”
Realizing that Arnie has now donned his foil hat, I try to steer him back on track. “I’d love to have you show me how you do hair analysis. I need to learn and it sounds like you really know your stuff.”
“Sure.” He brightens and stands a little straighter, puffing his narrow chest out so that he resembles a bird. If only Hurley were so easy. Arnie glances at his wristwatch and says, “We probably have time to do a quickie now if you want, before Izzy comes in.”
As the double entendre hits him, his face turns Day-Glo red and his glasses start to fog over.
“A quickie it is then,” I say, smiling.
For once, Arnie is speechless. His mouth opens and closes a few times, and he stammers out a few unintelligible syllables before turning away. He spends a moment zipping the body bag closed and cleaning his glasses off. By the time he’s done, he seems to have recovered. “Come on up to my lab,” he says, “and I’ll give you a crash course on hair analysis.”
“I’ll meet you there in a minute. I need to make a quick trip to the ladies’ room first.” This is a lie but I need to fetch Hurley’s hair from my purse and I don’t want Arnie to know that. I scoot back to the library, take the paper-wrapped hair from my purse, and shove it into my pocket. As I dawdle long enough to equal a bathroom trip, I brace myself for what lies ahead, wondering if I’m about to commit career suicide.
Chapter 10
Arnie’s lab area is located on the second floor of the building and is accessible only with a key card. As I make my way up the stairs, I ponder the potential implications of what I’m hoping to do. What if the hair I have matches the one found on Callie’s body? Where do I go from there? Can I believe Hurley? Can I trust him? Or am I letting my hormones get the better of me?
Arnie’s lab is an amazing demonstration of efficiency and order. The room looks smaller than it is because it’s jam-packed. Across the room from the entrance is Arnie’s small desk, which sits perpendicular to the storage cabinets lining the far end of the left-hand wall. The right-hand wall contains a long, equipment-covered counter full of machines, microscopes, analyzers, and other lab paraphernalia, with more storage cabinets mounted overhead. I find Arnie standing near the middle of this counter and he waves me over.
“This is a comparison microscope,” he says, pointing to the device in front of him, which looks like two microscopes joined at the hip with a double eyepiece centered between them. “It allows you to examine two objects side by side to look for differences and commonalities. For instance, I could have compared the hair we found on Callie’s body to one of her own hairs to try to determine if it was hers or the killer’s. I didn’t, because the evidential hair is coarse and black and hers are fine and auburn so the sources are obviously different. If the evidential hair wasn’t a human hair—it is, and I’ll explain how I know that in a second—I can look for a match in one of my reference books, or examine it next to sample references for different animal species: dogs, cats, horses, cows, etcetera, until I can determine what it came from. While an animal hair might not point directly to a given suspect, it can be useful in placing someone at a crime scene.”
He pauses, reaches up, and plucks a hair from his own head, wincing as he does. I’m not sure if he’s grimacing because of pain, or if it’s because his own hair is rapidly thinning on top, a fact I suspect he compensates for with his ponytail.
He cuts a segment of the hair and puts it on top of a glass slide. “We typically fix hairs as a wet mount using a drop of glycerin,” he explains, and after grabbing a nearby bottle, he unscrews its top and uses the attached eyedropper to apply a drop of a clear, viscous liquid to the hair. Then he places a cover slip atop the mount, causing the glycerin to spread over the entire sample. He positions the prepped slide on the bed of a nearby single stage microscope and turns its light on. After removing his glasses and positioning them atop his head, he looks through the eyepiece and adjusts the focus. When he’s done he steps back and says, “First let me give you a crash course on hair structure. Take a look.”
I bend down and peer through the scope.
“You’re looking at the hair magnified one hundred times. You should be able to see three basic layers. The outer layer is called the cuticle—that’s the part that looks like overlapping fish scales. It tells me what species the hair came from because each animal has a slightly different pattern. The dark line through the center of the hair shaft is the medulla, and between it and the cuticle is the cortex, which is where you’ll find tiny cells that contain whatever pigment colors the hair. How that pigment is distributed can vary from person to person and can sometimes be useful in matching a hair to a particular owner.”
I stand up and blink several times to adjust my focus. “You need a root to get DNA from a hair, right?”
“Yes, you do. But there is a lot of information you can get without the root. You can compare a hair to known samples for similarities. You can tell if a hair was cut off or pulled out, whether it’s human or animal in origin, and, if it is human, you can usually tell if it’s Negroid or Caucasian and where on the body it came from. Age might be
