wouldn't willingly cross the Hudson River without good cause, much less go somewhere like the Show-me State.'
Chuckling, Lindsay said, 'That's Missouri.'
'Beg pardon?'
'Missouri is the Show-me State. Montana is the Treasure State. Or Big Sky Country.'
'There's treasure in Montana?'
Lindsay smiled, remembering something Danny had said: that Montana's best treasure was in New York now. It was one of the most romantic things Danny had said to her-not that the competition was fierce, as Danny wasn't good at romantic sayings. Gestures, yes, but the actual words had a hard time making it through his sarcasm filter.
To Parsons, she only said, 'There's some left, yeah. Let me know about the blood.'
'I will. And best of luck with Danny.'
Tempted to say 'I don't think I need it,' Lindsay just nodded and left. Things had been going really well for them, after a rocky start. Still, they were taking it very slow. Office romances were fraught with peril, and they didn't want to risk the work. They also weren't completely sure how Mac would respond to two people on the same team having a relationship, though Danny seemed to think that he didn't have a leg to stand on, considering his relationship with Peyton.
But Peyton wasn't on the team. It wasn't the same thing.
However, she'd worry about that later. While she was waiting for Parsons and the MALDI to finish their respective work, she returned to the necklace.
Something had been bothering her about the necklace from the moment she walked into the Rosengauses' apartment, and looking at it now, she finally realized what it was: it was sparkling. Gold necklaces didn't stay that clean without a great deal of effort on the part of the owner.
Repeating the steps she'd taken with the dried blood, Lindsay used the cotton swab on a cleaner part of the necklace, hoping that the residue that came off would be something useful. Bringing it over to the MALDI, she saw that the mass spectrometer had just finished on the dried blood sample. Grabbing the printout from the printer attached to the MALDI, she saw that the hemoglobin came from human blood, type AB-negative.
Now she put the new sample into the mass spectrometer and ran it. While she waited, she returned to the necklace, examining it closely but not finding anything else of use. However, she did call up the autopsy photos and compared the photos she'd taken of the lobster-claw clasp to that of the abrasion on the back of Maria Campagna's neck. It wasn't a perfect match-one of the first things she learned in the Bozeman crime lab was that there was no such animal-but it was a very close match. Certainly close enough to convince a jury that the necklace belonged to her and that she'd worn it regularly.
When the MALDI finished, Lindsay looked at the molecular composition and found her memory jogged to a case she'd had back home a few years earlier. It was very similar to a sample from that rash of home robberies. The perp's lawyer had claimed that the jewelry recovered wasn't the same as the jewelry that was reported stolen, and one of the ways Lindsay had been able to prove the lawyer wrong was by testing the residue of silver polish and gold cleaner on the recovered jewelry against what the victim used.
Right now, she was staring at a molecular composition that bore a
She was flipping through patent applications on the computer when Stella came in, shrugging into a white lab coat. 'How goes it?'
'Not bad. All done with Cabrera?'
Stella nodded. 'Yeah, the testimony'll be a breeze. Anything on that necklace?'
Handing the results from the MALDI to her, Lindsay said, 'The blood's definitely human. Type AB-negative. Jane's running it now. Oh, and she said that the only DNA on Maria's knuckles was Maria's.'
'Damn.' Stella scanned the results. 'Morgenstern's O-positive.'
'There's more,' Lindsay said. She knew Stella and Angell both had latched onto Morgenstern as a suspect, so she knew that this news wouldn't be well received. 'I examined the necklace, and besides the blood, there's residue from another substance. I've been checking it against patent applications, and I've got a hit.' She pointed at the flat-screen monitor in front of her. Two identical molecular compositions were in two windows on the screen, but one image came from the U.S. Patent Office and the other from the New York Crime Lab. 'This is a gold and silver cleaner that went on the market earlier this year.'
Stella was impressed. 'Why'd you go straight to the patent applications?'
'It looked similar to the usual gold and silver cleaners that I've seen, but it was different enough that I figured it was something new. We had a case back in Bozeman involving this stuff. I got to learn more than I thought it was possible to know about what you use to clean jewelry. Besides, apart from the bloodstain, the necklace was
Nodding, Stella said, 'That tracks with what Angell got out of the other employees. She reinterviewed Annie Wolfowitz, the one Maria was supposed to close with last night. She said that the necklace was clean when she saw it last and that Maria was obsessive about keeping it shiny.'
'I think that's part of why Dina stole it,' Lindsay said. 'Maria was constantly showing it off and reminding everyone that her boyfriend got it for her. Not that I blame her-it's eighteen karat. That isn't cheap.'
Letting out a long sigh, Stella said, 'The problem is, all of this is telling us that it probably isn't Morgenstern. Whoever left this blood trace is probably our killer, and we don't know who it is.'
Stella was growing quite frustrated with the Campagna case. Lindsay's work on the necklace had been superb, but mostly what it did was eliminate Jack Morgenstern as a suspect, which put them back at square one.
When Mac returned from Staten Island, Stella asked to see him for a brainstorming session. She brought Lindsay and Angell along as well.
Just as they were settling down, Parsons sent Stella a text message. Stella read it and sighed. 'DNA on the blood isn't Morgenstern's or Maria's and it doesn't match any of the reference samples we got. So not only is Morgenstern clear, but so are Dina and all the other people who work there, and so's the boyfriend.'
Angell sighed. 'Great. We can also eliminate Gomer Wilson.'
Frowning in confusion, Stella asked, 'Who?'
'The guy from the Health Department that Maria got into a shouting match with?'
Snapping her fingers, Stella said, 'Right. How could I forget Gomer?'
'Who's Gomer?' Mac asked Stella.
'According to Belluso, the bakery was shut down by the Health Department after their inspector, a man named Gomer Wilson, got into an argument with our vic. He shut Belluso's down for a day.'
'Unfortunately,' Angell said, 'he has an airtight alibi. Last week, he and his wife and two sons moved to Indianapolis. His wife's a college professor, and she left her job in NYU's English department for a position at Purdue. He was at a job interview at the Indianapolis DMV late in the afternoon, so unless he went straight from the interview to the airport, boarded a flight to New York and went straight from LaGuardia to Riverdale, I don't think he's our killer.'
Mac leaned forward in his chair. 'All right, what do we know? I mean, know for sure.'
Stella started counting off items on her fingers. 'We know that Morgenstern went into Belluso's right before closing, which is around when Maria died, and that he and Maria were alone together. We know that there was a black poly/cotton fiber on Maria and that Morgenstern was wearing a black poly/cotton sweatshirt.'
'The fiber,' Lindsay added, 'was a match for Morgenstern's shirt, but it's also a match for one of
Nodding, Stella went on: 'We know he has a printer that could've been used to write the love letters DelVecchio brought us. And we know that he was previously arrested for rape.'
'But that was a false arrest,' Mac said.
'Yeah,' Angell said. 'I dug into the case file a little, just to be sure that there wasn't any wiggle room, and I talked to the guy at the five-two who handled it. It really was a case of mistaken ID. Morgenstern matched enough
