I pressed an intercom button to see if Jamie Kuhn was in.
“Let me find him,” a voice called back.
The instant he opened the door, Kuhn held out a clean, long white lab coat, gloves and mask. Contamination was the enemy of DNA, especially in an era when every pipette, microtome, glove, refrigerator and even pen used for labeling might be questioned in court. The degree of laboratory precautions had become just about as stringent as the sterile procedures found in the operating room.
“I hate to do this to you, Jamie,” I said.
“You always say that,” he said. “Come on in.”
There were three sets of doors to pass through, and fresh lab coats hung in each airlocked space to make sure you exchanged the one you’d just put on for yet another one. Tacky paper on the floors was for the bottom of your shoes. The process was repeated twice more to make sure no one carried contaminants from one area into another.
The examiners’ work area was an open, bright room of black counterspace and computers, water baths, containment units and laminar flow hoods. Individual stations were neatly arranged with mineral oil, autopipettes, polypropylene tubes and tube racks. Reagents, or the substances used to cause reactions, were made in big batches from molecular biology-grade chemicals. They were given unique identification numbers and stored in small aliquots away from chemicals kept for general use.
Contamination was managed primarily through serialization, heat denaturation, enzymatic digestion, screening, repeated analysis, ultraviolet irradiation, iodinizing irradiation, use of controls and samples taken from a healthy volunteer. If all else failed, the examiner just quit on certain samples. Maybe he tried again in a few months. Maybe he didn’t.
Polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, had made it possible to get DNA results in days instead of weeks. Now with short tandem repeat typing, STR, it was theoretically possible that Kuhn could get results in a day. That was, if there was cellular tissue for testing, and in the case of the pale hair from the unidentified man found in the container, there was not.
“That’s a damn shame,” I said. “Because it looks like I’ve found more of it. This time adhering to the body of the woman murdered last night at the Quik Cary.”
“Wait a minute. Am I hearing this right? The hair from the container guy’s clothing matches hair on her?”
“Looks like it. You can see my urgency.”
“Your urgency’s about to get more urgent,” he said. “Because the hair’s not cat hair, dog hair. It’s not animal hair. It’s human.”
“It can’t be,” I said.
“It absolutely is.”
Kuhn was a wiry young man who didn’t get excited by much. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen his eyes light up.
“Fine, unpigmented, rudimentary,” he went on. “Baby hair. I figured maybe the guy has a baby at home. But now, two cases? Maybe the same hair on the murdered lady?”
“Baby hair isn’t six or seven inches long,” I told him. “That’s what I collected from her body.”
“Maybe it grows longer in Belgium,” he dryly said.
“Let’s talk about the unidentified man in the container first. What would baby hair be doing all over him?” I asked. “Even if he does have a baby back home? And even if it were possible for baby hair to be that long?”
“Not all of them are that long. Some are extremely short. Like stubble when you shave:’
“Any of the hair forcibly removed?” I asked.
“I’m not seeing any roots with follicular tissues still adhering-mostly the bulbous-shaped roots you associate with hair naturally falling out. Shedding, in other words. Which is why I can’t do DNA.”
“But some of it’s been cut or shaved?” I thought out loud, drawing a blank.
“Right. Some’s been cut, some hasn’t. Like those weird styles. You’ve seen them-short on top and long and wispy on the sides.”
“Not on a baby I haven’t,” I answered.
“What if he had triplets, quintuplets, sextuplets because his wife had been on a fertility drug?” Kuhn suggested. “The hair would be the same but if it’s coming from, different kids that might explain the different lengths., The DNA would be the same, too, saying you had anything to test.”