In identical twins, triplets, sextuplets, the DNA was identical, only the fingerprints were different.
“Dr. Scarpetta,” Kuhn said, “all I can tell you is the hairs
are alike visually, their morphology the same, in other words.”
“Well, these hairs on this lady are alike visually, too.”
“Any short ones, as if they were cut?”
“No,” I replied.
“Sony I don’t have more to tell you,” he said.
“Believe me, Jamie, you’ve just told me quite a lot,” I said. “I just don’t know what any of it means.”
“You figure it out,” he tried to lighten up, “we’ll write a paper on it.”
I tried the trace evidence lab next and didn’t even bother saying hello to Larry Posner. He was peering into a microscope that probably was more sharply focused than he was when he looked up at me.
“Larry,” I said, “everything’s going to hell.”
“Always has been.”
“What about our unidentified guy? Anything?” I asked. “Because let me tell you, I’m really groping:’
“I’m relieved. I thought you dropped by to ask me about your lady downstairs,” he replied. “And I was going to have to break the news that I’m not Mercury with winged feet.”
“There may be a link between the two cases. Same weird hair found on the bodies. Human hair, Larry.”
He thought about this.for a long moment.
“I don’t get it,” he finally said. “And I hate to tell you, but I don’t have anything quite so dramatic to report to you.”
“Anything you can tell me at all?” I asked.
“Start with the soil samples from the container. PLM picked up the usual,” he began, referring to the polarized light núcroscopy. “Quartz, sand, diatomite, flint and elements like iron and aluminum. Lots of trash. Glass, paint chips, vegetable debris, rodent hairs. You can only begin to imagine all the crap inside a cargo container like that.
“And diatoms all over the place, but what’s a little off-beat is what I found when I examined the ones swept up from the container’s floor, and the ones from the’surface of the body and exterior of the clothes. They’re a mixture of saltwater and freshwater diatoms.”
“Makes sense if the ship started out in the Scheldt River in Antwerp and then spent most of the voyage at sea,” I remarked.
“But the inside of the clothing? That’s exclusively freshwater. Don’t get that unless he washed his clothes, shoes, socks, even underwear in a river, lake, whatever. And I wouldn’t expect you to launder Armani and crocodile shoes in a river or lake, or swim in clothes like that, either.
“So it’s like he’s got freshwater diatoms against his skin, which is weird. And the mixture of salt and fresh on the outside, which you’d expect under the circumstances. You know, walking around on the dock, saltwater diatoms in the air, getting on his clothes, but not on the inside of them”
“What about the vertebral bone?” I then asked.
“Freshwater diatoms. Consistent with freshwater drowning, maybe the river in Antwerp. And the hair on the guy’s head-all freshwater diatoms. No saltwater ones mixed in.”
Posner widened his eyes and rubbed them, as if they were very tired.
“This is really twisting my brain like a dishrag. Diatoms that don’t add up, weirdo baby hair and the vertebral bone. Like an Oreo. One side chocolate, the otter vanilla, with chocolate and vanilla icing in the middle and a scoop of vanilla on top.”
“Spare me the analogies, Larry. I’m confused enough.”
“So how do you explain it?”
“I can only offer a scenario.”
“Fire away.”
“He might have only freshwater diatoms in his hair,if his head were immersed in fresh water,” I said. “If he were put
.headfirst inside a barrel with fresh water in the bottom, for example. You do that to somebody, they can’t get out, just like toddlers who fall headfirst into buckets of waterthose five-gallon plastic kind detergent corRes in. Waisthigh and very stable. Impossible to topple it over. Or he could have been drowned in a normal-size bucket of fresh water if someone held him down.”
“I’m going to have nightmares,” Posner said.
“Don’t stay here until the roads start freezing again,” I said.