I studied her handwritten lists. There were only two types of cases from my past experience that might account for such an abundance of debris. One was when a body was dumped in a landfill or some other dirty place such as a road shoulder or gravel parking lot, the other when it was transported from one scene to another in the dirty trunk or on the dirty floor of a car. Neither scenario applied to Beryl.
“Break it down for me by color,” I said. “Which of these are likely to be carpet versus garment fibers?”
“The six nylon fibers are red, dark red, blue, green, greenish yellow, and dark green. The greens may actually be black,” she added. “Black doesn’t look black under the scope. All of these are coarse, consistent with carpet-type fibers, and I’m suspicious some of them may be from vehicle versus household carpeting.”
“Why?”
“Because of the debris I found. For example, the glass beads are often associated with reflectorized paint, such as is used in street signs. The metal spheres I find quite often in car vacuumings. They’re solder balls from the assembling of the vehicle’s undercarriage. You don’t see them, but they’re there. Bits of broken glass–broken glass is all over the place, especially along road shoulders and in parking lots. You pick it up on the bottom of your shoes and track it into your car. Same goes for the cigarette debris. Finally, we’re left with salt, and that makes me most suspicious the origin of Beryl’s trace is vehicular. People go to McDonald’s. They eat french fries inside their cars. Probably every car in this city has salt in it.”
“Let’s say you’re right,” I said. “Let’s say these fibers are from car carpeting. That still doesn’t explain why there would be possibly six different nylon carpet fibers. It’s not likely this guy has six different types of carpet inside his vehicle.”
“No, that’s not likely,” Joni said. “But the fibers could have been transferred to the inside of his car. Maybe he works in a profession that exposes him to carpets. Maybe he has an occupation that puts him in and out of different cars throughout the day.”
“A car wash?”
I asked, envisioning Beryl’s car. It was spotless inside and out Joni thought about this, her young face intense. “Could very well be something like that. If he works in one of these car washes where attendants clean the interiors, the trunks, he’d be exposed to a variety of carpet fibers all day long. It’s inevitable he’s going to pick up some of them. Another possibility is he works as a car mechanic.”
I reached for my coffee. “Okay. Let’s get to the other four fibers. What can you tell me about them?”
She glanced over her paperwork. “One is acrylic, one olefin, one polyethylene, the other Dynel. Again, the first three are consistent with carpet-type fibers. The Dynel fiber is interesting because I don’t see Dynel very often. It’s generally associated with fake fur coats, furlike rugs, wigs. But this Dynel fiber is rather fine, more consistent with garment material.”
“The only clothing fiber you found?”
“I’m inclined that way,” she answered.
“Beryl was thought to have been wearing a tannish pants suit…”
“It’s not Dynel,” she said. “At least her slacks and jacket aren’t. They’re a cotton and polyester blend. It’s possible her blouse was Dynel, no way to know since it hasn’t turned up.”
She retrieved another slide from the file folder and mounted it on the stage. “As for the orange fiber I mentioned, the only acrylic one I found, it has a shape at cross section I’ve never seen before.”
She drew a diagram to demonstrate, three circles joined in the center, bringing to mind a three-leaf clover without a stem. Fibers are manufactured by forcing a melted or dissolved polymer through the very fine holes of a spinneret. Cross-sectionally, the resulting filaments, or fibers, will be the same shape as the spinneret holes, just as a line of toothpaste will be the same cross-sectional shape as the opening in the tube it was squeezed through. I had never seen the clover-leaf shape before, either. Most acrylics are a peanut, dog bone, dumbbell, round, or mushroom shape at cross section.