But then, most of the lab workers did, and in fact the same was often said of me.
“Checking in on Beryl Madison,” I said. “What have you found?”
“More than you bargained for, I have a feeling.”
She turned back through pages in the notebook. “Beryl Madison’s trace is a nightmare.”
I wasn’t surprised. I had turned in a multitude of envelopes and evidence buttons. Beryl’s body was so bloody it had picked up debris like flypaper. Fibers, in particular, were difficult to examine because they had to be cleaned before Joni could put them under the scope. This required placing each individual fiber inside a container of soapy solution, which in turn was placed inside an ultrasound bath. After blood and dirt were gently agitated free, the solution was strained through sterile filter paper and each fiber was mounted on a glass slide.
Joni was scanning her notes. “If I didn’t know better,” she went on, “I’d suspect Beryl Madison was murdered somewhere other than her house.”
“Not possible,” I answered. “She was murdered upstairs, and she hadn’t been dead long when the police got there.”
“I understand that. We’ll start with fibers indigenous to her house. There were three collected from the bloody areas of her knees and palms. They’re wool. Two of them dark red, one gold.”
“Consistent with the Oriental prayer rug in the upstairs hallway?”
I recalled from the scene photographs.
“Yes,” she said. “A very good match with the exemplars brought in by the police. If Beryl Madison were on her hands and knees and on the rug, it would explain the fibers you collected and their location. That’s the easy part.”
Joni reached for a stack of stiff cardboard slide folders, sorting through them until she found what she was looking for. Opening the flaps, she perused rows of glass slides as she talked. “In addition to those fibers, there were a number of white cotton fibers. They’re useless, could have come from anywhere and possibly were transferred from the white sheet covering her body. I also looked at ten other fibers collected from her hair, the bloody areas of her neck and chest, and her fingernail scrapings. Synthetics.”
She glanced up at me. “And they aren’t consistent with any of the exemplars the police sent in.”
“They don’t match up with her clothing or bed covers?” I asked.
Joni shook her head and said, “Not at all. They appear foreign to the scene, and because they were adhering to blood or were under her nails, the likelihood is strong they’re the result of a passive transfer from the assailant to her.”
This was an unexpected reward. When Deputy Chief Fielding finally got hold of me the night of Beryl’s murder, I had instructed him to wait for me at the morgue. I got there shortly before one A.M. and we spent the next several hours examining Beryl’s body under the laser and collecting every particle and fiber that lit up. I had just assumed most of what we found would prove worthless debris from Beryl’s own clothing or house. The idea of finding ten fibers deposited by the assailant was astonishing. In most cases I was lucky to find one unknown fiber and considered myself blessed to find two or three. I frequently had cases where I didn’t find any. Fibers are hard to see, even with a lens, and the slightest disturbance of the body or the faintest stirring of air can dislodge them long before the medical examiner arrives at the scene or the body is transported to the morgue.
“What sort of synthetics?” I asked.
“Olefin, acrylic, nylon, polyethylene, and Dynel, with the majority of them being nylon,” Joni replied. “The colors vary: red, blue, green, gold, orange. Microscopically they’re inconsistent with each other as well.”
She began placing one slide after another on the stereoscope’s stage and peering through the lens.
She explained, “Logitudinally, some are striated, some aren’t. Most of them contain titanium dioxide in a variety of densities, meaning some are a semidull luster, others dull, a few bright. The diameters are all rather coarse, suggestive of carpet-type fibers, but on cross section the shapes vary.”