“Ten different origins?”
I asked.
“That’s the way it looks at this point,” she said. “Definitely atypical. If these fibers were transferred by the assailant, he was carrying an unusual variety of fibers on his person. Obviously, the coarser ones aren’t from his clothing because they’re carpet-type fibers. And they’re not from any of the carpets inside her house. For him to have such a variety is peculiar for another reason. You pick up fibers all day long, but they don’t stay with you. You sit somewhere and pick up fibers, and a little later they’re brushed off when you sit somewhere else. Or the air dislodges them.”
It got more perplexing. Joni turned another page in her notebook and said, “I’ve also put the vacuumings under the scope, Dr. Scarpetta. The debris Marino vacuumed off the prayer rug, in particular, is a real hodgepodge.”
She skimmed a list. “Tobacco ash, pinkish paper particles consistent with the stamp on cigarette packs, glass beads, a couple bits of broken glass consistent with beer bottle and headlight glass. As usual, there are pieces and parts of bugs, vegetable debris, also one spherical metal ball. And a lot of salt.”
“As in table salt?”
“That’s right,” she said. “All this was on her prayer rug?”
I asked. “Also from the area of the floor where her body was found,” she replied. “And a lot of the same debris was on her body, in her nail scrapings, and in her hair.”
Beryl didn’t smoke. There was no reason for tobacco ash or particles from a cigarette pack stamp to be found inside her house. Salt is associated with food, and it didn’t make sense for salt to be upstairs or on her body.
“Marino brought in six different vacuurnings, all of them from carpets and areas of the floor where blood was found,” Joni said. “In addition, I’ve looked at the control sample vacuumings taken from areas of her house or carpets where there was no blood or evidence of a struggle –areas where the police think the killer didn’t go. The vacuumings are significantly different. The debris I just listed was found only in those areas where the killer was thought to have been, suggesting that most of this material was transferred from him to the scene and her body. It may have been clinging to his shoes, his clothing, his hair. Everywhere he went, everything he brushed up against collected some of this debris.”
“He must be a veritable Pig Pen,” I said.
“This stuff is almost invisible to the naked eye,” the ever-serious Joni reminded me, “He probably wouldn’t have a clue he was carrying so much trace on his person.”
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.”