“Not until we reach the enlightened age where genetic prints are stored in a central data base like fingerprint records,” I muttered.
“Will never happen as long as the ACLU has a thing to say about it.”
Didn’t anybody have anything positive to offer today? A headache was beginning to work its way up from the base of my skull.
“It’s weird.”
She was dripping naphthyl acid phosphate on small circles of white filter paper. “You would think somebody somewhere has seen this guy. He’s not invisible. He doesn’t just beam into the women’s houses, and he’s got to have seen them at some point in the past to have picked them and followed them home. If he’s hanging out in parks or malls or the likes, someone should have noticed him, seems to me.”
“If anybody’s seen anything, we don’t know about it. It isn’t that people aren’t calling,” I added. “Apparently the Crime Watch hot lines are ringing off the hook morning, noon and night. But so far, based on what I’ve been told, nothing is panning out.”
“A lot of wild goose chases.”
“That’s right. A lot of them.”
Betty continued to work. This stage of testing was relatively simple. She took the swabs from the test tubes I’d sent up to her, moistened them with water and smeared filter paper with them. Working in clusters, she first dripped naphthyl acid phosphate, and then added drops of fast-blue B salt, which caused the smear to pop up purple in a matter of seconds if seminal fluid was present.
I looked at the array of paper circles. Almost all of them were coming up purple.
“The bastard,” I said.
“A lousy shot at that.”
She began describing what I was seeing.
“These are the swabs from the back of her thighs,” she said, pointing. “They came up immediately. The reaction wasn’t quite as quick with the anal and vaginal swabs. But I’m not surprised. Her own body fluids would interfere with the tests. In addition, the oral swabs are positive.”
“The bastard,” I repeated quietly.
“But the ones you took of the esophagus are negative. Obviously, the most substantial residues of seminal fluid were left outside the body. Misfires, again. The pattern’s almost identical to what I found with Brenda, Patty and Cecile.”
Brenda was the first strangling, Patty the second, Cecile the third. I was startled by the note of familiarity in Betty’s voice as she referred to the slain women. They had, in an odd way, become part of our family. We’d never met them in life and yet now we knew them well.
As Betty screwed the medicine dropper back inside its small brown bottle, I went to the microscope on a nearby counter, stared through the eyepiece and began moving the wetmount around on the stage. In the field of polarized light were several multicolored fibers, flat and ribbon-shaped with twists at irregular intervals. The fibers were neither animal hair nor man-made.
“These what I collected from the knife?” I almost didn’t want to ask.
“Yes. They’re cotton. Don’t be thrown off by the pinks and greens and white you’re seeing. Dyed fabrics are often made up of a combination of colors you can’t detect with the naked eye.”
The gown cut from Lori Petersen was cotton, a pale yellow cotton.
I adjusted the focus. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance they could be from a cotton rag paper, something like that. Lori apparently was using the knife as a letter opener.”
“Not a chance, Kay. I’ve already looked at a sample of fibers from her gown. They’re consistent with the fibers you collected from the knife blade.”
That was expert-witness talk. Consistent this and reasonable that. Lori’s gown was cut from her body with her husband’s knife. Wait until Marino gets this lab report, I thought. Damn.
Betty was going on, “I can also tell you right off the fibers you’re looking at aren’t the same as some of the ones found on her body and on the frame of the window the police think the killer came through. Those are dark-black and navy blue with some red, a polyester-and-cotton blend.”
The night I’d seen Matt Petersen he was wearing a white Izod shirt that I suspected was cotton and most certainly would not have contained black, red or navy blue fibers. He was also wearing jeans, and most denim jeans are cotton.