“So, maybe you labeled this thinking you were going to use it, changed your mind or something?” Wingo suggested.
I didn’t reply right away. I couldn’t remember! “When was the last time you went inside the refrigerator?”
I asked him.
A shrug. “Last week, maybe a week ago Monday when I got out the stuff so the doctors could take it up. I wasn’t in this past Monday. This is the first time I’ve looked in the fridge this week.”
I slowly recalled that Wingo had taken comp time on Monday. I myself had gotten Lori Petersen’s evidence out of the refrigerator before making evidence rounds. Was it possible I overlooked this cardboard folder? Was it possible I was so fatigued, so distracted, I got her evidence mixed up with evidence from one of the five other cases we had that day? If so, which cardboard folder of slides was really from her case-the one I receipted upstairs, or this one? I couldn’t believe this was happening. I was always so careful! I rarely wore my scrubs out of the morgue. Almost never. Not even when there was a fire drill. Several minutes later, lab workers glanced curiously at me as I walked briskly down the third-floor hall in my blood-spattered greens. Betty was inside her cramped office taking a coffee break. She took one look at me and her eyes froze.
“We’ve got a problem,” I said right off.
She stared at the cardboard folder, at the label on it.
“Wingo was cleaning out the evidence refrigerator. He found it a few minutes ago.”
“Oh, God,” was all she said.
As I followed her into the serology lab, I was explaining I had no recollection of labeling two folders from PERKS in Lori’s case. I was clueless.
Working her hands into a pair of gloves, she reached for bottles inside a cabinet as she attempted to reassure me. “I think the ones you sent me, Kay, have to be right. The slides were consistent with the swabs, with everything else you receipted. Everything came up as nonsecreter, was consistent. This must be an extra you don’t remember taking.”
Another tremor of doubt. I had taken only one folder of slides, or had I? Could I swear to it? Last Saturday seemed a blur. I couldn’t retrace my every step with certainty.
“No swabs with this, I take it?” she asked.
“None,” I replied. “Just this folder of slides. That’s all Wingo found.”
“Hmm.” She was thinking. “Let’s see what we have here.”
She placed each slide under the phase microscope, and after a long silence, said, “We’ve got big squamous cells, meaning these could be oral or vaginal, but not anal. And “she looked up – “I’m not seeing any sperm.”
“Lord,” I groaned.
“We’ll try again,” she answered.
Tearing open a packet of sterilized swabs, she moistened them with water and began gently rolling one at a time over a portion of each smear on each slide-three in all. Next she smeared the swabs over small circles of white filter paper.
Getting out the medicine droppers, she began deftly dripping naphthyl acid phosphate over the filter paper. Then came the fast-blue B salt. We stared, waiting for the first hint of purple.
The smears didn’t react. They sat there in tiny wet stains tormenting me. I continued to stare beyond the brief period of time the smears needed to react as if I could somehow will them into testing positive for seminal fluid. I wanted to believe this was an extra file of slides. I wanted to believe I had taken two PERKs in Lori’s case and just didn’t remember. I wanted to believe anything except what was becoming patently clear.
The slides Wingo had found were not from Lori’s case. They couldn’t be.
Betty’s impassive face told me she was worried, too, and doing her best not to let it show.
I shook my head.
She was forced to conclude, “Then it doesn’t seem likely these are from Lori’s case.”
A pause. “I’ll do what I can to group them, of course. See if there are any Barr bodies present, that sort of thing.”
“Please.”
I took a deep breath.