"Yellowish-white lines?' Catherine asked from behind them.
Grog's heart jumped into his throat, pounding feverishly. "Yes! I didn't know you were there."
"Sorry, Greg," Catherine said, "I didn't mean to startle you. Wendy, you were going to give me the data on Gottlieb." She gestured toward the paper Wendy still clutched. "But then you left with it."
"Oh, right." Wendy handed it over. "Sorry."
"No problem," Catherine said. "Lines in the nails. I have a feeling your nail donor isn't well."
"That would be my guess," Greg said. "I was going to do some research, see if I could find something that would cause that."
"You do that. I'm going to do some checking of my own. I have a little bit of a hunch…"
"What is it?"
"You'll know when it's more than a hunch," she said, walking away.
They both watched her go, then Wendy turned back to Greg. "Okay, you're bringing me diseased nails. I can't wait. Anything else?"
"Some long red hairs. Also very brittle."
Wendy eyed him for a moment, letting her gaze drift to his feet and back up to his head again. "What?" he asked.
"You have a certain… aroma about you today. Or should I say reek? You bring a girl diseased nails and brittle hair. And you're still single? Imagine that."
David Hodges watched Wendy and Greg out of the corner of his eye. It didn't look as if Greg was really getting anywhere with her, and it wasn't as if Hodges would have been jealous if he had.
Well, maybe a little. He and Wendy had so much in common. They were both smart – okay, brilliant, at least in his case. They both loved the old sci-fi TV series Astro Quest. He was sure she thought he was cute, and he agreed with that assessment.
But he had blown his one real chance with her, and he wasn't likely to get another one. Not really his fault, of course, that was just the way things shook out sometimes.
Still, he couldn't help watching her and wondering what they might have been like as a couple. Perhaps in some alternative dimension, an alternative Hodges was raising adorable little geniuses.
But this dimension's Hodges had more immediate concerns. He had to analyze the trace evidence from Robert Domingo's murder scene. Ray Langston hadn't been able to bring him much, but Hodges didn't know if that was because there wasn't much to be found or because he possibly had left some behind.
He had some hairs, which weren't whole enough still to have their follicles attached. The follicle cells were the parts of hairs that stored nuclear DNA and would have been most helpful to discover. A couple of the hairs had gone to Wendy just the same, because mitochondrial DNA could sometimes be extracted from hair shafts. Mitochondrial DNA was passed by maternal lineage, and it mutated very slowly, so it could identify not only a person's mother but also grandmother, great-grandmother, and so on, going back potentially for generations. It wasn't as commonly used in criminal cases as nuclear DNA, but that didn't mean it should be ignored. Finding it would be Wendy's problem.
The rest of the hairs were his problem. He would have to study the color and width, the distribution pattern of the pigment. He would run them through an infrared microspectrometer to determine if the color was real or fake. Through neutron activation analysis, he could determine the chemical content. There was plenty to be learned from hairs, even without DNA, it just took some doing. He might be able to determine the gender, race, and even age of the person the hair had belonged to, maybe even a place of origin if there was something unique in the chemical composition that pointed to a specific place. If it was dyed, he might be able to pinpoint when that had happened and what substance had been used.
And then there were the plant fiber samples. He would have to finish analyzing them to determine what type of plant they had come from and maybe to find the plant DNA that could differentiate the original plant from every other example of its type. If it was a local plant, he might be able to isolate where in the city it was found.
His shift had ended. He could go home, and no one could say a word about it. Day shift had come on, and everybody had to share space. Hodges hated sharing space with the day shift. They crowded him.
But Greg was still there, and Wendy and Mandy.
And Catherine. Nick and Captain Brass were out in the field, as was Ray Langston.
No, he was trapped, like a rat in a faulty maze. He was there for the duration, like it or not.
12
"There are a few huge nations," Aguirre was saying, "like the Navajo and the Cherokee, for example, where it's not that hard to find fullbloods anymore. Smaller tribes like ours, though, we're full of what they call thinbloods. Intertribal marriage was commonplace even back before the Europeans came here, so it's not like it's a new thing."
They were back in his official Jeep, cutting across the reservation, Aguirre driving fast over roads in serious disrepair. Every now and then, they passed a house or a trailer, some with wash hanging out on lines, kids in the yard, maybe a couple of goats or some chickens in a pen. Nick had filled in Aguirre and Brass on what Ray had told him about blood quantum, and Aguirre took over from there.
"Story is, blood quantum was invented by the white government as a way to winnow down tribal membership. Drive us into extinction bureaucratically, since they couldn't do it with bullets. I don't know if I believe that, but a lot of people do."
"That sounds a little far-fetched," Brass observed. "I thought the conspiracy theory was more modern than that."
"You want to talk far-fetched, how about those treaties you guys had us agree to?" Aguirre countered. "Look, I'm not some radical, I just try to understand the different points of view. I have to, to keep tabs on what's going on around here. People who grew up poor on the rez want some mechanism to keep newcomers from claiming tribal identity – pushing them to the back of the line when it comes to health insurance, housing, other tribal benefits. But if circumstances you couldn't control, you know, who your grandmother married, mean you suddenly don't belong to the people you thought you did, that's no good, either."
"It's a complicated thing, all right," Nick said. "Seems going by parentage would be easier. If your dad or your mom, depending on if the tribe is matrilineal or patrilineal, was a member, then you are."
Aguirre turned around in his seat and glanced at Nick. "Then what happens if my tribe goes by the mother, but your father's goes by him? Do you belong to both? Or what if you're in a patrilineal tribe, but your mother married into it, moved to the reservation years before you were born, and you've never lived anywhere else or considered yourself a part of any other tribe? It's not so bad if the rules are consistent for generations, because then at least people know what to expect. But when a tribal commission can change them in midstream, then people get messed up."
A snake slithered across the road, pink as a heavy-duty garden hose. Aguirre was watching the road again, which Nick appreciated, considering the sheer number of rabbits, ground squirrels, birds, and other creatures that kept darting into the road. "Some think the line should be cultural, not connected to bloodlines at all. What matters most is how well someone has assimilated the values of the people, not how much of any type of blood they have. Do they speak the language? Do they participate in traditional tribal activities? That's hard to measure, too, but it hurts to see someone raised as white, identified as white, who can claim membership with a piece of paper, when you're fully native but you're knocked out by some intertribal marriage way in the past."