“Thanks, doc. The new shop’s a real dazzler.”
“Welcome to Orange County, detective. I hope you receive better treatment here than you did in Los Angeles.”
Better treatment, Shephard thought as he climbed the stairs to the research lab. Like he was being transferred from one hospital to the next. The face of Morris Mumford flashed inside his brain, then vanished.
Forensic specialist Ken Robbins was a dramatic counterpoint to the oriental preciseness of Yee. He stared at Shephard with puffy, red-rimmed eyes and wiped his glasses on a dirty lab coat. His head was large and block-shaped, covered with a mass of gray hair. Robbins dismissed formalities with western flair.
“Weird shit, Shephard,” he said. “You’re the reverend’s son?”
“Right.”
“Well, whoever engineered this little killing doesn’t have much interest in our sweet Lord Jesus.” The Bible in Shephard’s pocket suggested the contrary, but the point didn’t seem worth making yet. Robbins pumped Shephard’s hand with easy power.
“What was the accelerant?” Shephard asked.
“You know burns?”
“A little.”
“The accelerant was turpentine. Liberal doses. You probably saw that he was burned head to toe, front side. Flesh won’t conduct flame on its own, so our man used turpentine. A good choice because it’s cheap, easy to get around here, and it burns like hell.”
“Nice comparison,” Shephard said. “Turpentine is used to thin paints and lacquers. What else?”
“Got me, Shephard. All I know is dead people and what makes ’em that way. In this case, what actually made this Algernon fellow dead was a twenty-ounce hunk of basalt punched through his head. There she is.” Robbins nodded to the triangular slab of rock that rested on a table beside an imposing microscope. The rock was fist-sized, sharp-edged, unremarkable.
“Common around here?”
“That’s what the books say. Coughed up by ancient volcanoes and spread around by quakes and drifts. A rock is a rock. But those hair specimens you brought in might be a gold mine.” Robbins pointed to the microscope and switched it on. Shephard bent down and peered through the eyepiece, adjusting the focus. Magnified, the hairs looked like the trunks of redwoods, complete with bark. Two such redwoods angled through the left side of the image area, while to the right rested a fat ring the apparent size and shape of a Cheerio. “On the left are two hairs from the collection you sent me. On the right is a cross-section from a third. The round center indicates straight hair. Oval center would indicate curly. You can’t tell because of the lighting down there, but the hairs, all of them, follow a black-to-gray color pattern. Keep your eye on the hairs while I up the power and tell me what you see.”
Shephard watched as the specimens tripled in size, their dull red tone fading still more with the higher magnification. “They got bigger.”
“No shit. What else?”
“Mounds. Little mounds on them.”
“Know what they are? Tocopherol acetate. More commonly known as vitamin E. If you use good conditioner on your hair, you probably have those blobs, too. That’s the point, not everybody does. Did you get these specimens from a suspect?”
“Unless Algernon pulled out his own hair.”
“Then you’re looking for a man old enough to have gray hair, and I don’t mean a streak or two. The original color was black, not brown. Jet black. Not a Viet Cong, either. The protein analysis says Caucasian all the way. His blood type is O. And he conditions his hair with something containing tocopherol acetate.”
“That would make it an expensive product,” Shephard noted, recalling that the contents of his own cheapish conditioner made a long paragraph on the label. And no vitamin E.
“And cheap people don’t buy conditioner at all. Next.”
Robbins slid out the specimen glass and inserted another, then turned down the power. Shephard regarded the single tree trunk-like object, which was thicker, darker, and much smoother than the first. One end tapered to a nearly perfect point, the other was truncated cleanly. Midway, it was dented.
“What you’re looking at is a camel’s hair, believe it or not.” Shephard entertained a brief and irrelevant vision of the killer arriving on the back of a camel. “It was in with the human hair. My first thought was a hairbrush. But it’s much too thin.”
“And why the tapered end?”
“Exactly my question. I was thinking it got pulled out of a sports jacket or a sweater.”
Shephard turned up the power and watched the hair grow. More mounds. “But who would condition a jacket?”
“What?”
Shephard backed away and let Robbins study the camel hair.
“No shit. Didn’t think to crank it up that high.” Robbins stood and shook his head slowly. “You got me. And you got me on this, too.” He replaced the specimen slide with still another.
Shephard gazed through the eyepiece at a stunningly beautiful sliver of blue. It was dark and rich as lapis lazuli. “Looks like a gem,” he said.
“It’s a cobalt compound,” Robbins corrected.
Shephard looked again at the bright slash of blue. “Is it radioactive?”
“Give me another hour, I’ll tell you.”
“What’s it doing in a man’s hair?”
“That’s your job, dick. Maybe he takes nuclear shampoos. I just dig the treasures, you spend ’em how you see fit. I’m still working on the fabric from his shirt, the dirt under his nails, some other angles. Fire doesn’t leave us much to go on.”
“It’s a start. The killer rides a conditioned camel and washes his own hair with cobalt. See it all the time.”
Robbins shrugged, and guided Shephard to the door. “Say hello to your father for me. We ran around a bit together in his cop days down in Laguna. I haven’t seen him since he started saving souls, but what the hell, it must be just as good as staring at stiffs all day. Good luck, Shephard. Weird shit.”
Yee was hefting a handful of something into the scale above Tim Algernon’s body when Shephard walked back into the morgue. The cargo dropped; the scale swung gently.
“Blood alcohol is point two,” Yee said decisively. “That’s legally quite drunk in this state. We found another two ounces of undigested whiskey in the stomach. I’d estimate he had his last drink no longer than fifteen minutes before death.”
Shephard watched the scale reading settle at one pound, four ounces. “The money you found in his throat. Was it enough to choke him?”
“Oh yes. In fact that is exactly what he was doing before he died.”
“Can a man make sounds when he’s choking? Anything loud enough to wake neighbors?”
“You mean a scream. No, and I’m afraid this money will complicate your search for motive. Why would anyone put a thousand dollars in a man’s throat when he could have put them in his own pockets?”
Shephard regarded Yee briefly, then turned toward the double doors. A good question, he thought, so good he’d been trying to answer it himself for the last six hours. Still without a workable solution, his mind resorted to the obvious. “Maybe they were full.”
Yee shook his head and emptied the contents of the scale tray with the nonchalance of a janitor.
Three
Back at the station, Shephard removed the Bible from his coat pocket and set it on the desk. The handwriting suggested order and calm: Liars Burn and Little Liars Burn First. Again he studied the incomplete, smeared stamp.
THI BIB PRO OF
FO TAT I N
This Bible Property of whom? Shephard instructed the desk receptionist to handle all calls from the press, then replaced the Bible with a telephone book.