Point of Origin

'I don't need some medical examiner telling me how to raise my children,' he said coldly. 'Lady, I'll see you in court.'

That you will, I thought, for I knew the Commonwealth would charge him and his wife with felony child abuse and neglect.

'Don't you call us anymore,' said Mr Quinn, and he hung up on me.

I returned the receiver to its cradle with a heavy heart and looked up to see Teun McGovern standing in the hallway, just outside my door. I could tell by the look on her face that she had heard every word.

'Teun, come in,' I said.

'And I thought my job was hard.' Her eyes were on mine as she took a chair and moved it directly across from me. 'I know you have to do this all the time, but I guess I've never really heard it. It's not that I don't talk to families all the time, but thankfully it's not my job to tell them exactly what inhaling smoke did to their loved one's trachea or lungs.'

'It's the hardest part,' I said simply, and the weight inside me would not go away.

'I guess you're the messenger they want to kill.'

'Not always,' I said, and I knew that in the solitude of my raw inner self, I would hear the Quinns' accusing, harsh words replay for the rest of my days.

There were so many voices now, screams and prayers of rage and pain and sometimes blame, because I had dared to touch the wounds, and because I would listen. I did not want to talk about this with McGovern. I did not want her to get any closer to me.

'I've got one more phone call to make,' I said. 'So if you want to get coffee? Or just relax for a minute. I'm sure you'll be interested in what I find out.'

I called the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, and although it was not quite nine, the registrar was in. He was excruciatingly polite but not at all helpful.

'I completely understand why you're calling and promise that we very much want to help,' he was saying. 'But not without a court order. We can't simply decide to release personal information about any of our students. Certainly not over the phone.'

'Mr Shedd, we're talking about a homicide,' I reminded him as impatience tugged at me.

'I understand,' he said again.

This went on and got me nowhere. Finally I gave up and got off the line. I was dejected when I returned my attention to McGovern.

'They're just covering their asses in case the family tries to come after them later,' McGovern told me what I already knew. 'They need us to give them no choice, so I guess that's what we'll do.'

'Right,' I said dully. 'So what brings you here?' I asked.

'I understand the lab results are in, or at least some of them. I called late Friday,' she said.

'News to me.'

I was irked. If the trace evidence examiner had called McGovern before me, I was going to be really hot. I picked up the phone and called Mary Chan, a young examiner who was new with the labs.

'Good morning,' I said. 'I understand you have some reports for me?'

'I was just getting ready to bring them downstairs.'

'These are the ones you've sent to ATF.'

'Yes. The same ones. I can fax them or bring them in person.'

I gave her the number of the fax machine in my office, and I did not let her know my irritation. But I did give her a hint.

'Mary, in the future, it's best if you let me know about my cases before you start sending lab results to others,' I said calmly.

'I'm sorry,' and I could tell she very much was. 'The investigator called at five as I was halfway out the door.'

The reports were in my hands two minutes later, and McGovern opened her battered briefcase to retrieve her copies. She watched me as I read. The first was an analysis of the metal-like shaving that I had recovered from the dead woman's cut to the left temporal region. According to the scanning electron microscope and energy dispersive X-ray, or SEM/EDX, the elemental composition of the material in question was magnesium.

As for the melted debris recovered from the victim's hair, those results were just as inexplicable. A FTIR, or Fourier transform infrared spectrophotometer, had caused the fibers to selectively absorb infrared light. The characteristic pattern turned out to be that of the chemical polymer polysiloxane, or silicone.

'A little strange, don't you think?' McGovern asked me.

'Let's start with magnesium,' I said. 'What comes to mind is sea water. There's plenty of magnesium in that. Or mining. Or the person was an industrial chemist or worked in a research lab? What about explosives?'

'If potassium chloride came up, then yes. That could be flash powder,' she answered. 'Or RDX, lead styphnate, lead azide or mercury fulminate if we're talking about blasting caps, for example. Or nitric acid, sulfuric acid, glycerin, ammonium nitrate, sodium nitrate. Nitroglycerin, dynamite, and so on and so on. And I will add that Pepper would have picked up on high explosives like that.'

'And magnesium?' I asked.

'Pyrotechnics, or fireworks,' she said. 'To produce the brilliant white light. Or flares.' She shrugged. 'Although aluminum powder is preferred, because it keeps better, unless the magnesium particles are coated with something like linseed oil.'

'Flares,' I thought out loud. 'You light flares, strategically place them, and leave? That could buy you several minutes, at least.'

'With the appropriate fuel load, it could.'

'But that doesn't explain an unburned turning or shaving of it embedded in her wound, that would appear to have been transferred by the sharp instrument she was cut with.'

'They don't use magnesium to make knives,' McGovern observed.

'No, nothing like that. It's too soft. What about the aerospace industry, because it's so light?'

'Most definitely. But in those instances, there are alloys that would have come up during testing.'

'Right. Let's move on to silicone, which doesn't seem to make any sense. Unless she had silicone breast implants before they were banned, which she clearly didn't.'

'I can tell you that silicone rubber is used in electrical insulation, hydraulic fluids, and for water repellency. None of which makes sense, unless there was something in the bathroom, maybe in the tub. Something pink - I don't know what.'

'Do we know if Sparkes had a bathmat - anything rubbery and pink in that bathroom?' I asked.

'We've only begun going through his house with him,' she said. 'But he claims that the decor of the master bath was mostly black and white. The marble floor and walls were black. The sink, cabinets, and tub, white. The shower door was European and wasn't tempered glass, meaning it didn't disintegrate into a billion little glass balls when the temperature exceeded four hundred degrees Fahrenheit.'

'Explaining why it basically melted over the body,' I said.

'Yeah, almost shrink-wrapped it.'

'Not quite,' I said.

'The door had brass hinges and no frame. What we recovered was consistent with that. So your friendly media tycoon's memory holds true at least on that score.'

'And on others?'

'God only knows, Kay.'

She unbuttoned her suit jacket as if it suddenly occurred to her to relax, while she paradoxically glanced up at the clock.

'We're dealing with a very smart man,' she said. 'That much all of us know.'

'And the helicopter? What do you make of that, Teun? I'm assuming you've gotten word about the little white Schweizer, or Robinson, or whatever it was that the farrier saw two days before the fire? Perhaps the same one you and I saw two days later?'

'This is just a theory,' she said. 'A groping one at that, okay?'

Her look was penetrating.