“You answered what we needed answered,” said Merci.
Hess watched Gilliam peer toward her over the top of his reading glasses. The lab director was a soft-spoken, deliberate man who took his time and never forgot the difference between a scientist and a cop. You couldn’t hook him into seeing what wasn’t there. He was almost a head shorter than Merci Rayborn.
“I found something else,” he said. “Kind of interesting, really.”
Hess’s pulse rose a blip — he knew from experience that “kind of interesting, really,” was James Gilliam’s way of saying hold onto your hat.
Merci knew it, too.
Gilliam said, “Those soil samples you brought me in the buckets, Tim — good thing. That was the only way to replicate the conditions in Ortega closely. But you brought me more than just soil samples. I’ll bet you didn’t know that.”
Hess shook his head.
“I set a little from each bucket aside, just as a precaution. When the perc tests worked out I thought I’d run the extra through the mass spec, just have a look. I tried the Kane soil first and got unusually high amounts of some unusual things — trioxane, formic acid, methanol, and CH O. When I ran the Jillson dirt I got nothing like that.”
Gilliam stopped here, as Hess knew he would. The man was a scientist and saw no reason to explain his own punch lines.
“Well, Jim, what is it?” Hess prompted.
“Oh, sorry. Formaldehyde — simplest of the aldehydes, highly reactive. In the soil samples, it was dehydrating to form the trioxane, oxidizing to make the formic acid and reducing to simple methanol. But it started as formaldehyde — there was enough of the unreacted CH2O left to determine that. Actually it was probably formalin, which is formaldehyde in a 37 percent aqueous solution. Pure formaldehyde is just a gas.”
“How did it get there?” asked Merci.
He looked at Hess but he answered Rayborn: “Someone put it there. Or, more likely maybe — spilled it.”
“Just the Kane site?”
“Just the Kane site. But remember, six months of weather and rain would have washed out the Jillson ground.”
Hess had already pulled down Remington’s Practice of Pharmacy from one of the crime lab shelves. It was a large book and punishingly heavy — he’d never noticed how heavy until today. It was the same 1961 edition, priced then at $22.95. Hess had used it a hundred times over the decades to look up answers that Gilliam had in his head. There was something of the educator in James Gilliam and Hess had never minded it.
He glanced at Merci and saw the quick look of irritation she gave the lab director. Gilliam missed it, lost as he was to the mass spectrometer. He hovered over the machine, bent at the waist with his hands behind his back like a helpful valet.
“Uh, James?” she asked. “Maybe you could spare us some heavy lifting here and tell us what formalin is used for. I mean, all I know is that’s what the frogs were pickled in for biology class.”
Gilliam was still bent over his machine. “Usage: a preservative. A solvent. A tanning agent for leather. Mix it with ammonia and you get a urinary tract antiseptic. It’s a big part of two different and powerful explosives — cyclonite and PETN. It combines eagerly, so it’s used to make everything from resins and disinfectants to embalming agents, plastics to polyvinyls. It’s also used as a soil sterilant. Which is interesting, since that’s exactly where Tim found it.”
“A preservative,” said Merci. “And the lid of a pickling jar. Do the jar and the formalin go together?”
Gilliam straightened and rubbed his chin. He sighed. His pale eyes were turned up to Merci but looked to Hess like they were focused somewhere past her head. A little odd, Hess thought: Gilliam distracted, Gilliam nervous, Gilliam not looking the woman in the face. It took Hess another moment to get it: she’s attractive to him and he doesn’t know how to act.
“They don’t have to go together, though I see what you’re getting at,” Gilliam said quietly. “Formalin will evaporate quickly, but you can transport it in any jar, really. And, maybe he didn’t bring the jar. We only found the lid. I guess the larger question is—”
“—Yeah — what the hell is he dumping formalin into the ground for in the first place?”
“Yes, of course.”
“While a body hangs from a tree, eviscerated and bleeding,” she said.
A moment of silence while three imaginations tugged at their respective tethers.
Until Gilliam cleared his throat. “I had a case where a rape-killer would wash off his victim with isopropyl alcohol before he... coupled with her. Something about germs and religion gone pathological, is what the prosecution said. He had to have her pure, clean, clinically... worthy.”
Rayborn was nodding. “I had one where the prick washed her out with bleach after he raped her. He wanted his seminal fluid destroyed.”
“Maybe he’s preserving parts of her,” said the director.
“As keepsakes,” said Merci. “Eyes. Hearts. Whatever in God’s name turns him on.”
“And when the meat hits the jar, the formalin spills out.”
Quiet again.
Another meditative pause.
Merci next: “If formalin is used in tanning leather, you could use it to tan human skin, right?”
“I guess you could. But if all he wants is their skin, where’s the rest of them? Even the coyotes and vultures can’t completely consume a full human skeleton in one week.”
Hess reentered the room after a brief mental departure. He was still looking down at The Practice of Pharmacy.
“Maybe he’s preserving the bodies,” he said. He set the Remington’s back on the shelf. “Taking the whole woman.”
Merci and Gilliam both looked at him — two mouths slightly open, four eyes intent.
Hess continued, “It would account for us finding nothing but lots of blood, scraps of innards, and the primary ingredient embalming fluid. He’s taking everything but fluids and viscera with him.”
“Okay,” said Merci. “Then what about the canning jar?”
“Maybe he was just using it for the obvious.”
“And what’s that, Tim?” asked Gilliam.
“To carry something to eat. All that work must make him hungry.”
“He ought to apply for a job here with the ME,” said Merci, with a small smile for Gilliam. “If he can eat while he carves.”
Gilliam smiled too but looked away from her. Then he was moving toward the door. “I found some other things from the cars. Kind of interesting, really.”
Merci held open the door for the director and looked over his head at Hess.
“I love this part of the job,” she said.
The comparison scopes were ready. Gilliam’s voice carried through the hush of the Hair &. Fiber room as Hess and Rayborn looked at two different hairs magnified one thousand times by the phase contrast microscope. Then they traded places.
“We were able to get the Jillson hair because her husband knew something was very wrong,” said the director. “So when he got Lael’s car out of impound he kept it exactly like it was. It sat under a cover in his garage for a month before we saw it. Never washed, never vacuumed. Sharp guy, Mr. Jillson. He was stubborn enough to leave the car untouched again after we examined it, in case we wanted a second look. We did. And I’m glad we did.
“The hair on the left is likely from a Caucasian. It’s blond, long, with some wave to it. We found it in the Jillson car yesterday. It was caught on the lap belt buckle — the plastic housing that the tongue goes into. I don’t know why they didn’t find it the first time. I don’t care, so long as it isn’t Ike’s or one of his workers’ — which it’s not. And it’s not a likely match with the victim or anyone in her family. We’ve eliminated them as donors, too, based on their scale counts and pigmentation. They all used the same hair conditioner as the victim. This hair wasn’t washed or conditioned with the same product. We found completely different pharmacological traces on it. Nothing we can identify yet, by the way. But the scale count is higher than any of the Jillson clan we tested. I’m going to say it’s possible, very possible, that this hair came from your man.”