"Benton, Kay, good afternoon." Cartwright shook our hands.
"Please have a seat. And this is George Kilby and Seth Richards from the labs. Have you met? "
"No. How do you do?" I said to Kilby and Richards, who were young, serious, and soberly attired.
"Would anybody like coffee?" Nobody did, and Cartwright seemed eager to get on with our business. He was an attractive man whose formidable desk bore testimony to the way he got things done. Every document, envelope, and telephone message was in its proper place, and on top of a legal pad was an old silver Parker fountain pen that only a purist would use. I noticed he had plants in his windows and photographs of his wife and daughters on the sills. Outside sunlight winked on windshields as cars moved in congested herds, and vendors hawked T-shirts, ice cream, and drinks.
"We've been working on the Steiner case," Cart- wright began, "and there are a number of interesting developments so far. I will start with what is probably most important, and that's the typing of the skin found in the freezer.
"Although our DNA analysis is not finished, we can tell you with certainty that the tissue is human and the ABO grouping is 0-positive. As I'm sure you know, the victim, Emily Steiner, was also 0-positive. And the size and shape of the tissue are consistent with her wounds. "
"I'm wondering if you've been able to determine what sort of cutting instrument was used to excise the tissue," I said, taking notes.
"A sharp cutting instrument with a single edge."
"Which could be just about any type of knife," Wesley said. Cartwright went on.
"You can see where the point penetrated the flesh first as the assailant began to cut. So we're talking about a knife with a point and a single edge. That's as much as we can narrow it down. And by the way" -he looked at Wesley"-we've found no human blood on any of the knives you had sent in. Uh, the things from the Ferguson house." Wesley nodded, his face impervious as he listened.
"Okay, trace evidence," Cartwright resumed.
"And this is where it begins to get interesting. We have some unusual microscopic material that came from Emily Steiner's body and hair, and also from the bottoms of her shoes. We've got several blue acrylic fibers consistent with the blanket from her bed, plus green cotton fibers consistent with the green corduroy coat she wore to the youth group meeting at her church.
"There are some other wool fibers that we don't know the origin of.
Plus we found dust mites, which could have come from anywhere. But what couldn't have come from anywhere is this. " Cartwright swiveled around in his chair and turned on a video display on the credenza behind him. The screen was filled with four different sections of some sort of cellular material that brought to mind honeycomb, only this had peculiar areas stained amber.
"What you're looking at," Cartwright told us, "are sections of a plant called Sambucus simpson ii which is simply a woody shrub indigenous to the coastal plains and lagoons of southern Florida. What's fascinating are these dark spots right here." He pointed to the stained areas.
"George" -he looked at one of the young scientists"-this is your bailiwick."
"Those are tannin sacs." George Kilby moved closer to us, joining the discussion.
"You can see them especially well here on this radial section."
"What exactly is a tannin sac?" Wesley wanted to know.
"It's a vessel that transports material up and down the plant's stem."
"What sort of material?"
"Generally waste products that result from cellular activities. And just so you know, what you're looking at here is the pith. That's the part of the plant that has these tannin sacs."
"Then you're saying that the trace evidence in this case is pith?" I asked. Special Agent George Kilby nodded.
"That's right. The commercial name is pith wood even though technically there really is no such thing."
"What is pith wood used for?" Wesley asked. It was Cartwright who answered, "It's often used to hold small mechanical parts or pieces of jewelry. For example, a jeweler might stick a small earring or watch gear into a pith button so it doesn't roll off the table or get brushed off by his sleeve. These days, most people just use Styrofoam."
"Was there much of this pith wood trace on her, body?" I asked.
"There was a fair amount of it, mostly in the bloody areas, which was where most of her trace was."
"If someone wanted pith wood Wesley said," where would he get it? "
"The Everglades, if you wanted to cut down the shrub yourself," Kilby replied.
"Otherwise you'd order it."
"From where?"
"I know there's a company in Silver Spring, Maryland." Wesley looked at me.
"Guess we need to find out who repairs jewelry in Black Mountain." I said to him, "I'd be surprised if they even have a jeweler in Black Mountain." Cartwright spoke again.
"In addition to the trace evidence already mentioned, we found microscopic pieces of insects. Beetles, crickets, and roaches nothing peculiar, really. And there were flecks of white and black paint, neither of them automotive. Plus, she had sawdust in her hair."
"From what kind of wood?" I asked.
"Mostly walnut, but we did also identify mahogany." Cartwright looked at Wesley, who was looking out the window.
"The skin you found in the freezer didn't have any of this same material on it, but her wounds did."
"Meaning those injuries were inflicted before her body came in contact with wherever it was that it picked up this trace?" Wesley said.
"You could assume that," I said.
"But whoever excised the skin and saved it may have rinsed it off. It would have been bloody."
"What about the inside of a vehicle?" Wesley went on.
"Such as a trunk?"
"It's a possibility," Kilby said.
I knew the direction Wesley's thoughts were heading. Gault had murdered thirteen-year-old Eddie Heath inside a beat-up used van that had been rife with a baffling variety of trace evidence. Succinctly put, Mr. Gault, the psychopathic son of a wealthy pecan plantation owner in Georgia, derived intense pleasure from leaving evidence that seemed to make no sense.
"About the blaze orange duct tape," Cartwright said, finally getting around to that subject.
"Am I correct in saying a roll of it has yet to show up?"
"We haven't found anything like that," Wesley replied. Special Agent Richards looked through pages of notes as Cartwright said to him, "Well, let's get on with that, because I personally think it's going to be the most important thing we've got in this case." Richards began talking in earnest, for like every devout forensic scientist I had met, he had a passion for his specialty. The FBI's reference library of duct tapes contained more than a hundred types for the purpose of identification when duct tape was involved in the commission of a crime. In fact, malevolent use of the silvery stuff was so common that I honestly could not pass by a roll of it in hardware or grocery stores without household thoughts turning into remembered horrors.
I had collected body parts of people blown up by bombs made with duct tape.
I had removed it from the bound victims of sadistic killers and from bodies weighted with cinder blocks and dumped into rivers and lakes. I could not count the times I had peeled it from the mouths of people who were not allowed to scream until they were wheeled into my morgue. For it was only there the body could speak freely. It was only there someone cared about every awful thing that had been done.