Most important, how was she supposed to get on the back of this thing without having to lean up against this boy?
With all of their layers, it was a tight fit. Trixie pushed herself back to the very edge of the seat, holding on to the rails at the sides with her mittened hands. Willie pulled the rip cord to start the machine and they groaned forward slowly, to keep the dogs from startling. He maneuvered around the chute and then gunned the engine, so that they flew across the ice. If it was cold standing around, it was fifty times colder on a snow machine blasting at full throttle. Trixie couldn't imagine not having the parka; as it was, she was shivering inside it and had curled her hands into fists.
The headlamp on the front of the machine cut a tiny visible triangle in front of them. There was no road whatsoever. There were no street signs, no traffic lights, no exit ramps. “Hey,” Trixie yelled into the wind. “Do you know where you're going?” Willie didn't answer.
Trixie grasped onto the handholds more firmly. It was dizzying, going at this speed without being able to see. She listed to the left as Willie drove up a bank, through a narrow copse of trees, and then back out onto a finger of the frozen river.
“My name's Trixie,” she said, not because she expected an answer but because it kept her teeth from chattering. After she spoke, she remembered that she was supposed to be someone else.
“Well, it's Trixie, but they call me Andi.” God, she thought. Could I sound any more stupid if I tried?
The wind blew into Trixie's eyes, which - as they started tearing - froze shut. She found herself huddling forward, her forehead nearly touching Willie's back. Heat rose off him in waves.
As they drove, she pretended that she was lying prone in the back of her father's pickup, feeling it vibrate underneath her as he bounced into the parking lot of the drive-in. The metal flatbed pressed against her cheek was still warm from a whole day of sun. They would eat so much popcorn that her mother would be able to smell it on their clothes even after she'd put them through the wash.
A frigid blast of air hit her full in the face. “Are we going to be there soon?” Trixie asked, and then, at Willie's silence,
“Do you even speak English?”
To her surprise, he ground the brakes, until the snow machine came to a stop. Willie turned around, still avoiding her gaze.
“It's fifty-five miles,” he said. “Are you going to yap the whole time?”
Stung, Trixie turned away and noticed the eerie light that had spilled onto the surface of the river up ahead. She traced it to its overhead origin - a wash of pink and white and green that reminded her of the smoke trails left behind by fireworks on the Fourth of July.
Who knew that when you cut a slit in the belly of the night sky it bled color?
“That's beautiful,” Trixie whispered.
Willie followed her gaze. “Qiuryaq.”
She didn't know if that meant Shut up or Hold on or maybe even I'm sorry. But this time when he started the sled, she tilted her face to the Northern Lights. Looking up here was hypnotic and less harrowing than trying to squint at the imaginary road. Looking up here, it was almost easy to imagine they were nearly home. 7
Max Giff-Reynolds had made a career out of focusing on the things most people never saw: a carpet fiber trapped on the inside edge of a victim's coat, a grain of sand left at a crime scene that was indigenous to a certain part of the country, the dust of a coffee grinder on the makings of a dirty bomb. As one of two hundred forensic microscopists in the country, he was in high demand. Chances were that Mike Bartholemew would never have gotten anywhere close to him for an analysis of Trixie's hair sample . .
. if he hadn't known Max when he was a skinny little geek in college, back when they were roommates and Bartholemew served as bodyguard in return for private tutorials in chemistry and physics.
He'd driven to Boston that night with a hank of Trixie Stone's hair on the seat beside him. The salon, Live and Let Dye, hadn't even sent the sample in to Locks of Love yet; it had been languishing in a drawer in the back room near the peroxide and the paraffin wax. Now he was sitting on top of a counter, waiting for Max to tell him something useful.
The lab was piled with boxes of dust and hair and fiber for comparison. A poster of Max's hero, Edmond Locard, hung over his polarized-light microscope. Bartholemew could remember Max reading books about Locard, the father of forensic science, even back at U
Maine. “He burned off his fingerprints,” Max had told him once with admiration, “just to see if they grew back in the same patterns!”
It had been almost thirty years since they'd graduated, but Max looked the same. Balder, but still skinny, with a permanent curve to his back that came from bending over a microscope. “Huh,” he said.
“What's that mean?”
Max pushed back from his workspace. “What do you know about hair?”
Bartholemew grinned at the other man's gleaming pate. “More than you do.”
“Hair's got three layers that are important, in terms of forensics,” Max said, ignoring his comment. “The cortex, the cuticle, and the medulla. If you think of a piece of hair as a pencil, the medulla is the graphite, the cortex is the wood, and the paint on the outside is the cuticle. The medulla is sometimes in pieces and differs from hair to hair on the same human head. The cells in the cortex have pigment, which is pretty much what I'm trying to match up between your two samples. You with me so far?”
Bartholemew nodded.
“I can tell you, by looking at a hair, if it's human or not. I can tell you if it came from someone of Caucasian, Negroid, or Mongolian origin. I can tell you where it came from on the body and whether the hair was forcibly removed or burned or crushed. I can tell you that a hair excludes a suspect, but I can't use it to pinpoint a particular one.”
He spoke as he bent over the microscope again. “What I'm seeing in both samples is a moderate shaft diameter and diameter variation, medulla continuous and relatively narrow, soft texture. That means they're both hairs from a human head. The hue, value, and intensity of the color are nearly identical. The tip of your known sample was cut with a pair of scissors; the other still has a root attached, which is soft and distorted . . . telling me it was yanked out. Pigment varies a bit between the two samples, although not enough for me to draw any conclusion. However, the cortex of the hair you found on the victim's body is much more prominent than the hairs in the known sample.”
“The known sample came from a haircut three weeks before the murder,” Bartholemew said. “Isn't it possible that during those three weeks, the cortex got more . . . what did you say again?”
“Prominent,” Max answered. “Yeah, it's possible, especially if the suspect had some kind of chemical hair treatment or was excessively exposed to sunlight or wind. Theoretically, it's also possible for two hairs from the same human head to just plain look different. But there's also the chance, here, that you're talking about two different heads.” He looked at Bartholemew. “If you asked me to get up in front of a jury, I couldn't tell them conclusively that these two hairs came from the same person.” Bartholemew felt like he'd been punched in the chest. He'd been so certain that he'd been on the right track here, that Trixie Stone's disappearance flagged her involvement in the murder of Jason Underhill.
“Hey,” Max said, looking at his face. “I don't admit this to many people, but microscopy's not always an exact science. Even when I think I do see a match, I tell detectives to get a DNA analysis to back up what the scope says.”
Mike sighed. “I have a root on only one of the hairs. That rules out DNA.”
“It rules out nuclear DNA,” Max corrected. He leaned over and took a card out of his desk. He scribbled something on the back and handed it to Bartholemew. “Skip's a friend of mine, at a private lab in Virginia. Make sure you say I sent you.” Bartholemew took the card. SKIPPER JOHANSSEN, he read. GENETTA LABS. MITOCHONDRIAL DNA.