Trail of Blood (36 page)

He raised one eyebrow. “Do you?”

“I can’t see why,” she thought out loud, trying to convince herself more than him, or perhaps the ghost of their dead grandfather. Family vs. job she could decide easily. But family vs. family? “I won’t see anything the cops won’t. I don’t have X-ray vision.”

“No. But you met the victim.”

With a sinking feeling she knew that to be true. She might see the significance in an item the cop with no knowledge of William Van Horn’s personality or habits might dismiss. What little she knew about the man was still more than nothing. “All right. I’ll go there on my way home.”

“Besides, what else do you have to do?”

As she taped the unremarkable turquoise shirt she told him Rachael had come home for the weekend in honor of her birthday. Frank sympathized but did not discourage her from revisiting the crime scene. The department did not waste two cops guarding a hunk of land lightly.

“How does it feel to be over the hill?”

“Terrific. Just great. Two new wrinkles just this morning.” Theresa sealed all the bags of clothing with red tape, scribbled her initials, and locked them all in the storage room in record time. Then she collected her sheets of acetate and written report and nudged her cousin, who dozed in one of the many seats in the old amphitheater. “Why don’t you go home and get some sleep?” she told him. “I’ll call you if I find anything significant.”

“I was hoping you’d have some coffee. Then I have to start interviewing Van Horn’s acquaintances, if Sanchez finds any worth talking to.”

“Come along, then, and we’ll forge an assault on the Braun.” They trudged up the three flights of stairs to the trace evidence lab.

Peace and quiet reigned there. Usually Theresa enjoyed her assigned Saturday mornings at the lab—giving up part of the weekend was worth it for the uninterrupted time. But this Saturday she would have preferred to be at home, planning breakfast.

The fibers trapped in the tape’s adhesive appeared to be the usual conglomeration of debris every person carried around with them: lint, khaki-colored and turquoise-colored fibers almost certainly from the clothing items themselves (though she would confirm that), and pieces of vegetation. But she also found a black fiber on the trousers and made a mental bet that it would match the fibers found on Richard Dunlop, one of the two men from the side of the hill, and the fiber from the bottom of the crate that held the body parts of Peggy Hall. She cleaned this new fiber with xylene to remove all traces of the tape’s adhesive and folded it into a piece of glassine paper to wait for the FTIR. She cleaned the yellow dog hair and mounted that on a glass slide. Organic materials—like hairs and natural fibers—were not uniform enough to yield a reliable spectrum on the FTIR. She would have to do a microscopic examination on the hair, and should they find a dog to compare, the root could be tested for the animal’s DNA.

The front of the shirt had not yielded much. But the back of it gave her another dog hair and other animal hairs, too fine and black to belong to the yellow dog, and also a number of white cotton fibers. Terrific. The killer had worn the one fiber so ubiquitous in the world it was considered to have no forensic value whatsoever. White cotton also had other advantages. Any bloodstains would be easy to bleach from white cotton, at least to the point where DNA would be unusable. As a natural fiber it would burn clean, if he chose to go that route, and not leave the gloppy mess that synthetic fibers could. He could bury it and the fibers would disintegrate completely within a few years, provided the killer felt comfortable waiting that long.

The soles of the shoes had two blue, trilobal fibers, and as her cousin returned with a steaming cup she asked him how Van Horn’s apartment had been decorated.

“Heavy, ugly curtains; a decent leather sofa; and blue carpeting that should have been replaced twenty years ago.”

“I’ll need a sample of that.”

“Gotcha.” He yawned and propped his feet up on the edge of her worktable. If she didn’t know better, she might have thought her cousin was now waiting around to talk about their respective relationships with their grandfather and any inequities in same. But she knew better. Frank never talked about his feelings. Frank didn’t admit he even
had
feelings.

She didn’t do much of that herself.

No, he hung around for the coffee and a few moments of peace, period.

“Did he have any pets?” she asked.

“Van Horn? Not so much as a goldfish. No animal lover he—except for birds, he had pictures of birds, but nothing live. I expect he didn’t want the place messed up.”

One of the white specks from the handkerchief flattened easily and stuck to the salt window after only a few seconds of fiddling. Once the stage had been moved so that the light beam could pass through the material, the spectrum popped up on the computer screen. Polyethylene and some titanium dioxide to make it extra white. But why the shape?

Frank sniffed the air. “I smell something musty. Is the stuff from the dead cop up here?”

Theresa allowed that James Miller’s notebook lay humidifying in the fume hood. Frank’s curiosity must have overcome his weariness because he wandered over to the hood and switched on the light.

Theresa called up the spectrum for the white flecks she had found on Kim. No surprise there. “Hey,” she said.

“Hey!” Frank said.

“The white flecks I found on Kim Hammond are identical to the white flecks I found in Van Horn’s handkerchief.”

“This notebook has the same handwriting as the one in Kim Hammond’s apartment.”

They stared at each other over the top of her microscope. “What?”

“What?”

Frank said, “When we searched her belongings, she had a little notebook like this one with the same handwriting. Her mother said it belonged to Kim’s father.”

“James Miller couldn’t have been Kim’s
father
.” Theresa felt silly even thinking such a thing. “But—”

“He could have been her grandfather, or great-grandfather, or whatever. I’ve got to go talk to her mother again. What did you say about white somethings?”

Theresa explained about the specks found stuck to the paint in Kim’s hair. “They’re identical to the ones I just found in Van Horn’s handkerchief. Granted, there’s not a lot to their composition—polyethylene and titanium dioxide and a few trace elements—but they’re identical.”

“So she
was
the Lady of the Lake.”

“This guy began his copycat spree with James Miller’s granddaughter?
How?
”

“That’s what I’m going to find out.” Her cousin no longer seemed a bit tired. Coffee forgotten, he pulled on a glove, snatched up the notebook, and absently planted a kiss on her cheek before barreling out the door.

“You can’t take that without—” She heard the stairwell door open. He hadn’t wanted to wait for the creaking elevator or to sign the property form to check out the notebook. She laughed in his wake but felt fairly reenergized herself. At least Kim Hammond had been linked—and how—which meant they had only one crazed decapitating murderer preying on the citizens of Cleveland instead of two.

This man had killed five people in as many days and had probably already abducted the next young man in the series. Yet like the original Torso killer, he remained a ghost.

But at the same time, all she wanted to do was go home. At only ten o’clock she had more or less completed all reasonable work on William Van Horn. She had only to stop by the crime scene on her way home and then call her cousin to release the patrol officers. Every cop in the city would be working on this case. Surely they could spare her long enough for her to make her only child some breakfast.

With a pang she reminded herself that both James Miller and his only descendant had been wiped from the earth.

She analyzed the fibers found on Van Horn. The blue carpet fibers were made of polyester, and the black nylon fiber matched the ones found on Kim and Richard Dunlop. The khaki and turquoise cotton fibers could not be assayed on the FTIR, of course, but a microscopic comparison with sample fibers from Van Horn’s shirt and pants indicated a common origin.

This left only the animal hairs, and she plunked the dog hair down on the microscope stage. She could be out of there in twenty minutes. Fifteen minutes to drive to the crime scene, maybe ten given the light weekend traffic…though she still wanted to pay Edward Corliss a visit to express her condolences, since he had introduced her to the victim and all, but that could wait until Monday. A phone call would do.

She had not found any animal hairs on Kim, but then they had never found Kim’s clothing. The hairs would stick to cloth much more easily than to skin; she knew that from constantly picking the fine wisps off her own clothes. Animal fur was insidious, and Theresa often swore that after the current set she would never get another cat or dog, no matter how adorable, soft, or funny they were.

She kept a reference library of animal hairs mounted on glass slides in an undersize metal filing cabinet designed for exactly that purpose, and she began to put one slide after another on the stage opposite the hairs found on Van Horn. With the comparison microscope she could view both slides at once.

The yellow dog hair reminded her of a retriever like her own, and using the reference slide for comparison she decided that the killer had one as well.

Exactly like hers. She had used Harry’s fur for her reference library, and the dog hair on Van Horn appeared to be identical. Of course, it didn’t mean much—all golden retrievers looked pretty much the same, didn’t they?

But Harry was not purebred. In fact, Harry had belonged to Theresa’s deceased fiancé and she had no idea of his actual ancestry, except that he had come from a pound and his fur had always seemed darker than the classic gold of that type of dog.

She wrote
One dog hair, app. gold retriever
into her notebook and went on to the finer, dark hairs. They were nothing like Harry’s, of that she felt certain.

The thicker guard hairs of cats and dogs were quite easy to tell apart by the distinct roots. The roots of dog hairs ended in a smooth spade shape, while the cat’s ended in an uncharacteristically awkward mess of tendrils. But the thinner undercoat or fur hairs, which kept the animals insulated, were not so easily separated. Often the roots appeared to be a cross between the two.

The medulla is a channel running through the center of the hair. It could be clear, if filled with cells, or black if hollow. The medulla in these three hairs appeared as a series of black bubbles, known as a string-of-pearls medulla, usually found in cats. The overlapping scales making up the outer cuticle were long and thin, or spinous, which indicated a cat. She got out her cat fur slides.

The hairs were solid black, with no coloration or banding to give any indication of breed. So she really could not consider it significant that the hairs were alike in every way to those of her own cat.

Anubis, named for the stern-faced Egyptian god, had been given to her by a neighbor of her cousin’s. He had been an only child, the offspring of a gray Persian mother and a father who snuck into the yard one night under cover of darkness and never returned. This made him fairly unique, and not only in his own mind.

The hairs matched perfectly, something she would never say in court. No, in court she would say that “the microscopic characteristics of both sets of hairs are such that they could have had a common origin.” Right after she explained how she contaminated a victim’s clothing.

Theresa had no illusions about her ability to do just that. Animal fur got everywhere, and she felt sure it could be found on every item of clothing she owned if she only looked hard enough. But she had worn a disposable lab coat when examining the clothing downstairs, and at the crime scene…though the cuffs of her long-sleeved T-shirt peeked out from the rolled-up ends of the Tyvek sleeves. Could she have brushed those cuffs to the shirt and pants as she moved them around?

Had she brushed against Van Horn at the preservation society headquarters? No, she’d only touched his hand. Besides, he had been wearing dark pants and a white shirt at the time, so he must have changed clothes later in the day. Of course the hairs could have transferred from the first set of clothes when he picked up the second. They could have clung to the chair she sat in when speaking with Edward Corliss, and then Van Horn sat there later and picked them up. The chairs were hard wood, no upholstery, which made it unlikely but not impossible. But four hairs?

Her heart began to beat faster and she told it not to. She had no reason to be upset. Golden retriever mixes and black cats were hardly uncommon in the Cleveland area. She had no reason to believe that these particular hairs came from her two particular animals. Perhaps Van Horn’s landlady also happened to have a golden retriever mix and a black, half-Persian cat. Last night the woman had spoken to the victim. Perhaps she and Van Horn were more than friends.

And perhaps Theresa needed to be a whole lot more careful about how she handled evidence. Any defense attorney in the city would jump at the chance to point
that
out in court.
Isn’t it true, Ms. MacLean, that you have a letter of reprimand in your personnel file for contaminating evidence?…

What to do now? She could note the hairs and their description and leave it at that. She could note the hairs and add “possible examiner contamination” and hope that no one would ever delve deeply enough into the case to notice. Or she could tell somebody. This would invite at best a tongue-lashing from Leo, or at worst some sort of disciplinary procedure that he would probably make up as he went along and might involve everything from remedial training to suspension. And with Rachael in college, Theresa couldn’t afford to lose even a few pennies from her paycheck.

Didn’t matter. She’d have to inform her supervisor, and the sooner the better. In any sort of law enforcement position, the cover-up always screwed you worse than the actual crime.

Theresa got her purse from her desk, locked up the lab, and headed for the crime scene.