“I’m sorry,” I reply with surprising composure. “I never asked you to come along for the ride, and this is why. And you’re going to have to explain to my sister what’s going on.”
“Okay, you’re right,” he says, and I’m glad Dorothy can’t hear his reluctance.
That’s part of the problem. I don’t want him preferring my company to hers, and it’s already happening now that we’re working together again.
“It’s not helpful if she resents me more than usual,” I remind him.
“I’ll drop you off, and take her out, but I really don’t like you driving home alone,” he says.
“I have to at some point,” I reply, texting Rex Bonetta that I’m pulling into the parking lot.
I’m hoping he’s still around, and he is. I ask if we can meet in the trace evidence lab, and he replies that he’s there now. Marino stops in his usual spot, and it’s not lost on me that Maggie’s Volvo is nowhere to be seen.
“She picked a good day to leave early,” I comment. “Not that I’d really want to run into her. You and Dorothy have a nice dinner.”
Shutting the door abruptly, I turn away from him, feeling shaky inside as if I might cry. I’m hoping he didn’t see the look on my face, everything catching up with me. Taking a deep breath, steadying myself, I unlock the pedestrian door. I pass through the empty bay, stepping inside the lower level where there’s a better phone signal, and I call Lucy.
“I’m here at the office, safe and sound,” I tell her as I walk past the empty autopsy suite. “And Marino and your mother are going out to dinner.”
“The helicopter is on its way back to the hangar, and I’m headed home,” Lucy says in my wireless earpiece. “How long will you be?”
“Not terribly long, and it’s going to be just you and me for dinner if you don’t mind waiting a bit.” I walk past the anthropology lab, the bones in their big pot softly clattering.
“We’ve got everything for tacos,” Lucy volunteers, and she’s not offered to help with a meal in a while.
“That sounds wonderful.” I open the fire-exit door, heading upstairs to an isolated wing that houses the scanning electron microscope.
Momentarily, I’m following the second-floor corridor, wondering who knows I’m about to be a thing of the past. Through observation windows, I glance at preoccupied scientists in the DNA clean rooms and labs with their airlocks and special ventilation, everybody covered in PPE. A few look up at me as I walk past, and it’s possible they don’t know the news.
Most assuredly they will by morning when I return to clear out my office. Ahead is the latent fingerprints lab, and I may as well check on one of my cases while I’m in the area. Veteran examiner Andy Patient is working under a chemical hood, gloved up and masked, trying to rehydrate the shriveled tips of fingers removed from mummified remains.
They were discovered in an abandoned barn not long after I started here, and I’ve yet to find evidence of violence. But the victim, an older white male, was naked when he died, his clothing strewn about as if he disrobed in a hurry. While that might look suspicious, it’s not necessarily.
As irrational as it seems, often that’s what people do when they’re freezing to death. They have the false sense of being too warm and begin to undress. I’m suspicious he may have sought shelter in the barn during cold weather and died from exposure. But who was he, and what was he doing on a deserted farm?
“Hi, Andy.” I stop in the doorway. “How are things going?”
“I’m optimistic.” He turns around, a wizened fingertip gripped in the forceps he holds in one hand, a syringe in the other.
If he knows I’ve been fired, he doesn’t let on.
“I think we’ll have prints with enough characteristics to run through IAFIS.” He refers to the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System.
“Let’s hope we get lucky since we weren’t with DNA,” I reply as he injects a sodium carbonate solution into what might be the tip of a thumb as best I can tell from where I’m standing.
I examined the remains days ago, noting that muscles and ligaments had decomposed but there was cutaneous tissue and visible friction ridges. Recommending we try restoring the fingertips, I cut them off at the middle phalanges. Since then Andy has been working on the desiccated digits, trying to get prints, still to no avail.
“We do have an update, a possibility of who this might be.” He places the fingertip in a petri dish. “The police say an eighty-three-year-old man wandered away from a nursing home in Winchester almost two years ago.”