Grave Secrets

They also gave me news from Chupan Ya. Thursday night, Señora Ch’i’p’s son had become a grandfather for the fourth time. The old lady now had seven great-grandchildren. I hoped those new lives would bring joy into hers.

The lab was weekend quiet. No chatter. No radios. No microwave whirs and beeps.

No Ollie Nordstern pressing for a quote.

Nevertheless, I found it hard to concentrate. My feelings were like wheels inside wheels inside wheels. Loneliness for home, for Katy, for Ryan. Sadness for the dead lying in boxes around me. Worry for Molly. Guilt for my lack of backbone at the Paraíso.The guilt prevailed. Vowing to do more for the Chupan Ya victims than I had for the girl in the septic tank, I worked long after Elena and Mateo called it quits.

Burial fourteen was a female in her late teens, with multiple fractures of the jaw and right arm, and machete slashes to the back of the head. The mutants who had done this liked working up close and personal.

As I examined the delicate bones my thoughts swung again and again to the Paraíso victim. Two young women killed decades apart. Does anything ever change? My sadness felt like a palpable thing.

Burial fifteen was a five-year-old child. Tell me again about turning the other cheek.

Galiano called in the late afternoon. Hernández had learned little from the parents of Patricia Eduardo and Claudia de la Alda. Señora Eduardo’s one recollection was that her daughter disliked a supervisor at the hospital, and Patricia and the supervisor had argued shortly before Patricia disappeared. She couldn’t recall the person’s name, gender, or position.

Señor De la Alda thought his daughter had begun losing weight shortly before she went missing. Señora De la Alda disagreed. The museum had called to inform them that they could no longer hold Claudia’s position for her. They would be hiring a permanent replacement.

By Monday I’d moved on to burial sixteen, a pubescent girl with second molars in eruption. I estimated her height at three foot nine. She’d been shot and decapitated by a machete blow.

At noon I drove to police headquarters and Galiano and I proceeded to the trace evidence section of the forensic lab. We entered to find a small, balding man hunched over a dissecting scope. When Galiano called out, the man swiveled to face us, hooking gold-rimmed glasses behind chimpanzee ears.

The chimp introduced himself as Fredi Minos, one of two specialists in hair and fiber analysis. Minos had been provided samples from the septic tank jeans, from the Gerardi and Eduardo homes, and from Mrs. Specter’s chair.

“It’s wookie, right?” Galiano.

Minos looked puzzled.

“Chewbacca?”

No glint.

“ Star Wars?”

“Oh yes. The American movie.”

In Minos’s defense, the joke sounded lame in Spanish.

“Never mind. What did you come up with?”

“Your unknown sample is cat hair.”

“How can you be sure?”

“That it’s hair, or that it’s cat?”

“That it’s cat,” I jumped in, seeing Galiano’s expression.

Minos rolled his chair to the right, and selected a slide case from a stack on the counter. Then he rolled back to the scope and slipped one specimen under the eyepiece. After adjusting focus, he got up, and indicated that I should sit.

“Take a look.”

I glanced at Galiano. He waved me into the chair.

“Would you prefer that I speak English?” Minos asked.

“If you don’t mind.” I felt like a dunce, but my Spanish was shaky, and I wanted to fully understand his explanation.

“What do you see?”

“It looks like a wire with a pointed end.”

“You’re looking at an uncut hair. It is one of twenty-seven included in the sample marked ‘Paraíso.’”

Minos’s English had an odd up-and-down cadence, like a calliope.

“Notice that the hair has no distinctive shape.”

“Distinctive?”

“With some species shape is a good identifier. Horse hair is coarse, with a sharp bend near the root. Deer hair is crinkly, with a very narrow root. Very distinctive. The Paraíso hairs are nothing like that.” He readjusted his glasses. “Now check the pigment distribution. See anything distinctive?”

Minos was fond of the word distinctive.

“Seems pretty homogenous,” I said.

“It is. May I?”

Withdrawing the slide, he moved to an optical scope, inserted it, and adjusted the focus. I rolled my chair down the counter and peered through the eyepiece. The hair now looked like a thick pipe with a narrow core.

“Describe the medulla,” Minos directed.

I focused on the hollow center, the region analogous to the marrow cavity in a long bone.

“Resembles a ladder.”

“Excellent. Medullar form is extremely variable. Some species have bipartite, or even multipartite medulla. The llama group is a good example of that. Very distinctive. Llamas also tend to have large pigment aggregates. When I see that combination, I immediately think llama.”

Llama?

“Your samples have a single-ladder medulla. That’s what you’re seeing.”

“Which means cat?”