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.This dust has fissures and blisters and smooth areas and thin transparent edges like the surface of a parched planet.Some particles have holes in them."What the hell is this?" he says."I don't know what this is.How can this same weird stuff be in two cases? They can't be related.I don't know what's happened here."He reaches for a pair of needle-tip tweezers and carefully removes several cotton fibers from the particles on the slide.Light passes through lenses and a congregation of magnified fibers look like snippets of bent white thread."You know how much I hate cotton swabs?" he asks the virtually empty laboratory."You know what a pain in the ass cotton swabs are?" he asks the large angular area of black countertops, chemical hoods, work stations, and dozens of microscopes and all of the glass, metal, and chemical accoutrements that they demand.Most of the lab's workers aren't at their work stations but are in other labs on this floor, preoccupied with atomic absorption, gas chromatography and mass spectroscopy, x-ray diffraction, the Fourier Transform Infrared Spectrophotometer, the scanning electron microscope or SEM/Energy Dispersive X-ray Spectrometer, and other instruments.In a world of endless backlogs and little money, scientists grab what they can, jumping onto instruments as if they are horses and riding the life out of them."Everybody knows how much you hate cotton swabs," remarks Kit Thompson, Else's nearest neighbor at the moment."I could make a giant quilt out of all the cotton fibers I've collected in my short life," he says."I wish you would.I've been waiting to see one of your giant quilts," she replies.Eise grips another fiber.They're not easy to catch.When he moves the tweezers or tungsten needle, just the slightest fan of air moves the fiber.He readjusts the focus and bumps down the magnification to 40x, sharpening his depth of focus.He barely breathes as he stares into the bright circle of light, trying to find the clues it holds.What law of physics dictates that when a disturbance of air dislodges a fiber, it moves away from you as if it is alive and on the lam? Why doesn't the fiber drift closer to captivity?He backs off the objective lens several millimeters, and the tips of his needle-sharp tweezers hugely invade the field of view.The circle of light reminds him of a brightly lit circus ring, even after all he's been through.For an instant he sees trick elephants and clowns in a light so bright it hurts the eyes.He remembers sitting in wooden bleachers and watching big pink puffs of cotton candy float by.He gently grabs another cotton fiber and air-lifts it off the slide.He unceremoniously shakes it loose inside a small transparent plastic bag filled with other spidery cotton debris that most certainly is Q-tip-type contaminants and of no evidentiary value.Dr.Marcus is the worst litterbug of all.What the hell is wrong with that man? Eise has sent him numerous memos insisting that his staff tape lift trace evidence whenever possible, and please, please, don't use cotton-tipped swabs because they have zillions of fibers that are lighter than angel kisses and get all tangled up with the evidence.Like white Angora cat hair on black velvet pants, he wrote Dr.Marcus several months back.Like picking pepper out of your mashed potatoes.Like spooning the creamer back out of your coffee.And other lame analogies and exaggerations."Last week I sent him two rolls of low-tack tape," Eise is saying."And another package of Post-its, reminding him that low-tack adhesives are perfect for pulling hairs and fibers off things because they don't break or distort them or shed cotton fibers all over the ranch.Or, not to mention, interfere with x-ray diffraction and other results.So we're not just being finicky when we sit here picking them out of a sample all the livelong day."Kit frowns at him as she unscrews the cap from a bottle of Permount."Picking pepper out of mashed potatoes? You sent Post-its to Dr.Marcus?"When Eise gets impassioned, he says exactly what he thinks.He isn't always aware, and probably doesn't really care, that what is inside his head is also escaping from his lips and audible to all."My point," he says, "is when Marcus or whoever checked the inside of that little girl's mouth, he swabbed it thoroughly with those cotton-tip swabs.Now, he didn't need to do that with the tongue.He cut the tongue out, now didn't he? Had it lying right there on the cutting board and could plainly see there's some sort of residue on it.He could have used a tape lift, but he kept on with the Q-tips, and all I do these days is pick out cotton fibers."Once a person, particularly a child, has been reduced to a tongue on a cutting board, he becomes nameless.That's the way it goes, without exception.You don't say, we worked our hands into Gilly Paulsson's throat and reflected back tissue with a scalpel and finally removed the organs of Gilly's throat and Gilly's tongue, pulled them right out of that little girl's mouth, or we stuck a needle in little Timmy's left eye and drew vitreous fluid for toxicological testing, or we sawed off the top of Mrs.Jones's skull, removed her brain and discovered a ruptured Berry aneurysm, or it took two doctors to sever the mastoid muscles in Mr.Ford's jaws because he was fully rigorous, very muscular, and we couldn't pry open his mouth.This is one of those moments of awareness that passes over Eise's thoughts like the shadow of the Dark Bird.That's what he calls it.If he looks up, nothing is there, just an awareness.He won't go any further with truths of this sort because when people's lives become pieces and parts and eventually end up on his slides, it's best not to look too hard for the Dark Bird.The bird's shadow is awful enough."I thought Dr.Marcus was too busy and too important to do autopsies," Kit says."In fact, I can count on one hand the number of times I've even laid eyes on him since he was hired.""Doesn't matter.He's in charge and makes the policies.He's the one who authorizes all those orders for Q-tips or their generic and cheap equivalent.As far as I'm concerned, everything's his fault.""Well, I don't think he did the autopsy on the girl.Not on the tractor driver who got killed at the old building either," Kit replies."No way he would do either one.He'd rather be in charge and boss everybody around.""How you doing for 'Eise Picks'?" Eise asks her, his slender hand agile and steady with the tungsten needle.He's been known to go through obsessive-compulsive spells of handcrafting his tungsten needles, which somewhat magically appear on the desks of his colleagues."I can always use another Eise Pick," Kit dubiously replies, as if she really doesn't want one, but in his fantasies, she is reticent because she doesn't want to inconvenience him."You know what? I'm not going to permanently mount this hair." She screws the cap back on the bottle of Permount."How many you got from the sick girl?""Three," Kit replies."It'll be just my luck DNA will decide to do something with the hairs, although they didn't seem interested last week.So I'm not going to permanently mount this one or the others.Everybody's acting weird these days.Jessie was in a scraping room when I got here.They've got all the linens in there.Apparently DNA's looking for something they must not have found the first time, and Jessie about bit my head off and all I did was ask what was going on.Something strange is going on.They already had those linens in the scraping room more than a week ago, as you and I both know.Where do you think I got these hairs from? Strange.Maybe it's the holidays [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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