A Textbook Case

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An Excerpt from The Kill Room

Also by Jeffery Deaver

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Physical evidence cannot be wrong, it cannot perjure itself, it cannot be wholly absent. Only human failure to find it, study and understand it, can diminish its value.

--Paul L. Kirk, Crime Investigation: Physical Evidence and the Police Laboratory

1

“The worst I’ve ever seen,” he whispered.

She listened to the young man’s words and decided that was a bit ironic, since he couldn’t have been more than mid-twenties. How many crime scenes could he have run?

But she noted, too, that his round, handsome face, crested by a crew-cut scalp, was genuinely troubled. He had a military air about him and didn’t seem the sort to get flustered.

Something particularly troubling was down there—in the pit of the underground garage they stood in front of, delineated by yellow fluttering tape, the pit where the woman had been murdered early that morning.

Amelia Sachs was gearing up at the staging area outside the bland apartment building in this equally style-challenged neighborhood of Manhattan, East Twenty-sixth Street. Here were residential low rises from the 1950s and ‘60s, some brownstones, restaurants that had been born Italian twenty years ago and had converted to Middle Eastern. For greenery, short, anemic trees, striving grass, tiny shrubs in huge concrete planters.

Sachs ripped open the plastic bag containing the disposable scene suit: white Tyvek coveralls, booties, head cap, cuffed nitrile gloves.

“You’ll want the Ninety-five, too,” the young officer told her. His name was Marko, maybe first, probably last. Sachs hadn’t bothered to find out.

“Chemical problem? Bio?” Nodding toward the pit.

The N95 was a particulate respirator that filtered out a lot of the bad crap you found at some crime scenes. The dangerous ones.

“Just, you’ll want it.”

She didn’t like the respirators and usually wore a simple surgical mask. But if Marko told her there was a problem inside, she’d go with it.

Worst I’ve ever seen…

Sachs continued to pull on the protective gear. She was claustrophobic and didn’t like the layers of swaddling that crime scene searchers had to put up with, but were necessary to protect them from dangerous substances at the scene but more important protect the scene from contaminants police might throw off—their hairs, fibers, flecks of skin and other assorted trace they might cart about with them. (One man had nearly been arrested because a tomato seed had linked him to a murder—until it was discovered that the seed came from the shoe of a crime scene officer, who’d neglected to wear booties… and who was soon, thanks to Lincoln Rhyme, a former crime scene officer.)