All that had happened of late had not cleared his name of suspicion for the simple reason that even those of us who knew we might be dealing with serial murders were not at liberty to release such information to the news. I was certain that Sparkes did not know. I desperately wanted to talk to him, to somehow ease his mind, as if perhaps in doing so I might ease my own. Depression crushed my chest with cold, iron hands, and when I turned off Jackson Street into the bay of my building, the sight of a hearse unloading a black pouched body jolted me in a way it had not before.

I tried not to imagine Benton’s remains enveloped so, or the darkness of his cold, steel space at the shutting of the cooler door. It was awful to know all that I did. Death was not an abstraction, and I could envision every procedure, every sound and smell in a place where there was no loving touch, only a clinical objective and a crime to be solved. I was climbing out of my car when Marino rolled up.

“Mind if I stick my car in here?” he asked, even though he knew the bay parking was not for cops.

Marino was forever breaking rules.

“Go ahead,” I replied. “One of the vans is in the shop. Or at least I think it is. You’re not going to be here long.”

“How the hell do you know?”

He locked his car door and flicked an ash. Marino was his rude self again, and I found this incredibly reassuring.

“You going to your office first?” he asked, as we followed a ramp to doors that led inside the morgue.

“No. Straight upstairs.”

“Then I’ll tell you what’s probably already on your desk,” he said. “We got a positive I.D. for Claire Rawley. From hair in her brush.”

I wasn’t surprised, but the confirmation weighed me down with sadness again.

“Thanks,” I told him. “At least we know.”

19

THE TRACE EVIDENCE laboratories were on the third floor, and my first stop was the scanning electron microscope, or SEM, which exposed a specimen, such as the metal shaving from the Shephard case, to a beam of electrons. The elemental composition making up the specimen emitted electrons, and images were displayed on a video screen.

In short, the SEM recognized almost all of the one hundred and three elements, whether it was carbon, copper, or zinc, and because of the microscope’s depth of focus, high resolution, and high magnification, trace evidence such as gunshot residue or the hairs on a marijuana leaf could be viewed in amazing, if not eerie, detail.