“There were no mats front or back when the car was brought in,” Ernie says. “I can’t answer if there ever were any, but I have a feeling maybe not based on what I’m seeing.” He directs the light to show me. “Mostly in this area.” He means the driver’s side of the front seat.

Fibers look like snippets of wire fluorescing white, orange, neon green, and rainbow blends as the UV light passes over them. Ernie reaches in with adhesive carbon tape stubs that he gives to me as he finishes with each one. I place them inside screw-cap vials, sealing them in bags I label with the location they were recovered from and other information Ernie gives to me.

“I already went over the back and the passenger’s side.” His coveralls and booties make plastic sounds, and intermittently his voice is muffled when he’s inside the car. “First with white light, then blue, just in case there’s fine blood spatter or gunshot residue. I tried green for latents. UV for semen, saliva, urine. There’s no evidence thus far that anything bad happened in this car. It’s dusty and lonely, if a car can be lonely, like an old person’s car.”

“She wasn’t old, but I think she lived like it.”

“I found what looks like some cat fur, grayish-white,” he says. “On the carpet in back where you might expect someone to put a pet carrier.”

“I’m reasonably sure she had a cat.” I need to talk to Bryce about that, about taking Shaw to the vet.

“It may have been her only passenger,” Ernie supposes. “Typical for what I see in a vehicle usually driven by one person, especially an older person. There’s a high concentration of fibers, hair, other debris transferred to the driver’s area and tracked in and ground into the carpet, which I could cut out, but I’d rather collect what’s obvious first. What I am noticing and what you’ll be most interested in is this stuff here.”

His gloved hand holds out another stub to me.

“You’ll need a lens to see what I’m talking about,” he says. “It doesn’t fluoresce because it’s absorbing the UV and looks black, pretty much like blood does, but it’s not blood. In normal light and under a lens it’s dark red. There’s a fair amount of it in the carpet near the brake and the accelerator, like someone had it on his shoes.”

I step away from the car and take off my goggles. Retrieving a magnifier from a cart, I examine the stub and agree with Ernie that blood wouldn’t look like this. The woody material is familiar.

“I’m thinking the stuff could be mulch,” he says.

“Do you know what kind of wood?”