He’s confident he’s going to find the same chemical fingerprint, he explains, the same interference colors and same birefringence he saw when he took a look at the reddish material I collected from Peggy Stanton’s body.

“Red-stained wood but not stained all the way through.” I study another stub he hands to me. “If it were ground up and sprayed with dye, would it look like this?”

“Maybe. I do know when I examined what Dr. Zenner submitted to me yesterday, I noted that some of the fibers are charred,” Ernie says. “And that I don’t necessarily expect to find in mulch. But it completely depends on what it’s made from. Scrap wood from a torn-down building where there may have been a fire, for example? I also found charcoal and a lot of minerals mixed in.”

“The question is whether the charcoal, the minerals are indigenous to this mulchlike material or are from dirt on a floor or carpet.”

“That’s exactly the question.” Ernie stands up and straightens his back as if it’s stiff. “You start looking at the world through a microscope and you see salt, silica, iron, arsenic, insect pieces and parts, skin cells, hair, fibers, a holy horror.”

“It certainly appears he drove her car.” I feel sure of it. “Wherever he took her must have this reddish debris on the floor, on the ground.”

“Maybe a landscaping business or an area where a lot of red-colored mulch is used. Golf courses, apartment complexes, a park. Or maybe a place they manufacture mulch. Did you see anything like this around her house?”

“No. She stepped in it wherever he took her, and he did, too, and he tracked it into her car. This splintery material would work its way into clothing, carpet, skin, hair, and stick to everything like Velcro.”

“Some synthetic fibers on the leather seats,” he lets me know as he looks. “Probably from clothing, and a fair amount of white hair everywhere.”

“Her hair was white. Long. Shoulder length.”

“A little bit of these same wooden fibers.” He finds more of them. “Possibly transferred from clothing. Hers or some other person’s.” He turns a knob on the ALS’s panel, changing wavelengths, and the light turns green-blue.

I put my goggles back on, the orange filter blocking light not absorbed by the evidence, and I return to the car. Ernie is painting the steering wheel, the dash, the console, and the seat belt’s metal buckle and tongue, areas that will be swabbed for DNA next. Some smudges light up, nothing discernible, no latent prints we can do anything with, and I’m not surprised.