Looking Glass (The Naturalist Series Book 2) by Andrew Mayne

Author:Andrew Mayne [Mayne, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781542047999
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Published: 2018-03-13T06:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

SAMPLE BIAS

Although William offered me the use of his house to do my lab work, the threat of DEA or IRS agents storming through his door loomed at the back of my mind. I didn’t want to be sitting there with a magnifying glass in one hand and a child’s decomposing skull in the other as they raided.

Instead, I opted to rent a suite at the LAX Marriott. While performing a forensic examination in a hotel room is less than ideal, I’d had some prior experience at making my own mini clean room in the field and felt I could extract what I needed with minimal contamination.

Just in case a hotel maid decided to ignore the DO NOT DISTURB sign I’d taped to the door, I put a sign on the inside of my room next to my samples that read, MOVIE PROPS: DO NOT TOUCH.

In the town that invented CSI and NCIS and has turned the decomposing flesh of murder victims sitting on lab counters into a dinnertime affair, I figured this would be a passable explanation.

My first order of business was to remove the contents of the buckets inside the tent I’d created over the desk and place each distinct item into a double-lined plastic bag, cataloging it.

In the event that I found more bones than the femur that had caught my eye, I wanted to be able to enable the medical examiner to have a clear idea of what came from where when I presented them with the materials—anonymously, of course.

As I pulled each item from the bucket, I gave it a bath in a washbasin using purified water and then sifted through the grime, looking for fingernails and tiny little ossicles from inside the ear.

William went home when he realized that this was going to be a very long and tedious process. Although he feigned interest as I explained how you could extrapolate sewer placements from a soil map, I lost him when I started in about locating old streams and lake beds, even in radically changed topography.

It was past three when I had identified all the distinct bones from the storm drain. There were eleven of them. Almost all fingers.

It appeared the mother raccoon had managed to steal away with a child’s hand or two, or possibly a number of different fingers.

There was also the femur and several fragments that appeared to be from a tibia and an ulna, although I couldn’t be entirely positive.

After taking photographs of everything using a digital camera that in theory wouldn’t be traceable to me, I began the extraction phase.

Using a small jeweler’s drill and a special polymer seal to avoid contamination with oxygen, I removed three samples from each fragment, leaving plenty of area for the medical examiner to get their own material from an uncontaminated section of each bone.

Part of me wanted to play a prank on Sanjay by fixing DNA samples from a Neanderthal sequence inside a gelatin and using it to replace the bone marrow of one sample.

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