The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 by Jodi Picoult

Author:Jodi Picoult [Picoult, Jodi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2012-10-23T04:00:00+00:00

7

Max Giff-Reynolds had made a career out of focusing on the things most people never saw: a carpet fiber trapped on the inside edge of a victim’s coat, a grain of sand left at a crime scene that was indigenous to a certain part of the country, the dust of a coffee grinder on the makings of a dirty bomb. As one of two hundred forensic microscopists in the country, he was in high demand. Chances were that Mike Bartholemew would never have gotten anywhere close to him for an analysis of Trixie’s hair sample—if he hadn’t known Max when he was a skinny little geek in college, back when they were roommates and Bartholemew served as bodyguard in return for private tutorials in chemistry and physics.

He’d driven to Boston that night with a hank of Trixie Stone’s hair on the seat beside him. The salon, Live and Let Dye, hadn’t even sent the sample in to Locks of Love yet; it had been languishing in a drawer in the back room near the peroxide and the paraffin wax. Now he was sitting on top of a counter, waiting for Max to tell him something useful.

The lab was piled with boxes of dust and hair and fiber for comparison. A poster of Max’s hero, Edmond Locard, hung over his polarized-light microscope. Bartholemew could remember Max reading books about Locard, the father of forensic science, even back at U Maine. “He burned off his fingerprints,” Max had told him once with admiration, “just to see if they grew back in the same patterns!”

It had been almost thirty years since they’d graduated, but Max looked the same. Balder, but still skinny, with a permanent curve to his back that came from bending over a microscope. “Huh,” he said.

“What’s that mean?”

Max pushed back from his workspace. “What do you know about hair?”

Bartholemew grinned at the other man’s gleaming pate. “More than you do.”

“Hair’s got three layers that are important, in terms of forensics,” Max said, ignoring his comment. “The cortex, the cuticle, and the medulla. If you think of a piece of hair as a pencil, the medulla is the graphite, the cortex is the wood, and the paint on the outside is the cuticle. The medulla is sometimes in pieces and differs from hair to hair on the same human head. The cells in the cortex have pigment, which is pretty much what I’m trying to match up between your two samples. You with me so far?”

Bartholemew nodded.

“I can tell you, by looking at a hair, if it’s human or not. I can tell you if it came from someone of Caucasian, Negroid, or Mongolian origin. I can tell you where it came from on the body and whether the hair was forcibly removed or burned or crushed. I can tell you that a hair excludes a suspect, but I can’t use it to pinpoint a particular one.”

He spoke as he bent over the microscope again. “What I’m seeing in both samples

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