Body of Evidence (23 page)

"With one exception," Hanowell laconically began, "the fibers I was asked to look at, Dr. Scarpetta, reveal few surprises--no unusual dyes or shapes at cross sections to speak of. I have concluded that the six nylon fibers most likely came from six different origins, just as your examiner in Richmond and I discussed. Four of them are consistent with the fabrics used in automobile carpeting."

"How do you figure that?" Marino asked.

"Nylon upholstery and carpeting degrade very quickly in sunlight and heat, as you might imagine," Hanowell said. "If the fibers aren't treated with a premetalized dye, thereby adding UV and thermal stabilizers, car carpet will bleach out or rot in short order. By using X-ray fluorescence I was able to detect trace amounts of metals in four of the nylon fibers. Though I can't say with certainty the origin of these fibers is car carpeting, they are consistent with that."

"Any chance of tracing them back to a make and model?" Marino wanted to know.

"I'm afraid not," Hanowell replied. "Unless we're talking about a very unusual fiber with a patented modification ratio, tracing the darn thing back to a manufacturer is pretty futile, especially if the vehicles in question were manufactured in Japan. Let me give you an example. The precursor to the carpeting in a Toyota is plastic pellets, which are shipped from this country to Japan. There they are spun into fibers, the yarn shipped back here to be made into carpet. The carpet is then sent back to Japan to be placed inside the cars coming off the line."

He droned on. It only got more hopeless. "We also have headaches with cars manufactured in the United States. Chrysler Corporation, for example, may procure a certain color for its carpeting from three different suppliers. Then halfway through the model year Chrysler may decide to change suppliers. Let's say you and I are both driving 'eighty-seven black LeBarons with burgundy interior, Lieutenant. Well, the suppliers for the burgundy carpet in mine may be different from the suppliers in yours. Point is, the only significance of the nylon fibers I've examined is the variety. Two may be from household carpeting. Four may be from automobile carpeting. The colors and cross sections vary. You add to this the finding of olefin, Dynel, acrylic fibers, and what you've got is a hodgepodge I find most peculiar."

"Obviously," Wesley interjected, "the killer has a profession or some other preoccupation that puts him in contact with many different types of carpeting. And when he murdered Beryl Madison, he was wearing something that caused numerous fibers to adhere to him."

Wool, corduroy or flannel could account for that, I thought. But no wool or dyed cotton fibers had been found that were thought to have come from the killer.

"What about Dynel?" I asked.

"Usually associated with women's dresses. With wigs, fake furs," Hanowell answered.

"Yes, but not exclusively," I said. "A shirt or pair of slacks made of Dynel would build up static electricity like polyester, causing everything to stick to it. This might explain why he was carrying so much trace."

"Possibly," Hanowell said.

"So maybe the squirrel was wearing a wig," Marino proposed. "We know Beryl let him in her house, translated into she didn't feel threatened. Most ladies ain't going to feel threatened by a woman at the door."

"A transvestite?" Wesley suggested.

"Could be," Marino replied. "Some of the best-looking babes you'll ever see. It's friggin' sickening. Even I can't tell with a few of 'em unless I get right up in their faces."

"If the assailant were in drag," I pointed out, "how do we account for the fibers adhering to him? If the origin of the fibers is his workplace, certainly he wouldn't have been dressed in drag at work."

"Unless he works the streets in drag," Marino said. "He's in and out of Johns' rides all night long, maybe in and out of motel rooms with carpeted floors."

"Then his victim selection doesn't make any sense," I said.

"No, but the absence of seminal fluid might make sense," Marino argued. "Male transvestites, faggots, usually don't go around raping women."

"They usually don't go around murdering them, either," I answered.

"I mentioned an exception," Hanowell resumed, glancing at his watch. "This is the orange acrylic fiber you were so curious about."

His gray eyes fixed impassively on me.

"The three-leaf clover shape," I recalled.

"Yes," Hanowell said, nodding. "The shape is very unusual, the purpose, as is true with other trilobals, to hide dirt and scatter light. Only place I know you'll find fibers with this shape is in Plymouths manufactured in the late seventies--the fibers are in the nylon carpeting. They're the same three-leaf clover shape at cross section as the orange fiber in Beryl Madison's case."

"But the orange fiber is acrylic," I reminded him. "Not nylon."

"That's correct, Dr. Scarpetta," he said. "I'm giving you background in order to demonstrate the unique properties of the fiber in question. The fact that it is acrylic versus nylon, the fact that bright colors such as orange are almost never used in automobile carpeting, assists us in excluding the fiber from a number of origins--including Plymouths manufactured in the late seventies. Or any other automobile you might think of."

"So you're never seen anything like this orange fiber before?" Marino asked.

"That's what I'm leading up to." Hanowell hesitated.

Wesley took over. "Last year we got in a fiber identical to this orange one in every respect when Roy was asked to examine trace recovered from a Boeing seven forty-seven hijacked in Athens, Greece. I'm sure you recall the incident," he said.

Silence.

Even Marino was momentarily speechless.

Wesley went on, his eyes dark with trouble. "The hijackers murdered two American soldiers on board and dumped their bodies on the tarmac. Chet Ramsey was a twenty-four-year-old Marine, the first to be thrown out of the plane. The orange fiber was adhering to blood on his left ear."

"Could the fiber have come from the interior of the plane?" I asked.

"It doesn't appear so," Hanowell replied. "I compared it with exemplars of carpet, seat upholstery, the blankets stored in the overhead bins, and didn't come up with a match or even a near match. Either Ramsey picked up the fiber someplace else--and this doesn't seem likely since it was adhering to wet blood--or possibly it was the result of a passive transfer from one of the terrorists to him. The only other alternative I can think of is that the fiber came from one of the other passengers, but if so, this individual would have to have touched him at some point after he was injured. According to eyewitness accounts, none of the other passengers went near him. Ramsey was taken to the front of the plane, away from the other passengers, and beaten, shot, his body wrapped in one of the plane's blankets and thrown out onto the tarmac. The blanket, by the way, was tan."

Marino said it first, and he wasn't good humored about it, "You mind explaining how the hell a hijacking in Greece is connected with two writers getting whacked in Virginia?"

"The fiber connects at least two of the incidences," Hanowell replied. "The hijacking and Beryl Madison's death. This isn't to say that the actual crimes are connected, Lieutenant. But this orange fiber is so unusual we have to consider the possibility there may be some common denominator in what happened in Athens and what is happening here now."

It was more than a possibility, it was a certainty. There was a common denominator. Person, place, or thing, I thought. It had to be one of the three, and the details were slowly materializing in my mind.

I said, "They were never able to question the terrorists. Two of them ended up dead. Another two managed to escape and have never been caught."

Wesley nodded.

"Are we even certain they were terrorists, Benton?" I asked.

After a pause, he answered, "We've never succeeded in tying them in with any terrorist group. But the assumption is they were making an anti-American statement. The plane was American, as were a third of its passengers."

"What were the hijackers wearing?" I asked.

"Civilian clothes. Slacks, open-neck shirts, nothing unusual," he said.

"And no orange fibers were found on the bodies of the two hijackers killed?"

I asked.

"We don't know," Hanowell answered. "They were gunned down on the tarmac, and we weren't able to move fast enough to claim the bodies and fly them over here for examination along with the slain American soldiers. Unfortunately, I got only the fiber report from the Greek authorities. I never actually examined the hijackers' clothing or trace myself. Obviously, quite a lot could have been missed. But even if there had been an orange fiber or two recovered from one of the hijacker's bodies, this still wouldn't necessarily tell us the origin."

"Hey, what are you telling me?" Marino demanded. "What? I'm supposed to think we're looking for an escaped hijacker who's now killing people in Virginia?"

"We can't completely rule it out, Pete," Wesley said. "Bizarre as it may seem."

"The four men who hijacked that plane have never been associated with any group," I recalled. "We really don't know the whole of their purpose or who they were, except that two of them were Lebanese--if my memory serves me well--the other two who escaped possibly Greek. It seems to me there was some speculation at the time that the real target was an American ambassador on vacation who was scheduled to be on that flight with his family."

"This is true," Wesley said tensely. "After the American embassy in Paris was bombed several days earlier, the ambassador's travel plans were secretly changed even though the reservations weren't."

His eyes glanced past me, and he was tapping an ink pen against the knuckle of his left thumb.

He added, "We haven't ruled out the possibility the hijackers were a hit squad, professional guns hired by somebody."

"Okay, okay," Marino said impatiently. "And no one's ruled out that Beryl Madison and Gary Harper might have been murdered by a professional gun. You know, their crimes staged to look like a squirrel did 'cm in."

"I suppose one place to start would be to see what else we can find out about this orange fiber, its possible origin."

Then I came right out and said it. "And maybe someone ought to look a little harder at Sparacino, make sure he wasn't somehow connected with that ambassador who may have been the real target in the hijacking."

Wesley didn't respond.

Marino suddenly got interested in trimming a thumb- nail with his pocketknife.

Hanowell looked around the table, and when it seemed apparent we had no more questions for him, he excused himself and left.

Marino fired up another cigarette. "You ask me," he said, blowing out a stream of smoke, "this is turning into a damn wild goose chase. I mean, it don't add up. Why hire some international hit man to snuff a lady romance writer and a has-been novelist who ain't produced nothing in years?"

"I don't know," Wesley said. "It all depends on who had what connections. Hell, it depends on a lot of things, Pete. Everything does. All we can do is follow the evidence as best we're able. This brings me to the next item on the agenda. Jeb Price."

"He's back on the street," Marino said automatically. I looked at him in disbelief. "Since when?"

Wesley inquired. "Yesterday," Marino replied. "He posted bail. Fifty grand, to be exact."

"You mind telling me how he managed that?"

I said, furious that Marino hadn't told me this before now. "Don't mind at all, Doc," he said. There were three ways to post bail, I knew. The first was on personal recognizance, the second with cash or property, the third through a bail bondsman who charged a ten percent fee and demanded a cosigner or some other sort of security to assure he wasn't left holding an empty bag if the accused decided to skip town. Jeb Price, Marino said, had opted for the latter.

"I want to know how he managed that," I said again, getting out my cigarettes and scooting the Coke can closer so we could share.

"Only one way I know of. He called his lawyer, who opened a bank escrow account and sent a passbook to Lucky's," Marino said.

"Lucky's?" I asked.

"Yo. Lucky Bonding Company on Seventeenth Street, conveniently located a block from the city jail," Marino answered. "Charlie Luck's pawnshop for prisoners. Also know as Hock & Walk. Charlie and me go back a long time, shoot the breeze, tell a few jokes. Sometimes he snitches a little, other times he zips his lip. This is one of those other times, unfortunately. Nothing I could pull on him succeeded in getting me the name of Price's lawyer, but I've got a suspicion he ain't local."

"Price obviously has connections in high places," I said.

"Obviously," Wesley agreed grimly.

"And he never talked?" I asked.

"Had the right to remain silent, and he sure as hell did," Marino answered.

"What did you find out about his arsenal?" Wesley was making notes to himself again. "You run it through ATF?"

Marino replied, "Comes back as registered to him, and he's got a license to carry a concealed weapon, issued six years ago by some senile judge up here in northern Virginia who's since retired and moved down south somewhere. According to the background check included in the record I got from the circuit court, Price was unmarried, was working in a D. C. gold and silver exchange called Finklestein's at the time he was issued the license. And guess what? Finklestein's ain't there no more."