11

Catherine was on the phone when Wendy Simms tapped on her office door. Catherine now spent her life on the phone, it seemed, or dealing with paperwork or attending meetings. That she still had time actually to go out into the field seemed to be the result of a flaw in the time-space continuum – surely there weren't really that many hours in any given day.

But the phone call was about her water bill, a matter she would have handled at home if she had expected to make it back there today, so she cut it short. The DNA tech had a sheet of paper in her hands and an expectant look on her face, and her slender body bobbed from side to side impatiently, making her ponytail wag. "Sorry, Wendy," Catherine said as she lowered the phone. "What's up?'

"Good news. I think," Wendy said. "Well, news anyway."

"What is it?"

"Those sheets you brought in? I've got a preliminary result."

"Let's have it," Catherine said. She was thrilled to have something back so soon. She didn't know if Daria Cameron's disappearance was at all connected to the man killed on her mother's estate, but she didn't like coincidences. If a link between the two events existed, she intended to find it.

"I've only tested the seminal fluid so far," Wendy said. "Assuming – and before you say anything about assuming, I know, it's just a prioritizing tool – that the vaginal fluid belonged to Daria Cameron and she wasn't letting someone else use her place as a… play pad."

"That's probably a safe assumption. Temporary assumption," Catherine added. "Which will be checked out shortly."

"Absolutely. Anyway, the other fluid came from one Dustin Gottlieb."

"The Camerons' estate manager?"

"I guess so, if he lives on the estate. He has the same address as Helena Cameron, anyway."

Catherine raked her memory, turning up what she had heard about Gottlieb at the scene. "He was fired recently, a couple of months ago. I'm not sure on what grounds. Then a few weeks ago, he was re-hired, put back in his old position. Apparently, some of the other people on the staff were unhappy about that. As, presumably, would be whoever had the job in his absence.'

Wendy nodded along. "And screwing the boss's daughter…"

"He wouldn't be the first guy to advance his career that way."

"Probably not the first guy to end his that way, either," Wendy pointed out.

"True. Whatever happened, there seems to have been a reconciliation between him and Helena Cameron. When I was there, he seemed genuinely concerned for her well-being."

"Wouldn't you be, if she was your meal ticket?"

"Well, of course. But it can go beyond that, too. Maybe he really does care for Daria and her mother."

"In different ways, let's hope."

"Oh," Catherine said, making an involuntary grimace. "Yes, let's hope that. Very strongly."

Greg was on his way to his office when he saw Wendy coming out of Catherine's with a sheet of paper in her hands. "Wendy," he said. "Just who I was looking for."

"You were? I can usually be found in the DNA lab. Which is, you know, next to your office."

Greg tugged his collar away from his neck. He felt as if he needed a shower after spending time in that filthy tent. More than a shower, a whole series of them, increasingly hotter and more sterile, until his entire outer layer of skin was burned off. "Okay, I just got back. But I was going to go looking for you in a minute."

She walked with him toward the DNA lab and his shared office. "What for?"

"I have something that needs analysis, stat."

"Is it evidence?'

"I think so."

"Log it in with the evidence clerk, and he'll bring it to me."

Greg stopped in his tracks, stared at her, then realized she was joking. The evidence clerk was in his office so seldom that Greg had a hard time remembering what he looked like. Maybe they didn't have one at all. Maybe he'd been fired as a cost-cutting measure. That's an excellent idea, Greg thought. That one's going in the suggestion box. Even if it's already happened. "That's very funny," he said. "Do you want it now, or should I bring it to the lab?"

"What is it?"

"Fingernails."

"Without fingers attached?"

"Just the nails."

"Eew. Bring them to the lab."

"They're strange."

"Besides being disembodied, how strange can fingernails be?"

"These are strange," Greg said again. The paper scraps in the tent belonging to the man called Crackers had been almost geologically layered, like the Grand Canyon. But he had found the finger nails and some long, fine, straight hairs right on top, along with shorter brown hairs that he thought be longed to Crackers himself. He didn't know if they meant anything other than that someone had visited Crackers sometime in the relatively recent past. But at this point, he would take any clue he could find that might point to someone who could identify the dead man. "They're actually pieces of nails. They're very brittle. And they have these weird yellowish-white longitudinal lines running through them."

"Yellowish-white lines?' Catherine asked from behind them.

Grog's heart jumped into his throat, pounding feverishly. "Yes! I didn't know you were there."

"Sorry, Greg," Catherine said, "I didn't mean to startle you. Wendy, you were going to give me the data on Gottlieb." She gestured toward the paper Wendy still clutched. "But then you left with it."

"Oh, right." Wendy handed it over. "Sorry."

"No problem," Catherine said. "Lines in the nails. I have a feeling your nail donor isn't well."

"That would be my guess," Greg said. "I was going to do some research, see if I could find something that would cause that."

"You do that. I'm going to do some checking of my own. I have a little bit of a hunch…"

"What is it?"

"You'll know when it's more than a hunch," she said, walking away.

They both watched her go, then Wendy turned back to Greg. "Okay, you're bringing me diseased nails. I can't wait. Anything else?"

"Some long red hairs. Also very brittle."

Wendy eyed him for a moment, letting her gaze drift to his feet and back up to his head again. "What?" he asked.

"You have a certain… aroma about you today. Or should I say reek? You bring a girl diseased nails and brittle hair. And you're still single? Imagine that."

David Hodges watched Wendy and Greg out of the corner of his eye. It didn't look as if Greg was really getting anywhere with her, and it wasn't as if Hodges would have been jealous if he had.

Well, maybe a little. He and Wendy had so much in common. They were both smart – okay, brilliant, at least in his case. They both loved the old sci-fi TV series Astro Quest. He was sure she thought he was cute, and he agreed with that assessment.

But he had blown his one real chance with her, and he wasn't likely to get another one. Not really his fault, of course, that was just the way things shook out sometimes.

Still, he couldn't help watching her and wondering what they might have been like as a couple. Perhaps in some alternative dimension, an alternative Hodges was raising adorable little geniuses.

But this dimension's Hodges had more immediate concerns. He had to analyze the trace evidence from Robert Domingo's murder scene. Ray Langston hadn't been able to bring him much, but Hodges didn't know if that was because there wasn't much to be found or because he possibly had left some behind.

He had some hairs, which weren't whole enough still to have their follicles attached. The follicle cells were the parts of hairs that stored nuclear DNA and would have been most helpful to discover. A couple of the hairs had gone to Wendy just the same, because mitochondrial DNA could sometimes be extracted from hair shafts. Mitochondrial DNA was passed by maternal lineage, and it mutated very slowly, so it could identify not only a person's mother but also grandmother, great-grandmother, and so on, going back potentially for generations. It wasn't as commonly used in criminal cases as nuclear DNA, but that didn't mean it should be ignored. Finding it would be Wendy's problem.