In identical twins, triplets, sextuplets, the DNA was identical, only the fingerprints were different.

"Dr. Scarpetta," Kuhn said, "all I can tell you is the hairs are alike visually, their morphology the same, in other words."

"Well, these hairs on this lady are alike visually, too."

"Any short ones, as if they were cut?"

"No," I replied.

"Sony I don't have more to tell you," he said.

"Believe me, Jamie, you've just told me quite a lot," I said. "I just don't know what any of it means."

"You figure it out," he tried to lighten up, "we'll write a paper on it."

I tried the trace evidence lab next and didn't even bother saying hello to Larry Posner. He was peering into a microscope that probably was more sharply focused than he was when he looked up at me.

"Larry," I said, "everything's going to hell."

"Always has been."

"What about our unidentified guy? Anything?" I asked. "Because let me tell you, I'm really groping:' "I'm relieved. I thought you dropped by to ask me about your lady downstairs," he replied. "And I was going to have to break the news that I'm not Mercury with winged feet."

"There may be a link between the two cases. Same weird hair found on the bodies. Human hair, Larry."

He thought about this.for a long moment.

"I don't get it," he finally said. "And I hate to tell you, but I don't have anything quite so dramatic to report to you."

"Anything you can tell me at all?" I asked.

"Start with the soil samples from the container. PLM picked up the usual," he began, referring to the polarized light nъcroscopy. "Quartz, sand, diatomite, flint and elements like iron and aluminum. Lots of trash. Glass, paint chips, vegetable debris, rodent hairs. You can only begin to imagine all the crap inside a cargo container like that.

"And diatoms all over the place, but what's a little off-beat is what I found when I examined the ones swept up from the container's floor, and the ones from the'surface of the body and exterior of the clothes. They're a mixture of saltwater and freshwater diatoms."

"Makes sense if the ship started out in the Scheldt River in Antwerp and then spent most of the voyage at sea," I remarked.

"But the inside of the clothing? That's exclusively freshwater. Don't get that unless he washed his clothes, shoes, socks, even underwear in a river, lake, whatever. And I wouldn't expect you to launder Armani and crocodile shoes in a river or lake, or swim in clothes like that, either.

"So it's like he's got freshwater diatoms against his skin, which is weird. And the mixture of salt and fresh on the outside, which you'd expect under the circumstances. You know, walking around on the dock, saltwater diatoms in the air, getting on his clothes, but not on the inside of them” "What about the vertebral bone?" I then asked.

"Freshwater diatoms. Consistent with freshwater drowning, maybe the river in Antwerp. And the hair on the guy's head-all freshwater diatoms. No saltwater ones mixed in."

Posner widened his eyes and rubbed them, as if they were very tired.

"This is really twisting my brain like a dishrag. Diatoms that don't add up, weirdo baby hair and the vertebral bone. Like an Oreo. One side chocolate, the otter vanilla, with chocolate and vanilla icing in the middle and a scoop of vanilla on top."

"Spare me the analogies, Larry. I'm confused enough."

"So how do you explain it?"

"I can only offer a scenario."

"Fire away."

"He might have only freshwater diatoms in his hair,if his head were immersed in fresh water," I said. "If he were put .headfirst inside a barrel with fresh water in the bottom, for example. You do that to somebody, they can't get out, just like toddlers who fall headfirst into buckets of waterthose five-gallon plastic kind detergent corRes in. Waisthigh and very stable. Impossible to topple it over. Or he could have been drowned in a normal-size bucket of fresh water if someone held him down."

"I'm going to have nightmares," Posner said.

"Don't stay here until the roads start freezing again," I said.

Marino gave me a ride home, and I took the jar of formalin with me because I would not give up hope that the flesh inside it had something else to say. I would keep it on my desk in my study and now and then put on gloves and study it in sidelight like an archaeologist trying to read crude symbols worn away on stone.

"You coming in?" I asked Marino.

"You know, my damn pager keeps going off and I can't figure out who it is," he said, shoving his truck in gear.

He held it up and squinted.

"Maybe if you turned on the overhead light:' I suggested.

"Probably some snitch too stoned to dial right," he replied.. "I'll eat something if you're offering. Then I gotta go."

As we stepped inside my house, his pager vibrated again. He grabbed it off his belt in exasperation, tilting it until he could read the display.

"Screwed up again! What's five-three-one? Anything you know that's got those numbers in it?" he asked, exasperated.

"Rose's home number does," I said.

27

Rose had grieved when her husband died, and I thought t she would fall apart when she'd had to put down one of her greyhounds. Yet somehow she'd always worn her dignity the sate way she dressed, properly and with discretion. But when she learned on the news that morning that Kim Luong had been murdered, Rose got hysterical.

"If only, if only…," she went on and on, crying in the wing chair near the fire in her small apartment.

"Rose, you got to quit saying that," Marino said.

She had known Kim Luong because Rose often shopped at the Quik Cary. Rose had gone there last night, probably at the same time the killer was still inside beating and biting and smearing blood. Thank God the store had been closed and locked.

I carried two mugs of ginseng tea into her living room while Marino drank coffee. Rose was shaking all over, face swollen from crying and gray hair hanging over the collar of her bathrobe. She looked like a neglected old woman in a nursing home.

"I didn't have the TV on. I was reading. So I didn't know about it until I heard it on the news this morning." She kept telling us the same story in different ways. "I had no idea, was sitting up in bed reading and worrying about all the problems in the office. Mainly Chuck. I think that boy's as twisted as they come and I've been working to show it."

I set down her tea.

"Rose," Marino said. "We can talk about Chuck another time. We need you to tell us exactly what happened last…"

"But you've got to listen to me first!" she exclaimed. "And Captain Marino, you've got to make Dr. Scarpetta listen! That boy hates her! He hates all three of us. I'm trying to tell you, you must do anything to get rid of him before it's too late."

"I'm going to take care of it as soon as…" I started to say.

But she was shaking her head.

"He's pure evil. I believe he's been following me, or at least someone involved with him," she claimed. "Maybe even that car you saw in my parking lot and the one following you. How do you know it wasn't him who rented it under a phony name so he didn't have to use his car and be recognized right away? How do you know it's not whoever he might be involved with?"

"Whoa, whoa, whoa," Marino interrupted her, holding up his hand. "Why would he follow anybody?"

"Drugs," she answered as if she knew it for a fact. "This past Monday we had an overdose case come in, and it just so happened I decided to come in an hour and a half early because I was going to take a long lunch break to get my hair done."

I didn't believe that Rose just happened to come in early. I had asked her to help me find out what Ruffin was up to, and of course, she had made that her mission.