Total pages in book: 75
Estimated words: 77857 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 389(@200wpm)___ 311(@250wpm)___ 260(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 77857 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 389(@200wpm)___ 311(@250wpm)___ 260(@300wpm)
And I stop my jaw from dropping.
This is a lab all right. There’s equipment down here that I don’t recognize. I may have wandered into a secret government complex.
“Let’s see what we’ve got here.” Jackson takes the box from me and sits down on the stool in front of what looks like a workbench but is much more intricate.
“Have a seat.” He gestures to the stool next to him. Then he puts on a pair of glasses, except they’re not glasses. They have something like jewelers’ loupes attached to them, so they’re clearly some kind of magnifying device. Then he straps on some white rubber gloves.
He pulls out the first item, the perfume. Examines it. “You’re not looking for fingerprints?”
“No,” I say.
“Good, because most of these are old, except for a few that appear very new.”
“That would be my girlfriend and me. We’re the ones who found the stuff and brought it back from London.”
“Got it.” He looks at the perfume bottle from all angles. “Definitely nothing on here that I could get DNA from.”
Next he pulls out the cassette tape. He examines it the same way, looking at it from every angle with his magnifiers. He sets it down after a few moments. “Nothing here either.”
“No. We figured our best bets were the hair tie or the panties.”
He carefully pulls the hair tie out of the box. “I don’t want to disturb anything that is attached to it. You do have some hairs here. But if they’re over sixty years old…” He shakes his head.
“We know. It’s a real long shot.”
“It is.” He examines the hair tie and carefully extracts the hairs from it, looking at them closely. Then he removes the magnifiers from his face and turns to a microscope.
He examines each hair under the scope. Then he sighs.
And I sure don’t like the sound of that sigh.
“I’m afraid there’s no viable root on any of these hairs. I thought we might have one, but under the scope, it’s a no.”
“What now?” I ask.
“Let me look at the panties, though I doubt there will be anything there.”
“Okay.”
He takes the panties, puts his magnifying glasses back on, and examines them.
Minutes tick by.
He’s not leaving any stone unturned, that’s for sure. Either that or he likes touching women’s panties.
Just when I’m sure he’s about to tell me he has nothing—
“Here we go. One pubic hair.” He pulls it out. “Damn. She was a real redhead.”
I dismiss the ick factor. I don’t give a shit what this man says. I just want to know if this pubic hair has DNA attached.
He pulls the hair from the panties with tweezers, removes his glasses again, and turns to the microscope. He examines it for what seems like hours but is only a few seconds.
“Shit,” he says.
“Bad news?”
“No viable hair root. I’m sorry.”
I sigh. “Well, I guess that’s it. All that’s left in there are some roses. Dried-up roses.”
He raises his eyebrows. “Any stems?”
“Yeah. Short stems.”
“Another long shot, but let me see the stems.”
I hand the box to him, and he puts his glasses back on and intricately examines the stems.
“I’ll be damned,” he says.
“What?”
“Right here, by the thorn. A tiny speck of blood.”
A spike of hope shoots through me, until—
“That blood could be the Englishman’s,” Jackson says. “It may not be the girl’s.”
“Pretty much a fifty-fifty shot, though, wouldn’t you say?”
Jackson removes the magnifiers. “True enough. But we still have limitations. The speck of blood is probably over sixty years old.”
“And is that a problem? I mean… I don’t know anything about DNA extraction.”
“It’ll be difficult,” he says. “But we at least have a sample. Will we get anything from it? More likely we won’t, but at least it’s something I can try.”
“So you have the DNA from the bones. All you need to do is match it.”
“Right. And if the blood doesn’t match, we know it probably belongs to the guy.”
“Do you need a sample of his DNA?”
“No. Unless you need it for something else.”
“No, I don’t.”
“All right,” Jackson says. “Give me twenty-four hours. I’ll be in touch.”
“Thank you. You’ll be compensated very well.”
“I know, and I appreciate it. Tell Ruby I said hi.”
“Will do.”
I leave the stems with Jackson, but I take the rest of the items in the shoebox with me. Once everything is over, I’ll return the entire box to Ennis.
“I’ll see you out,” Jackson says.
“Don’t bother,” I tell him. “Go ahead and start your work.”
Back in Snow Creek, I stop at the cinema to talk to Jenny Mabel, the manager.
Jenny and I went to high school together, and she always blushes profusely when I talk to her. True to form, her cheeks are bright red when she comes out of her office.
“Hi, Brock.” She looks at her feet.
“Hi, Jenny. Thanks for seeing me. I need to change my reservation for Rory Pike’s concert.”