It was, but that wasn’t what I’d used. I was in too big of a rush to go back to the locker room and wash with the pink disinfectant kept in bottles by the sinks.
Instead, I went to the sink nearest me, the one in the autopsy suite where there was a metal dispenser filled with the same grainy, gray soap powder used throughout the rest of the building. It was cheap. It was what the state purchased by the truckload. I had no idea what was in it. It was almost odorless and didn’t dissolve or lather. It was like washing up with wet sand.
There was a ladies’ room down the hall. I left for a moment and returned with a handful of the grayish powder. Lights out and Vander switched on the laser again.
The soap went crazy; blazing neon white.
“I’ll be damned . . .”
Vander was thrilled. I wasn’t exactly feeling the same way. I desperately wanted to know the origin of the residue we’d been finding on the bodies. But I’d never, not in my wildest fantasies, hoped it would turn out to be something found in every bathroom inside my building.
I still wasn’t convinced. Did the residue on this file come from my hands? What if it didn’t?
We experimented.
Firearms examiners routinely conduct a series of test fires to determine distance and trajectory. Vander and I were conducting a series of test washings to determine how thoroughly one had to rinse his hands in order for none of the residue to show up in the laser.
He vigorously scrubbed with the powder, rinsed well, and carefully dried his hands with paper towels. The laser picked up one or two sparkles, and that was it. I tried to reenact my handwashing, doing it exactly as I did it when I was downstairs. The result was a multitude of sparkles that were easily transferred to the countertop, the sleeve of Vander’s lab coat, anything I touched. The more I touched, obviously, the fewer sparkles there were left on my hands.
I returned to the ladies’ room and presently was back with a coffee cup full of the soap. We washed and washed, over and over again. Lights went on and off, the laser spitting, until the entire area of the sink looked like Richmond from the air after dark.
One interesting phenomenon became apparent. The more we washed and dried, the more the sparkles accumulated. They got under our nails, clung to our wrists and the cuffs of our sleeves. They ended up on our clothing, found their way to our hair, our faces, our necks—everywhere we touched. After about forty-five minutes of dozens of experimental washings, Vander and I looked perfectly normal in normal light. In the laser, we looked as if we’d been decorated with Christmas glitter.
“Shit,” he exclaimed in the dark. It was an expletive I’d never heard him use. “Would you look at this stuff? The bastard must be a clean freak. To leave as much of the stuff as he does, he must be washing his hands twenty times a day.”
“If this soap powder’s the answer,” I reminded him.
“Of course, of course.”
I prayed the scientists upstairs could make their magic work. But what couldn’t be determined by them or anyone else, I thought, was the origin of the residue on the slide file—and how the file had gotten inside the refrigerator to begin with.
My anxious inner voice was nagging at me again.
You just can’t accept you made a mistake, I admonished myself. You just can’t handle the truth. You mislabeled this PERK, and the residue on it came from your own hands.
But what if? What if the scenario were a more pernicious one? I silently argued. What if someone maliciously planted the file inside the refrigerator, and what if the glittery residue was from this person’s hands instead of mine? The thought was strange, the poison of an imagination gone berserk.
So far a similar residue had been found on the bodies of four murdered women.
I knew Wingo, Betty, Vander and I had touched the file. The only other people who might have touched it were Tanner, Amburgey or Bill.
His face drifted through my mind. Something unpleasant and chilling shifted inside me as Monday afternoon slowly replayed in my memory. Bill was so distant during the meeting with Amburgey and Tanner. He was unable to look at me then, or later when the three men were going though the cases inside my conference room.
I saw case files slipping off Bill’s lap and falling to the floor in a commingled, god-awful mess. Tanner quickly offered to pick them up. His helpfulness was so automatic. But it was Bill who picked up the paperwork, paperwork that would have included leftover labels. Then he and Tanner sorted through everything. How easy it would have been to tear off a label and slip it into a pocket . . .
Later, Amburgey and Tanner left together, but Bill remained with me. We talked in Margaret’s office for ten or fifteen minutes. He was affectionate and full of promises that a couple of drinks and an evening together would soothe my nerves.