FORGET ME NOT (Mark Kane Mysteries Book One) by John Hemmings

said, “there’s no harm in letting it show
occasionally.” He smiled, and I nodded. “Life’s unpredictable,” he
said, as I placed the box in the trunk of my car, “no-one knows
that better than me.” He handed me the bag containing Gloria’s
hairbrush.
    Immediately after leaving Philips I headed
straight for Cambridge with the contents of the plastic bag. I
doubted whether I would get the DNA results for more than a week,
but I knew that Jill Bloom, who ran a private forensic laboratory
called Complete Forensics in Cambridge, would pull out all the
stops for me. I called ahead, but Jill wasn’t available until late
afternoon and as I wanted to see her personally I drove home.
Testing for DNA would take at least seven to ten days and I needed
to make progress as quickly as possible, but a few hours wouldn’t
make much difference. I had made a call and arranged to visit Susan
again, this time at her home. I called Lucy to see if she’d had
time to research the plane crash. I made myself a sandwich and
coffee, as much to kill time as anything else. At four o’clock I
fired up the Chevy and headed for Cambridge.
    Over the years Jill had handled a lot of work
for me. She’s a meticulously thorough researcher and a fearsome
expert witness with the ability to turn a prosecution case on its
head. Her strength is her ability to think outside the box; she’s
highly adept at lateral thinking. She’d helped one of my clients
who had been charged with arson. He’d been arrested in the vicinity
of a warehouse fire and forensic tests showed that there were
traces of a fire accelerant called toluene on his shoes which the
fire department examiners confirmed was the same accelerant used to
start the fire. As far as the police forensic laboratory was
concerned it was powerful evidence against him and the DA was
confident of a conviction. The client was adamant that he’d never
knowingly been near anything containing a fire accelerant. Through
meticulous research and correspondence with the manufacturer of my
client’s shoes Jill discovered that toluene was used in the formula
for the adhesive used to attach the sole to the upper part of the
shoe. The prosecution was abandoned.
    I knew that if DNA could be extracted from
Gloria’s hair by anyone then it would be her. If she was
unsuccessful then nobody else could do it either. I’d arranged to
see her at five but I was late because of unusually heavy traffic.
I had a security pass into the car park and into the building
itself because I was a regular visitor. Jill was tied up in a
meeting, so I waited in the reception room and tried unsuccessfully
to find something interesting to read. She came down to the
reception at five forty five to receive the sample. She knew that I
needed no advice relating to the DNA test itself since she had
performed other similar tests for me before, but she had
thoughtfully prepared a typed leaflet for my client to explain the
intricacies of testing for DNA on hair samples.
    In particular her leaflet pointed out that
although it is sometimes possible to extract DNA from a shaft of a
hair it is far more likely to be successful if the root is present,
because that’s where the blood supply was. Even then experience has
shown that chemical treatments, including dyes,
can alter the hair cuticle. Dyes can easily penetrate the spaces
between the scaly cells forming the hair cuticle or even raise them
in order to be better absorbed by the hair. Peroxides, one of the
main constituent chemicals in hair dyes, heavily contribute to the
degradation of DNA in hair. Peroxides act by specifically breaking
the bonds in DNA, once the hair is exposed to water on washing; the
DNA is then easily washed out of the hair fibers. The greater the
number of washes, the more DNA is lost from the hairs. This loss of
DNA is not only due to the degradation and breaking down of the
bonds in DNA but also to the damage caused to the hair by simply
washing it.
    I was well