Frozen Stiff by Annelise Ryan Page B

speechless. His mouth opens and closes a few times, and he stammers out a few unintelligible syllables before turning away. He spends a moment zipping the body bag closed and cleaning his glasses off. By the time he’s done, he seems to have recovered. “Come on up to my lab,” he says, “and I’ll give you a crash course on hair analysis.”
    “I’ll meet you there in a minute. I need to make a quick trip to the ladies’ room first.” This is a lie but I need to fetch Hurley’s hair from my purse and I don’t want Arnie to know that. I scoot back to the library, take the paper-wrapped hair from my purse, and shove it into my pocket. As I dawdle long enough to equal a bathroom trip, I brace myself for what lies ahead, wondering if I’m about to commit career suicide.

Chapter 10
    A rnie’s lab area is located on the second floor of the building and is accessible only with a key card. As I make my way up the stairs, I ponder the potential implications of what I’m hoping to do. What if the hair I have matches the one found on Callie’s body? Where do I go from there? Can I believe Hurley? Can I trust him? Or am I letting my hormones get the better of me?
    Arnie’s lab is an amazing demonstration of efficiency and order. The room looks smaller than it is because it’s jam-packed. Across the room from the entrance is Arnie’s small desk, which sits perpendicular to the storage cabinets lining the far end of the left-hand wall. The right-hand wall contains a long, equipment-covered counter full of machines, microscopes, analyzers, and other lab paraphernalia, with more storage cabinets mounted overhead. I find Arnie standing near the middle of this counter and he waves me over.
    “This is a comparison microscope,” he says, pointing to the device in front of him, which looks like two microscopes joined at the hip with a double eyepiece centered between them. “It allows you to examine two objects side by side to look for differences and commonalities. For instance, I could have compared the hair we found on Callie’s body to one of her own hairs to try to determine if it was hers or the killer’s. I didn’t, because the evidential hair is coarse and black and hers are fine and auburn so the sources are obviously different. If the evidential hair wasn’t a human hair—it is, and I’ll explain how I know that in a second—I can look for a match in one of my reference books, or examine it next to sample references for different animal species: dogs, cats, horses, cows, etcetera, until I can determine what it came from. While an animal hair might not point directly to a given suspect, it can be useful in placing someone at a crime scene.”
    He pauses, reaches up, and plucks a hair from his own head, wincing as he does. I’m not sure if he’s grimacing because of pain, or if it’s because his own hair is rapidly thinning on top, a fact I suspect he compensates for with his ponytail.
    He cuts a segment of the hair and puts it on top of a glass slide. “We typically fix hairs as a wet mount using a drop of glycerin,” he explains, and after grabbing a nearby bottle, he unscrews its top and uses the attached eyedropper to apply a drop of a clear, viscous liquid to the hair. Then he places a cover slip atop the mount, causing the glycerin to spread over the entire sample. He positions the prepped slide on the bed of a nearby single stage microscope and turns its light on. After removing his glasses and positioning them atop his head, he looks through the eyepiece and adjusts the focus. When he’s done he steps back and says, “First let me give you a crash course on hair structure. Take a look.”
    I bend down and peer through the scope.
    “You’re looking at the hair magnified one hundred times. You should be able to see three basic layers. The outer layer is called the cuticle—that’s the part that looks like overlapping fish scales. It tells me what species the hair came from because each animal