Seeds of Evidence (9781426770838) by Linda J. White Page B

your advantage, assuming, of course, the little boy had been living on the peninsula. If he hadn’t, well, you’re totally out of luck.”
    Kit pressed her phone to her ear. “Let’s assume he lived on the peninsula. How can the acorns help?”
    â€œWell, think about it: if we were talking about a red oak or a white oak, they’re all over the place. We would find it very hard, probably impossible, to find the mother tree. But live oaks don’t grow up there naturally. People plant them as ornamentals.”
    â€œOrnamentals?”
    â€œLive oaks are the big tree you see in pictures of the old plantations, the ones with the Spanish moss hanging down from them. So people use them to evoke that Old South image. Since they’re not native to Delmarva, there won’t be nearly as many and they’ll be in fairly predictable places, around houses, along lanes, like that. They’re evergreens, with leaves that look kind of like thin magnolia leaves. Go to Hampton University. There’s a famous live oak there, the Emancipation Oak. That’s where the Emancipation Proclamation was read out loud for the first time in the South, in 1863.”
    Kit opened up her laptop and Googled “Southern live oak” while she continued to hold the phone.
    Dr. Hill continued, “They’re resistant to salt spray, and if they’re growing right alongside a body of water like the ocean, they’ll be kind of scrubby and short. But inland, they get real big—80 feet max. The fact that your boy had acorns in hispocket at this time of year tells me he was keeping them, playing with them. He had a stash of them somewhere . . . in a jar or something. They don’t drop until September, and if they’d been on the ground since last winter, they would have been eaten by animals or rotted. So he had to have had them stored somewhere.
    â€œHere’s what I’d do,” Dr. Hill continued. “I’d look at the big tomato fields, and see if I could find a house with live oaks around it . . . lining the driveway or just in the yard, anywhere nearby. Then I’d get a sample from them and check the DNA.”
    â€œSo you could trace the DNA? To an individual tree?”
    â€œWe should be able to.” The botanist explained what kind of samples he’d need. Kit hung up the phone. She had just a little over a week left to prove her case to her boss.

    David pushed his paintbrush into the corner of the window frame. He was trying to keep his feelings at bay by focusing on the painting and playing upbeat music in his iPod.
    But he missed her. He barely knew her, but he missed her. And that violated every practical rule he had established for himself. Every long-standing principle. Every common-sense, street-smart, logical game plan he’d ever created.
    He looked up every time a car passed, hoping he’d see a green Subaru Forester. Hers. He caught himself daydreaming, his brush poised in midair. He wondered a thousand times over if he should call her. Take a chance, again.
    But those chances had never worked out. Why did he think another one would? And was he drawn to her, or the adrenaline of the chase?

    Armed with a list of growers from the local agricultural extension agent, Kit spent six hours bent over her laptop, zooming in on satellite photographs of tomato farms on Google Earth, looking for live oaks, based just on their shape—the huge crown, broad, spreading branches, and overall size. After identifying sixteen possibilities, she’d spent two days driving around, checking them out in person, and reducing her list to eight farms. Eight locations on the Virginia portion of the Delmarva Peninsula where there were live oaks near tomato fields.
    What a long shot. Kit tried to encourage herself by remembering the case of the federal judge killed by a pipe bomb loaded with nails. The FBI case agent went from hardware store to