The Price of Innocence by Lisa Black Page B

comparison in a rape case. She had also written up the clothing descriptions for all the explosion victims, such as they were, since the clothing of those people closer to the epicenter, like Nairit, had either burned or melted off. This limited her descriptive abilities.
    Now she opened an envelope she had labeled with a Sharpie, noting Nairit Kadam’s case number and ‘left shin’, ‘shin’ sounding more pleasant than ‘stump’. She tried to keep her notes PC and somewhat gentle, for fear of finding herself on the witness stand trying to explain the use of the phrase ‘cat-puke yellow’ to describe a piece of evidence. Attorneys leapt on any sign of humanness as a sign of incompetence.
    Under the stereomicroscope, which functioned as a large, high-powered magnifying glass, she examined the paper-thin piece of fabric. Its fibers were unusually thin as well, and coated in black tar from the explosion. Even this tiny scrap brought a faint whiff of iodine to her nose. She pulled off a few fibers and washed them, first in soapy water and then in xylene, almost losing them entirely when the liquid made them hard to see. Then she let the xylene evaporate. She did all this while breathing shallowly, lest an errant breath shoot her fibers into the wild blue yonder to be lost forever along the lab’s worn linoleum.
    Finally they were ready to analyze. Now the real fun began, as she tried to hold down one end of the fiber with tweezers and roll up and down the length of it, from the loose end, with a small metal roller. The fiber stuck to the roller at will, then let go of it again, so that even once nicely flattened it would get bunched up under the roller and wind up a wadded-up mess. Then she had to transfer it to a round, clear disk of potassium bromide about one centimeter in diameter and repeat the rolling motion, trying to get the fiber flat against the ‘window’ without scratching the soft salt disk with the metal roller – or, heaven forbid, breaking it. They cost well over a hundred dollars apiece and Leo would have a mild conniption if she ordered another one before the end of the quarter. So she worked with the fiber until it gave up and lay flat, and carefully picked up the window and dropped it into its slot on the infrared spectrometer’s stage. All the while breathing very, very lightly. Only when she told the computer what to do and it sent a beam of light through the fiber did she take a deep breath, but still held it until the spectra appeared on the monitor.
    Fibers could be a painfully annoying analysis, but they were not her
least
favorite task – they still had more variety and color than hairs.
    The fiber’s spectra turned out to be quite ordinary, a type of polyethylene.
    ‘What’s up?’ Don hitched himself up on her workbench, his long legs dangling over her cabinets.
    ‘Don’t move, and don’t breathe too much.’
    ‘That’s why I love coming to visit you. I always get such a friendly welcome.’
    ‘You’re breathing.’
    ‘Duly noted.’ Determining someone’s DNA markers from bodily samples involved periods of waiting, during which Don would inevitably seek her out. He had made this even more of a habit in the past few days. Unlike Leo, Don
did
care about her emotional health.
    Unfortunately she did not have such a free period at the same time. ‘These are samples from the explosion suspect. Possible suspect.’
    ‘I thought the Feds took the samples.’
    ‘They did.’
    ‘You naughty girl. So what is it?’
    ‘Nothing exciting, just olefin.’
    ‘And that is?’
    ‘It makes excellent carpet – really stain resistant. I don’t think it’s used in clothing too often.’
    ‘So it’s carpet. Place blows up, the fiber sticks to him.’
    ‘Who carpets a storage room, especially in white carpet? And it’s awfully thin.’
    ‘Maybe he wasn’t in the storage room at the time. Maybe he didn’t have anything to do with this explosion at all and we’re all rushing to the