The Bone Bed

about,” he says. “It doesn’t fluoresce because it’s absorbing the UV and looks black, pretty much like blood does, but it’s not blood. In normal light and under a lens it’s dark red. There’s a fair amount of it in the carpet near the brake and the accelerator, like someone had it on his shoes.”
    I step away from the car and take off my goggles. Retrieving a magnifier from a cart, I examine the stub and agree with Ernie that blood wouldn’t look like this. The woody material is familiar.
    “I’m thinking the stuff could be mulch,” he says.
    “Do you know what kind of wood?”
    “The chemical spectra for that may take a day or two. Assuming you want to know if all of it came from the same localized area, from the same tree, for example?”
    George and Cybil from trace want to know when they can begin to set up the tent. It will completely enclose the car so no one is inhaling superglue fumes or is exposed to them. I tell them not quite yet.
    “To determine that degree of specificity? Well, it depends on the uptake from soil, various elements in it; we are what we eat. It’s true of everything, even trees,” Ernie is saying from inside the Mercedes, and I know he’s thinking about what I recovered from Peggy Stanton’s body.
    The fibrous red material on the bottom of her feet and under her nails looks identical to what he’s finding inside her car.
    “If you want that level of detail, I might have to send a sample to a lab where they specialize in wood analysis.” He continues painting UV inside the Mercedes. “It goes without saying in trace amounts like this you can’t exactly count the rings.”
    “I’d settle for type of tree. Pine, redwood, cypress, cedar. It does look a lot like mulch.”
    Soft-sided carrying cases are set down close to me, scientists unpacking the cyanoacrylate monomer and cabling.
    “Hardwood shredded mulch as opposed to mulch made from bark,” I specify.
    “There’s no bark I can see,” Ernie tells me.
    “Sort of like shredded wheat,” I describe, as I look at it. “Fibrous, hairy. Almost like cotton. Not milled like wood that’s sawed or cut with machines. But extremely fine. Without magnification it almost looks like soil, like dirt, like fine coffee grounds. Only dark red.”
    “No, it’s not milled. It’s totally irregular. A red-colored mulch, and usually mulch is made from scrap pallets and other wood that’s chip-ground.” His head is ducked in the driver’s side. “Not popular with a lot of people, because it bleeds in the rain and the dye masks treated lumber, which you don’t want in your yard, certainly not near your vegetable garden. Recycled CCA, chromated copper arsenate, and whatever this stuff is, it doesn’t have a trace of CCA, that much I can say. Assuming it’s the same stuff you found on the body. I did find iron oxide, which could be from a dye or from good ole dirt.”
    I tell him it would be very helpful if he could examine what he’s finding inside her car, to do it as quickly as possible. It might be quite important, I add, and he promises when he gets back to his lab he’ll take a look with the stereomicroscope, the polarized light scope, the Raman spectrometer.
    He’s confident he’s going to find the same chemical fingerprint, he explains, the same interference colors and same birefringence he saw when he took a look at the reddish material I collected from Peggy Stanton’s body.
    “Red-stained wood but not stained all the way through.” I study another stub he hands to me. “If it were ground up and sprayed with dye, would it look like this?”
    “Maybe. I do know when I examined what Dr. Zenner submitted to me yesterday, I noted that some of the fibers are charred,” Ernie says. “And that I don’t necessarily expect to find in mulch. But it completely depends on what it’s made from. Scrap wood from a torn-down building where there may have been a fire, for example? I also found charcoal and a lot of minerals mixed in.”
    “The question is whether the charcoal, the minerals are indigenous to this mulchlike material or are from dirt on a floor or carpet.”
    “That’s exactly the question.” Ernie stands up and straightens his back as if it’s stiff. “You start looking at the world through a microscope and you see salt, silica, iron, arsenic, insect pieces and parts, skin cells, hair, fibers, a holy horror.”
    “It certainly appears he drove her car.” I feel sure of it. “Wherever he