The Bone Bed

say, and it’s my way of acknowledging I’m persistent and always in a hurry. “Any chance the fibers you collected from her car could have come from the clothing she had on? If she was dressed that way for some unusual reason when she went out last, most likely this past April twenty-seventh?”
    Specifically, I want to know if fibers recovered from the floor, the seats, and the trunk might have come from the dark blue wool Tallulah jacket, the gray wool skirt, the purple silk blouse, and Ernie says no.
    “Carpet fibers, synthetics,” he says, and then he gets to the wood fibers he thought were mulch.
    “They’re not,” he lets me know. “I’m not saying I know what this stuff is used for, but it wasn’t made by feeding wood or bark through a tub grinder and spraying it with a dye.”
    He says he used gas chromatography–mass spectrometry, GC–MS, to analyze what he recovered from the driver’s area of the Mercedes, and the red-stained wood debris has a specific cyclic polyalcohol profile consistent with American oak.
    “Characterized by a richness in deoxyinositols, especially proto-Quercitol,” he explains. “A very interesting way of identifying the botanical origin of natural woods used in aging wine and spirits, obviously to guarantee authenticity. You know, some winemaker or distributor claims a red wine was aged in French oak barrels and GC–MS says nope, it wasn’t. It was aged in American oak barrels, so there’s no way what you’re about to pay a fortune for is a Premier Grand Cru Bordeaux. Quite a science to it, and you can imagine why. If a distributor is trying to sell you a young wine they’re passing off as a fine one?”
    “Bordeaux?” I ask. “What’s this got to do with wine?”
    “The wood fibers from her car,” he replies.
    “You think they’re from wine barrels?” I can’t imagine what that might mean.
    “Common oak, white oak used in cooperage to make barrels, and also a secondary source of tannic acid, or the tannins you find in red wine,” he says. “In your case we’re talking American oak stained a red-wine color, with trace elements of burned wood, most likely from what’s known as toasting or charring the inside of the barrel, and sugar crystals and other derivatives such as vanillin, lactones.”
    “A woody debris that looks like mulch but isn’t. Wineries or some place that makes use of wine barrels,” I think out loud. “But not where the barrels themselves are made, because new barrels wouldn’t be stained.”
    “They wouldn’t be.”
    “Then what?”
    “It’s frustrating as hell,” he says. “I can tell you the origin of this stuff likely is wine barrels, but I can’t tell you why it’s shredded, absolutely pulverized, or what it was used for.”
    He mentions that it is a common practice for people to cut old wine barrels into pieces, char them, and toss them into whiskey they’re aging.
    “But this stuff’s way too fine for that, fine like dirt,” he says. “Doesn’t look like it was from planing or sanding, either, but I suppose the debris could be from someplace where old wine barrels are being recycled or reused for something.”
    I’m aware that barrels no longer suitable for aging wine can be handcrafted into furniture, and I recall some of the unusual pieces inside Peggy Stanton’s house, the table in the entryway, where her car key was found, the oak table in the kitchen. Everything I saw was antique and certainly not recycled from used barrels, and there was no evidence she collected wines or even drank them.
    “What about the woody fibers from the bottom of her feet and under her nails?” I inquire. “Same thing?”
    “American oak stained red, some of it charred,” he answers. “Although I didn’t find sugar crystals and some of these same derivatives.”
    “They would have dissolved in the water. It’s probably safe to assume what was on her body and tracked into her car came from the same source,” I decide. “Or better put, possibly the origin of the debris likely is the same location.”
    “You can assume that,” he agrees. “I was thinking of checking with some wineries around here to see if they know what this wine barrel debris might be—”
    “Around here?” I interrupt him. “I wouldn’t.”

thirty-six
    IT IS ALMOST FOUR P.M. WHEN I WALK INTO THE WAR room, as it’s called, where experts and investigators, including scientists and doctors from the military, convene face-to-face both in