The Dying Breath: A Forensic Mystery

we’re gonna unravel us a mystery,” Ben said, slapping his hands together to go all loose in the joints. “All right, what do we do first?”
    “Let me show you the file on Leather Ed,” Justin began. “Can we clear some space?”
    “I’ll get that desk.” Hopping off the stool, Ben quickly rolled a computer desk with a laminate top and stopped it right in front of Justin.
    “That’ll work great,” Justin told him. He laid the opened file on top and spread out the photographs in an arc, like a deck of cards. “Cameryn says we’re missing something, and maybe she’s right. I’ve already gone through this. While you study these, I’d like to take a look at those slides.”
    “Be my guest,” said Dr. Moore. “That sample belongs to Leather Ed.”
    While Justin squinted into the microscope, Cameryn studied the glass rectangles, each one marked with a specific name. “Did you make these, Dr. Moore?”
    “No, the slides are created here, in the histology lab. It’s a process. You’ve seen me slice bits of tissue and place them in the cassettes—”
    “Cassettes?” Cameryn asked. She frowned, trying to remember.
    “Cassettes,” he replied, a note of impatience in his voice. “Those small white plastic squares—you’ve seen them. They’re on the table where I slice the organs. I put tiny chunks of heart, liver, lung, all the bits of visceral matter go into those containers. The lab technician takes the tissues to this lab and pours wax on top. Then they set. This device here”—he patted a square machine made of white enamel, with a huge, twelve-inch blade—“shaves the material that’s embedded in the wax. Those slices are stained, heated, placed between glass slides, and voilà! We can examine the lung at a cellular level.”
    “I don’t know what I’m looking at,” Justin said and moved aside so that Cameryn could see. The image was cream colored with a ribbon of red circles touching one another in what looked like a string of beads.
    “There’s the foreign matter in the alveoli,” Dr. Moore murmured. “But for the life of me I can’t say what it is.”
    Sighing, Cameryn pushed herself away from the microscope. Like Justin, she couldn’t interpret it at all, which meant it was no use to her. She turned once again to the evidence reports, some printed out while others had been scrawled in ink. “Justin, what’s all this?”
    “That is everything we’ve got so far, including background information on Leather Ed. Plus a list of things found in his house. He served in Vietnam, bought the house and stayed in Silverton for over thirty years. But the guy was a loner. I realize I’m the new guy in town, but no one seems to have really known him.”
    Ben picked up a photograph of the living room and frowned. “Is this the inside of his house? Man, that place was a mess. That was one strange dude.”
    “I lived in Silverton all my life and I never really talked to him,” Cameryn said, feeling a haze of guilt. In her mind’s eye she saw him once again, hunched over his plate of food, his hair a mat of gray coils and his nails stained with tobacco. “He came into the Grand every so often and I served him, but now that I think about it, I don’t even know what he did for a living.” She stopped, considering this. “I mean, how did he pay his bills?”
    Justin began rifling through the photographs. “I can’t say for sure, but I know one thing he did that could have scored him some extra cash.” Pulling a few pictures from the back of the pile, he said, “Look at this. Leather Ed grew pot. This was in his basement—the man was a regular horticulturalist. It could have been just for his own personal stash, but it’s possible Leather Ed may have been dealing.”
    “You’re serious ?” Cameryn asked, genuinely shocked. She studied the various pictures of the basement. It was unceilinged and unpainted, with shelves overflowing with boxes of junk, rags, pipes, and tools, but in the center, sprouting from trays on a wooden table, grew row after row of marijuana plants. Above them hung a bank of grow lights, five-foot rectangles tacked to exposed wooden beams.
    “So that is said cannabis. I’ve never actually seen it before.”
    “Very good, Cammie,” her father told her, wagging shaggy brows at her. “As a father, I must say I’m encouraged. Perhaps, ‘just say no’ works after all.”
    “Dad, I would never touch the stuff,” she assured him.
    “But the thing