The Reborn by Lin Anderson Read Free Book Online Page B

last time, McNab looking half dead through lack of sleep and worry. She’d smelt whisky on his breath and known that as soon as she left, he would supplement his coffee with more.
    If he were sitting opposite her now, they would be discussing the latest case. She tried to imagine what his take on it would be, what questions he would ask. McNab had a habit of getting right to the point.
    ‘Why was she in the Hall of Mirrors on her own?’ The voice in her head was as clear as if he were there. ‘Kids would go in there together for a laugh, but not by themselves.’
    It was such an obvious question. Rhona hoped Slater had thought to ask it.

6
    The strategy meeting had been called for mid-afternoon, leaving time for the post-mortem to establish the cause of death. That gave her a couple of hours in the lab before she had to show her face again. Her repeated checks on her mobile had been futile. Rhona resisted attempting to call Janice. If she was in court, her phone would be switched off anyway.
    She settled down to some work, relishing the silence. Kira’s case wasn’t the only one in the running at the moment, but it was the most serious and therefore the one occupying her mind. Knife crime was fairly common in Glasgow. The analysis of stab wounds, and the knives used to inflict them, was well documented. But Kira’s death was unique. Rhona could find no record of anything similar happening in the UK in her computer searches.
    Her examination of the body had produced three interesting pieces of evidence. The hair or fibre from under the fingernail, the scrawled mirror writing done with what she suspected was a make-up pencil, and a deposit of something she believed might have come from the handle of the knife the perpetrator had wielded.
    Professional knives such as those used in slaughterhouses and in hunting required handles that weren’t slippery even when covered in blood. Shark skin provided the perfect material for this. Sharply pointed placoid scales, also known as dermal teeth or dentricles, gave the shark’s skin the feeling of sandpaper.
    Magnified under an electron microscope, the unique shape of the scales she’d found was clearly visible. The perpetrator had deposited microscopic dentricles on the body as they performed the Caesarean. The police hadn’t recovered the weapon but at least they knew a bit more about it. She took a micrograph of the enhanced image to show at the meeting, then examined the fibre.
    The detailed analysis and comparison of fibre evidence fell into three or four sequential phases. First came microscopy to compare samples and establish type, followed by microspectrophotometry (MSP) to record a colour graph. Thin layer chromotography (TLC) could then be used to strip out the dye using an appropriate mixture of solvents, and for man-made fibres, the use of infrared spectroscopy to confirm the chemical identity already established from the fibre’s appearance under the microscope.
    Most work on hairs was to do with comparison. Hairs turned up everywhere, inside balaclavas and stocking masks, on clothing, in bedding and often on blunt weapons. Matching of hairs could place an accused at the scene of crime, just as a victim’s hairs found on an accused provided a link between them.
    Human and animal hairs were essentially the same. Both consisted of an inner core, known as the medulla. This was surrounded by a cortex enclosed in a thin outer layer called the cuticle. The easiest way to imagine the form was to use the image of a pencil, where the lead was the medulla, the wood the cortex and the paint the cuticle.
    The item under the microscope was not man-made fibre, despite its bright red colour, as she had first thought. It was a hair dyed bright red. When present in human hairs, the medulla was amorphous in appearance, the width generally less than one-third the overall diameter of the hair shaft. Very fine human hair and naturally blonde hair contained no medulla at all. The hair