Hanken squinted through the lens. Everything Miss Amber Kubowsky had said was so achingly obvious that he wondered at her level of excitement. Things must be as bland as yesterday's porridge in the laboratory—not to mention in her life—if the poor lass got herself worked up over this. “What exactly am I supposed to be looking for?” he asked Miss Kubowsky, raising his head and gesturing at the microscope. “This doesn't much look like a scissor blade to me. Or blood, for that matter.”
“It isn't,” she said happily. “And that's the point, DI Hanken. That's what's so damned intriguing about everything.”
Hanken glanced at the clock on the wall. He'd been working nonstop for more than twelve hours, and before the day was through he still wanted to coordinate his information with whatever was being accumulated at the London end of the case. So the last entertainment he was willing to engage in was a guessing game with a frizzy-haired forensic technician.
He said, “If it's not the blade and it's not Cole's blood, why am I looking at it, Miss Kubowsky?”
“It's nice you're so polite,” she told him. “Not every detective has your manners, I find.”
She was going to find out a hell of a lot more if she didn't start elucidating, Hanken thought. But he thanked her for the compliment and indicated that he'd be happy to hear whatever else she had to tell him as long as she told him post haste.
“Oh! Of course,” she said. “That's the scapula wound you're looking at there. Well, not all of it. If you magnified the whole thing, it would be twenty inches long, probably. This is just a portion of it.”
“The scapula wound?”
“Right. It was the biggest gash on the boy's body, did the doctor say? On his back? The boy, not the doctor, that is.”
Hanken recalled Dr. Myles's report. One of the wounds had chipped the left scapula and come near to one of the heart's arteries.
Miss Kubowksy said, “I wouldn't have bothered with it normally, except I saw on the report that the scapula—that's one of the bones in the back, did you know?—had a weapon mark on it, so I went ahead and compared the mark with the knife blades. With all the knife blades. And what do you know?”
“What?”
“The knife didn't make that mark, Inspector Hanken. No way, not for a minute, uh-uh, and forget it.”
Hanken stared at her. He tried to assimilate the information. More, he wondered if she'd made a mistake. She looked so scatty—her lab coat had half its hem ripped out and a coffee stain on the front of it—that it was hardly beyond the realm of possibility that she was less than proficient in her own line of work.
Amber Kubowsky apparently not only saw the doubt on his face but also understood the necessity for dispelling it. When she went on, she'd become perfect science, speaking in terms of x-rays, blade widths, angles, and micro-millimeters. She didn't complete her remarks until she was certain he understood the import of what she was saying: The tip of the weapon that had pierced Terry Cole's back, chipped his scapula, and scored the bone was shaped unlike the tip of any of the Swiss Army knife's blades. While the knife blades’ tips were pointed—obviously, because how could they be knife blades if they weren't pointed, she asked reasonably—they broadened out at an entirely different angle from the weapon that had marked the bone in Terry Cole's back.
Hanken whistled tonelessly She'd given an impressive recitation, but he had to ask. “Are you sure?”
“I'd swear to it, Inspector. We would've all missed it if I didn't have this theory about x-rays and microscopes that I won't go into at the moment.”
“But the knife made the other wounds on the body?”
“Except for the scapula wound. Yes. That's right.”
She had other information to impart as well. And she took him to another area of the lab, where she held forth on the topic of a pewterlike smear she'd also been asked to evaluate.
When he'd heard what Amber Kubowsky had to say on this final subject, Hanken headed immediately for a phone. It was time to track down Lynley.
Hanken rang the other DI's mobile and found Lynley in the casualty ward of Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. Lynley put him into the picture tersely: Vi Nevin had been brutally attacked in the maisonette that she and Nicola Maiden had shared.
“What's her condition?”
There was noise in the background, someone shouting, “Over here!” and the increasingly loud howl of an ambulance's double-note siren.
“Thomas?” Hanken raised his voice. “What's her condition? Have you got anything from her?”
“Nothing,” Lynley finally replied from London. “We haven't been able to manage a statement yet. We can't even get close. They've been working on her for an hour.”
“What do you think? Related to the case, what's happened?”