I STOPPED BY KPD THE NEXT MORNING TO SEE ARTBohanan. A trash can appeared to have exploded there in the forensic lab. Empty cans and scraps of food wrappers covered every table and countertop in the room. The lab room smelled like an untidy teenager’s room, one where pizza crusts and apple cores have accumulated under the bed for a week or two.
Art was bent over the red sleeping bag we’d hauled from the underground room. The bag was spread flat on a large piece of white paper, and Art was methodically coating the bag’s entire surface with overlapping strips of clear evidence tape. He laid the last strip in place just as I entered, then began peeling the tape off the bag as a single patchwork sheet. Holding a section of the tape up to a lamp on the table, he studied the fuzz and fibers stuck to the adhesive. “Looks like some black hairs,” he said. “We’ll compare them to the ones we found in her house, but I’m betting they match. If we’ve got follicles on any of these and any of those, we can do a DNA comparison.” Loosely wadding the tape, he dropped it into a plastic five-gallon bucket filled with water. The water-soluble tape quickly softened; once it had dissolved entirely, Art would strain the water to collect all the hairs and fibers. On one corner of a table, clumped on a tray, I noticed several wads of dirty cotton gauze. Beneath the grime were crusted, reddish brown stains. “That looks like blood to me,” I said.
“Looks like blood to the black light, too,” Art observed. “Take a gander—the light’s on the counter there.” I held the portable ultraviolet lamp over the gauze, and the stains darkened; if not for the ambient light in the room, I knew, they’d appear completely black. I couldn’t help wincing as I thought of Isabella’s fingers, seared into open wounds—not as bad as Garcia’s, but still serious—by the radiation source she’d handled before feeding it to Novak.
I surveyed the assortment of empty bottles, cans, and food wrappers. “Anything that indicates when she bought any of these items or when she consumed them?”
“Not that I’ve found so far,” he said. “None of this stuff was perishable—bottled water, canned tuna fish, dried fruit—so there’s no pull date, the way there’d be on a jug of milk or a pound of ground beef. Some of this stuff has a shelf life that’s measured in decades. Look at this unopened pack of trail mix—‘Best when consumed by July 2017.’ California might have slid into the ocean by then, but these nuts and raisins will still be lip-smacking good.” He laughed. “The most interesting thing is that, though.” He pointed to a small, wandlike object of white plastic, half hidden beneath a Hershey bar wrapper. At first glance I thought it was a digital fever thermometer, but looking closer I realized the shape wasn’t quite right; it was about as long and wide as a tongue depressor, but considerably thicker. “What is it?”
“Look but don’t touch,” he said. “Here’s some tweezers.”
With the tip of the tweezers, I slid the candy-bar wrapper aside for an unobstructed look, but I still couldn’t tell what I was seeing. “Accu-Clear,” read a word in small blue letters. To the left of the word was an oval-shaped indentation in the plastic, and within the indentation were two small cutout windows. One of the windows, an oval, was bisected by a crisp magenta line on a white background. The other opening, a small rectangle, also showed a line, a fuzzier, paler pink. “I still don’t know what it is.”
“Flip it over and read what’s on the back.”
Gingerly I grasped the object by the edges and turned it. This side was printed with instructions in the same blue ink. “Hold for five seconds in urine stream,” read the first line. “Urine stream?” I asked.
“It’s a pregnancy test, dummy.”
A small illustration on the back depicted the two small cutout windows, complete with the colored lines I’d seen on the other side. The caption beside this illustration explained what the pair of lines meant. The lines meant my life had just turned upside down. Unless someone else had taken the test, Isabella was pregnant.
CHAPTER 13