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apartment, so we have to assume he’s smart enough to pick the right target.”
    “Why didn’t he attack Marissa in her apartment? Why the parking garage?”
    Evelyn thought out loud. “Because he didn’t know which apartment is hers? She hasn’t lived here that long, and it’s under Robert’s name. Plus, Robert works irregular hours—who knows when he might come home?—and the parking garage has multiple escape routes in case he’s surprised. The apartment doesn’t.” She sat on the edge of the

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    concrete wall, weariness flooding her body. “But these are just guesses, and we need answers. And I know where to get some.”
    “Hey.”
    She looked up. He took her face in both hands. “You’re not going to say, ‘To the Batcave, Robin!’ are you?”
    She laughed, its sound echoing weakly from the concrete walls.

    C H A P T E R
    4
    HER WORKPLACE HAD BEEN TITLED THE TRACE EVIdence Department for a reason. A single fiber or drop of liquid could provide the most important clue, assuming that a scientist could translate an item’s analyses into facts, after being lucky enough to find it in the first place. Sometimes, though, a tiny piece of debris turned out to be a tiny piece of debris, with no significance at all. Evelyn hoped her collection from Grace Markham’s apartment would yield more of the former than the latter.
    She dropped her purse into the bottom drawer of her desk, a battered hand-me-down from Records, and pushed aside the case reports piled on the calendar blotter to check the day and make sure she hadn’t forgotten about a scheduled court case or deposition.
    These were canceled or postponed so often that they were easy to forget, risking a contempt of court charge.
    Her desk decor consisted of a black kitten Beanie Baby, a picture of Angel from her most recent school dance, and the framed words “News flash—life ain’t fair!”
    The clock read 6:30. She hadn’t bothered going back to bed.
    She had called her boss, Tony, from the hospital but saw no need to wait for him. She knew what had to be done and wanted to get

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    started before Tony, the ME, the cops, and one or two assistant county prosecutors massed in the conference room.
    She poured liquid nitrogen through a funnel into the infrared spectrometer with great care. Evelyn couldn’t help but feel uneasy around the stuff, as if her fingers might freeze to a shatterable brittleness if they got too close. Closing the lid, she let the computer warm up while the detector cooled down. She pulled out her sealed envelope containing a swab of the smudge on Grace Markham’s arm and opened the pasted bottom of the envelope, preserving the original red seal.
    Only the hum of the lab equipment kept her company; the sensible people of the world were still in bed or at the breakfast table.
    She would need some caffeine soon, preferably intravenously.
    She rubbed the tip of the swab onto a gold-plated microscope slide. Infrared radiation, just like visible light, travels in waves, with specific frequencies and wavelengths. The beam of infrared light from the Fourier transform infrared spectrometer pierced the sample material, bounced off the gold plate underneath, and returned to the detector. The molecules of the sample interacted with the light, absorbing particular frequencies depending on which groups of elements it contained—a COOH bond would absorb radiation at a different frequency than an OH bond. The computer charted all these frequencies as a spectrum, which appeared as a jagged line above a ruled scale of absorption versus wavelength. Each spectrum glowed in its own specific color—the reason she had the only color printer in the lab.
    A wide peak at 1000 probably meant silicone, but since silicone was the most common metal on earth, she didn’t read too much into it. She saw a small amount of barium, found in most gunshot primers. The main ingredient, by far, was petroleum.