by Alec Peche
Nathan and Jill introduced themselves to Deputy Davis. She was a tall African American woman with a cool, competent air about her. Jill felt safer in her presence, and the gun holstered at Deputy Davis’s waist relaxed her further. Outside the entrance to the lab, Jill explained her role in consulting on homicide cases and gave the deputy an overview of the kind of instruments she had in the lab. Jill then explained the details of her present case to Deputy Davis.
While they could do some fingerprinting of some key surfaces like the doors, the generator, and the fuse box, neither Jill nor Deputy Davis had much hope of finding the person that caused the damage. The destruction inside her lab seemed pointed at her current case. This was the first time in her consulting career, indeed in her forensic pathology career, that an as yet unidentified person had attacked her property.
Deputy Davis completed her report and gave Jill a copy for her insurance company. She didn’t know yet if any of her expensive analyzers had been damaged or if it was strictly the specimens. Deputy Davis also gave her the names of a few security companies that protected other businesses in the Palisades Valley. Jill had been thinking about increasing her security once she started producing wine, but now she had a more urgent need to protect her lab, her property, her dog, and herself.
After Deputy Davis drove away, Jill straightened her shoulders, and said to Nathan, “Well, I guess I better go clean up this mess and see what is salvageable”.
Nathan sighed “Jill, you’re tired. Why not wait until the morning to clean this mess up.”
Jill responded “I’m too revved up on adrenaline to relax at the moment. I may as well use that energy for something positive. I’m racking my brains trying to figure out who thought I might be getting close to a discovery on my current case. Besides, I might find something to salvage.”
“Nathan, would you mind staying the night? Until I can get some security in place, I’m uneasy about staying here by myself. I need to clean this mess up. I can’t lock the lab since the lock is damaged, and at this point, I need to see what specimens and records are recoverable.”
Nathan, without hesitation, agreed to stay and help Jill clean up. He had never seen her self-confidence dented like it was at the moment. He was a third degree Master Black Belt in Hapkido and could defend her in hand-to-hand combat. He was working on his fourth degree, and he was pretty handy with swords, canes, and sticks. Jill knew of his love for Hapkido, but she had never seen him in competition, and thus she was unaware of the degree of personal protection he could provide.
He sure hoped he wouldn’t have to do a live demonstration, and in the end he wasn’t much help against a gun loaded with bullets.
Jill returned to the lab with the lights blazing. She had let Trixie loose in the yard in case someone attempted to return to the scene of the crime. Trixie would at least bark to alert them. She gave Nathan a refresher on her lab and put yellow sticky notes on any potentially infectious waste or hazardous chemicals. For Jill, it was years of practice that guided her on the handling of substances in the lab, but Nathan was a novice and she needed him to take precautions inside her lab. She gave him a waterproof coverall and gloves just in case he accidentally touched the wrong thing, and she did likewise as they got to work.
Jill started with the actual samples. The blood, biopsy fluids, and agars that she had collected from Graeme’ body in the funeral home had all been contaminated or destroyed. Broken glass and plastic littered the floor. All that remained of the specimens that she had spent hours collecting was either in the package on the way to the outside reference lab, or if she had luck, she might have a usable syringe or two in the sharps container. If the person that had done this damage hadn’t thought to look there for syringes that she used to extract tissue and fluid from Graeme’s body, she might be able to re-start her specimen testing.
She walked over to the container, and her luck held as it contained 3 of the original specimens tubes with fluid still in them that she could re-use. She was even luckier that she had a syringe from the leg wound and another from the IV site in the arm. The third syringe held a sample that she had taken from the non-infected arm and it also had its uses. She could reproduce some of the key agars had been destroyed.
Jill and Nathan made significant progress cleaning the mess up. She then moved on to her analyzers. They would need to be recalibrated, but otherwise seemed in working order. The person that attempted to destroy her lab seemed intent on dumping all specimens on the floor and smashing them, not smashing the equipment.
Next Jill and Nathan explored her computers, both those within the analyzers and the desktop computer she had on one work bench. Nathan was far more computer literate than was Jill. She showed him where to locate the interior computers for most of her analyzers, and then she went to her desktop computer. She powered it up and found that it had been reformatted, with all of her data on Graeme destroyed. But fortune shone on her here. She had kept her backup paper copy of all findings on the forms that she kept with her until a case was closed.
Early in her consultant career a virus had destroyed the computer on which she entered data. Even back then she had kept paper backup. She had been disorganized and scattered with her paper at that time, and it had been painful to reconstruct the case after the computer virus. This time she had only lost her data entry time, as her forms kept the data in a ready format.
This was the first (and she hoped the last) case that Jill seemed to be under attack from someone who did not want her to find the truth about the cause of Graeme’s death. She would discuss with Nathan how she should secure her data going forward with all cases. She would contact Emma early in the morning to discuss all of tonight’s activity.
Nathan and Jill finished cleaning up the lab, and they left the lights blazing everywhere but her bedroom as a meager attempt to keep out any additional intruders. She had put the sharps container in Nathan’s trunk for now. She would process some more agars tomorrow, and send a duplicate set to the university. She had a friend in the pathology department seeking interesting cases for her students. Jill would love to get their feedback on the samples.
Jill settled into her bed, her head on Nathan’s shoulder. With Trixie on the floor by the bedroom door, she promptly fell into an exhausted slumber. Her adrenaline rush had run its course, and she didn’t stir until morning.
Chapter 6
As a morning person, Jill awoke with a surge of energy to get out of bed and celebrate the sunrise. She left Nathan asleep, as he was a night person, and it was best not to disrupt the grumpy artist until he awoke later in the morning.
She had a to-do list. Check with 2 security system companies and get a estimate today. Call Emma and discuss the case and the vandalism. Check that her samples had been received by the reference lab. Re-calibrate her analyzers to assure they were in working order. Contact her pathology friend at the university and mail the agars from her 3 remaining tubes of blood. Prepare her agars to re-start the analysis of the bacteria. Find a safer place than Nathan’s trunk to store her blood tubes. Set up a call with Jo, Marie, and Angela to brainstorm over next steps.
Best of all, Jill had a great excuse to avoid jogging through the countryside for a few days. She rather thought that her personal safety might be at risk until this case was passed on to law enforcement. Jill was quite pleased with herself for thinking of this excuse not to go running. Trixie wouldn’t be happy, but she could pacify her with some frequent fetch time. She also planned to stick close to Nathan for a few days. She needed someone watching her back.
On her second cup of coffee, Jill set up appointments with the security companies for that morning. She wanted to secure her winery and her lab for the years ahead. She needed to balance those long-term needs with the panic she felt now to surround her property with a security guard every 20 feet. If these security companies knew how vulnerable she was to buying the top of the line system, she would be taken to the cleaners.
After completing her calls with the secu
rity companies, she put her thoughts in order for her conversation with Emma Spencer. It had been an interesting 36 hours. Jill was going to brief Emma on the preliminary findings from the destroyed lab tests in her lab as well as the vandalism to her lab. While Emma had hired Jill strictly to offer an opinion on the cause of Graeme’s death, the damage to her lab made it personal, and she was going to take the case a step further to see if she could figure out who was trying to destroy evidence that might prove that Graeme had been murdered.
Yesterday had been Graeme’s funeral, so she expected Emma to be exhausted from that experience. She didn’t want to telephone her too early, but given her evidence, she felt she needed to warn Emma to get additional security for her home.
Jill felt confident that she could cross Emma off her suspect list. His death had already been ruled an accident, and if she wanted to hide the murder, the easiest path would be to simply accept the medical examiner’s cause of death.
She planned to discuss with Emma the possibilities of who would want Graeme dead. Once the medical examiner accepted her test results and changed the cause of death, then the case would be turned over to the San Francisco Police Department. However, with the evidence destroyed and new evidence not available for another 36 hours, she felt she needed to alert Emma to her vulnerabilities.
Jill and Emma spoke about the funeral before Jill launched into an explanation of her preliminary findings and the lab vandalism. Emma was horrified. She had really thought that Graeme had died of an accidental overwhelming blood infection. Her hiring of Jill had been her final act of love for Graeme to verify the cause of his death. Now she had to grieve all over again. To know that they could have had a long life together, but that it had been cut short by his murder, was almost too much to bear.
Jill waited as Emma coped with this latest news, answering her questions concerning the science of the bacteria and why she thought it was not natural infection growth. When Emma had all of her questions answered, Jill moved on to her security. She asked Emma to think of her own surroundings as well as the security at her home and business. Without having a clue as to the identity of the killer or vandal, Jill had no idea if Emma was in harm’s way. Better to be safe than sorry on that issue. They set the appointed time for more conversation the next day.
She then checked on her FedEx package and noted that it had arrived at the reference lab in the last hour. She spoke with her contact in the lab and asked that a few tests be added to the ones originally requested. While she was hopeful of running the same tests in her own lab, due to the fact that there was potentially a break in the chain of custody, the reference lab specimens would serve to verify her findings after the case was turned over to the SFPD once they opened their investigation.
Jill had her first appointment with a security company. She toured the estimator through her property and discussed her business needs as far as securing the vineyard, the wine production area, the laboratory, and her home. She also mentioned that she had been vandalized the previous night, and she wanted to know what the company could have in place today. While she didn’t think her lab would be wrecked again, she rather thought that she might be the next target of the unknown assailant. Whoever had arranged Graeme’s death thought that the evidence from her lab was destroyed. If they destroyed her next series of tests, the cause of death couldn’t be overruled. With Graeme’s body embalmed and buried, the evidence was gone, except what was in Jill’s head, or so the killer would think.
An hour later she followed the same routine with the second company. Both companies verbally suggested similar strategies for about the same price. The second company could actually have installers at her house within the hour, so she signed a contract and heaved a sigh of relief that she would have some needed security by later today.
With her personal protection being improved by the hour, Jill returned to the house to check on Nathan. He sat in her kitchen with a cup of coffee. He took a good 30 minutes to get going once he rolled out of bed in the morning. She offered to make him breakfast. She had the ingredients for a breakfast burrito. He gratefully accepted her offer. She made a smaller one for herself and they dined at the table.
He showed signs of achieving alertness, so she described her morning, including the work that would improve her security. Nathan offered to move his life into Jill’s home. While she hated to put him in danger’s way, she was rather spooked at the moment and welcomed his presence.
They went over to his house to collect clothes, Arthur, and his other stuff, and the materials Nathan needed to continue work at Jill’s house. Fortunately, Nathan could rearrange his work to shadow Jill for the next few days.
She thought she would be able to deliver her findings to the San Francisco medical examiner’s office soon. The ME would in turn notify the SFPD. Jill figured that once her test results were made public, it would take the heat off of her, and then she and Nathan could go back to their normal lives.
They arrived back at her house and settled Arthur in. Trixie was not happy, but Jill rather liked the thought that Arthur would keep Trixie occupied and close to him. She was worried that Trixie would get hurt in the current circumstances.
Nathan and Jill headed over to her lab to re-calibrate her analyzers. Jill started her agars again and set the timers. Nathan had re-set all of her analyzers and sat down at her desktop computer to see if there was anything he could recover. He considered himself good with computers, but this was beyond him. He spoke with a friend in town who was his go-to person for the rare computer problem that he couldn’t fix. In the end, they decided that it would be just as fast for Jill to re-enter her data.
This act of vandalism was a lesson for her. In the past she had kept her case consultant data on the desktop. The rare time that she lost data, she pulled up her backup copy. Now that Nathan had seen her process for collecting data on a case, he would develop a process with built-in redundancy for her to follow.
Early in his design career, he had lost a design he had spent weeks working on. He had recreated the design, but for some reason, he never felt that the duplicate design artistically matched the original. After that experience, he had set up an elaborate backup system so that he would never again lose a design.
Jill sighed and glanced around her. She had restored order to her home and to her lab. That feeling of control lessened her panic about Graeme’s killer. What she really needed now was a good workout.
She turned to Nathan and asked, “Did you bring your kickboxing gloves with your stuff this morning?”
Nathan smiled at her with a gleam in his eye and stated, ”Yes, do you want to burn off some excess energy from the stress of the last 24 hours?”
Jill responded, “I don’t know how to kickbox, but I sure want to kick something at the moment, and just one kick won’t be enough. I need at least half an hour of kicking to clear my head.”
Nathan said, “Then let’s go back to your house, change clothes, and I’ll get the equipment. Do you have an exercise mat?”
She had chased a few fitness passions over the years that had caused her to accumulate an exercise mat or two. They changed their clothes, gathered up Nathan’s equipment, and strolled over to an unused barn where she stored the mats. She had never tried working out with Nathan before. Nathan wanted to teach her a few self-defense moves given her current precarious situation.
Chapter 7
They spread the mats out in the empty barn. Nathan insisted that they stretch before the more rigorous work. Nathan wanted to go over the self-defense moves before the cardio workout.
Nathan demonstrated how to fend off various forms of attack. Next he showed her where to strike for maximum impact. After he was satisfied that Jill could protect herself with the basic tenets of self-defense, he moved on to some kickboxing.
He showed Jill how to shift her weight to kick for maximum power. He put on gloves to deflect her kicks and then proceeded to goad her into the most physical workout she had ever done.
After 45 minutes, every hair on her head and every piece of clothing she wore was soaked with sweat. She dropped to the floor. Nathan had barely broke a sweat. Another reason not to jog. In the end she wasn’t as fit as she thought she was. It was all very depressing.
Jill and Nathan returned to her house. She planned to drink a large glass of water, shower, and lure Nathan to her bed, in that order. She had been totally turned on for the last hour and a half by Nathan’s body and movements. He had the upper hand then, and now it was up to her to wrestle with him for the upper hand in bed, and she looked forward to the contest.
A few hours after the work out, Jill was both energized and calm. Thanks to Nathan, she felt prepared to deal with any intruders. She had also burned off her mad. Her attitude was completely re-adjusted into a much more positive state of mind. She thanked Nathan profusely for helping her get there. She felt refreshed and renewed and ready to apply all of her considerable brain power to solving the mystery surrounding Graeme’s death.
She returned to the lab. Her re-started agars had reached their first checkpoint of growth. The results were exactly the same as the first agars that had been destroyed. She also had an e-mail from the reference lab, giving her highly specific DNA results. She needed the results of just one more series of tests, and then she would be able to prove that Graeme’s infection was not the result of his body’s weak immune response, but a deliberate exposure to an infectious agent.
Jill sat down at her desk to plan her next steps. She would summarize her findings and turn them over to the medical examiner, who would then give them to the SFPD. However, the vandalism on her laboratory had made this personal. She was both mad and scared. She wanted the killer caught and soon. She didn’t like her property, her dog, and her man at risk.
She decided that the case would be solved faster if she stayed in the game. It would take her another day or so to gather additional evidence to give to the ME to try to convince him to re-evaluate his cause of death before the police would officially be brought in on the case.