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Claudel glanced at, then pocketed the printout.
“I will put someone on this.” Clearly, Claudel thought himself too valuable for such a mundane task. “I will return at five.”
When Detective Delightful had gone, I grabbed a quick lunch of peach yogurt and a banana, then spent several hours in my lab with the infant remains from Sainte-Agathe. I saw nothing to alter my impression that the babies had perished at intervals over a long period of time, and that none had died recently.
Marcel phoned at 3:40 to say that the thin sections were ready. After repackaging the baby bones, I hurried next door to the histo lab.
A thin section is a slice of bone mounted on a glass slide. Typically, the specimen has been impregnated with resin and ground to somewhere between sixty and seventy microns. In other words, damn thin.
Individual bone cells are called osteons. When viewed under magnification, osteons can be observed in a thin section.
Marcel had left a box holding twenty-four slides beside one of the microscopes. Removing its protective hood, I turned the scope on, set the level of magnification, and positioned a glass rectangle below the lens.
Peering through the eyepiece, I did some fine-tuning. The osteons snapped into focus. I studied them. Saw nothing of note. Increased the magnification. Still nothing. I took a pic and moved on to the next specimen.
Two dozen thin sections later, I turned off and covered the scope.
What the hell?
Confused, I collected the slides and photos and returned to my office, dreading my upcoming rendezvous.
Claudel arrived on the dot. He did not greet me. I did not greet him back.
As before, I slid a printout across the desktop. Claudel picked up and glanced at the image. His eyes rolled up in question.
“Bone cells are called osteons. Each osteon looks like a tiny volcano with a crater in the center. The crater is a canal that carries a blood vessel and a nerve fiber. Do you see them?”
“I have not come for an anatomy lesson.”
Easy.
“You are viewing a photomicrograph, an image taken through a microscope. It shows magnified bone cells in what’s called a thin section.”
Though Claudel thought himself an exceptionally intelligent man, I shifted to the KISS principle. Keep. It. Simple. Stupid.
“In lightning deaths, it is common to see micro-fracturing within the bone caused by the passage of current.”
Claudel raised his chin and canted his eyebrows. The move created anotherV, this one inverted. I took this as encouragement to elaborate.
“Micro-fracturing will appear as cracks radiating out from the centers of bone cells. Or jumping irregularly between clusters of cells.”
“I see nothing like that.”
“Exactly. Because it’s not there.”
“Perhaps this one thin whatever you call it didn’t catch—”
I laid twenty-three additional pages on the blotter. Claudel snatched up and whipped through the first dozen images.
“What does this mean?” he asked, not bothering to hide his annoyance.
“I don’t know,” I said.
After a full minute had passed, Claudel reached into the pocket of his navy blazer and withdrew a printout of his own. Winging the page sideways onto my desk, he leaned back in his chair. Fingers steepled below his chin, he observed my reaction.
I picked up the paper. A blue header identified it as an FBI report. Printed below the header were the words: FBI Records: The Vault. Tattoo Recognition Database.
An image appeared halfway down the page. It showed the octopus/spider with its appendages encircling the number 5.
