Die Again (Rizzoli & Isles, #11)(48)
“What about under the microscope? Just a visual comparison?”
“That would only tell us we’re looking at white hairs that might be from the same cat. Not good enough as proof in court.”
“Is there any way I can prove these hairs were transferred from Gott’s house?”
“Possibly. If you spend any time around cats, you’ll notice how much they clean themselves. They’re constantly grooming, and every time they lick their own hair, they shed epithelial cells from their mouths. We might be able to get mitochondrial DNA markers off these strands. I’m afraid it’ll take weeks to get back the results.”
“It would be proof, though?”
“Yes, it would be.”
“Then I guess I need to collect some cat hairs.”
“Pulled directly from the animal itself, so we can harvest root material.”
Jane groaned. “That’s not going to be easy, since one of the cats doesn’t want to be caught. He’s still somewhere in the victim’s house, running loose.”
“Oh dear. I hope someone’s feeding him.”
“Guess who goes over there every single day to leave food and water and change the litter box?”
Erin laughed. “Don’t tell me. Detective Frost?”
“He claims he can’t stand cats, but I swear he’d run into a burning building just to save a kitty.”
“You know, I always liked Detective Frost. He’s such a sweetie.”
Jane snorted. “Yeah, makes me look like a bitch in comparison.”
“What he needs is to find himself another wife,” said Erin as she removed the microscope slide. “I wanted to set him up with one of my girlfriends, but she refuses to date cops. Says they have control issues.” She placed a new slide under the microscope. “Okay, let me show you another hair collected from the same bathrobe. This is the one that’s got me completely stumped.”
Jane settled back onto the lab stool and peered into the eyepiece. “It looks like the first strand. What’s different about it?”
“At first glance, it does seem similar. White, straight, about five centimeters. It has the same color banding that tells us this is probably not human. Initially I thought it was also from Felis catus, a house cat. But when you examine it at 1500X, you’ll see it’s from a very different origin.” She swiveled back to her computer and opened a second window on the screen, showing a different photomicrograph. She arranged the two images side by side.
Jane frowned. “The second hair looks nothing like a house cat’s.”
“The cuticular scales are very different. They look like little flat-topped mountain peaks. Not at all like a housecat’s spinous scales.”
“What animal is this second hair from?”
“I’ve compared it to every animal hair in my database. But this is something I’ve never seen before.”
A mystery creature. Jane thought of Leon Gott’s house and its wall of mounted trophy heads. And she thought of his taxidermy workshop where he regularly scraped and dried and stretched the pelts of animals from around the world. “Could this hair be from a snow leopard?” she asked.
“That’s pretty specific. Why a snow leopard?”
“Because Gott was working on a snow leopard pelt, and it’s now missing.”
“They’re extremely rare animals, so I don’t know where I’d get a hair sample to compare. But there is a way to determine species. Remember how we ID’d that weird hair from the Chinatown murder? The strand that turned out to be from a monkey?”
“You sent it to a lab in Oregon.”
“Right, the Wildlife Forensics Lab. They have a database of keratin patterns from species around the world. With electrophoresis, you can analyze a hair’s protein component and match it against known keratin patterns.”
“Let’s do it. If this hair came from a snow leopard, then it was almost certainly transferred from Gott’s house.”
“In the meantime,” said Erin, “get me that house cat hair. If the DNA matches, you’ll have the proof you need that these two murders are linked.”
“YOU WERE A BIG MISTAKE,” SAID MAURA. “I NEVER SHOULD HAVE brought you home.”
The cat ignored her and licked its paw, fastidiously cleaning up after devouring a meal of imported Spanish tuna packed in olive oil. An extravagance at ten dollars a serving, but he’d refused to touch the dry cat food, and Maura had forgotten to pick up more cans of gourmet cat food on her way home that afternoon. A search of her pantry had turned up that one precious can of tuna, which she’d intended to use in a nice salade Ni?oise with crisp green beans and red potatoes. But no, her greedy little houseguest lapped up every tasty morsel and sauntered out of the kitchen, making it clear that Maura’s services were no longer needed.
So much for companionship. I’m just the maid. Maura rinsed the cat bowl in hot soapy water and placed it in the dishwasher for a thorough, microbe-blasting scrub. Could you catch Toxoplasma gondii from a cat in just a week? Lately she’d been obsessed with toxoplasmosis, because she’d read it could lead to schizophrenia. Crazy cat ladies were crazy because of their cats. This is how these crafty animais control us, she thought. They infect us with a parasite that makes us serve them ten-dollar cans of tuna.