Deja Dead Page 0,147

machinery. A label identified it as an X-ray diffractometer. He didn’t speak and I didn’t say anything until he had removed a slide with a small white smear and placed it on a tray. Then he gave me eyes as soft as a Disney fawn, lids drooping, lashes curling back like petals on a daisy.

“Bonjour, Monsieur Lacroix. Comment ça va?”

“Bien. Bien. You have them?”

I held up two plastic bags.

“Let’s get started.”

He led me into a small room with an apparatus the size of a photocopier, two monitors, and a printer. A periodic chart of the elements hung on the wall above.

Lacroix laid the evidence bags on a counter and pulled on surgical gloves. Gingerly, he withdrew each suspect glove, inspected it, then laid it on its plastic bag. The gloves stretched across his hands looked identical to those on the counter.

“First we look for gross characteristics, details of manufacturing. Weight. Density. Color. How the rims are finished.” He turned each glove over and over, examining as he spoke. “These two look quite similar. Same rim technique. See?”

I looked. The wrist of each glove ended in a border that rolled outward onto itself.

“They’re not all like that?”

“No. Some roll in, some roll out. These are both outies. So. Now we see what’s in them.”

He carried Gabby’s glove to the machine, raised the cover, and placed it on a tray inside.

“With very small samples I use those little holders.” He pointed to a tray of small plastic tubes. “I stretch a square of polypropylene window film across the holder, then use press-on tabs to make a sticky spot to hold the fragment. That’s not necessary with this. We’ll just put the whole glove in.”

Lacroix flipped a switch and the apparatus whirred to life. A box positioned on a pole in one corner lit up, the word X RAY white against a red background. A panel of buttons glowed, indicating the machine’s condition. Red: X rays. White: Power. Orange: Shutter open.

For a few moments Lacroix adjusted dials, then he closed the cover and moved to a chair in front of the monitors.

“S’il vous plaît.” He indicated the other chair.

A desert landscape appeared on the first monitor, a granular backdrop of synclines and anticlines, with shadows and boulders scattered here and there. Superimposed on that scene was a series of concentric circles, the two smallest and most central shaped like footballs. Two hashed lines intersected at right angles, forming a cross directly over the bull’s-eye circles.

Lacroix adjusted the image by manipulating a joy stick. Boulders shifted in and out of the circles.

“That’s the glove we’re looking at, magnified eighty times. I’m just picking a target location. Each run samples an area of about three hundred microns, approximately the area inside the dotted circle. So you want to direct your X rays onto the best part of your sample.”

He shifted the crosshairs a few more moments, then settled on a boulderless patch.

“There. That should be good.”

He flipped a switch and the machine hummed.

“Now we’re creating a vacuum. That’ll take a couple of minutes. Then the scan. That’s very quick.”

“And this will determine what’s in the glove.”

“Oui. It’s a form of X-ray analysis. X-ray microfluorescence can determine what elements are present in a sample.”

The humming stopped and a pattern began to form on the right-hand monitor. A series of tiny red mounds sprouted across the bottom of the screen, then grew against a bright blue background, a thin yellow stripe up the middle of each. In the lower left-hand corner was an image of a keyboard, each key marked with the abbreviation for an element.

Lacroix typed in commands, and letters appeared on the screen. Some mounds remained small, others grew into tall peaks, like the giant termite castles I’d seen in Australia.

“C’est ça.” That’s it. Lacroix pointed at a column on the far right. It rose from the bottom to the top of the screen, where its top was truncated. A smaller peak to its right climbed to a quarter of its height. Both were marked Zn.

“Zinc. That’s standard. It’s found in all these gloves.”

He indicated a pair of peaks to the far left, one low, the other rising three quarters of the distance up the screen. “That low one is magnesium. Mg. The tall one marked Si is silicon.” Farther to the right a double peak bore the letter S.

“Sulfur.”

A Ca peak spired halfway up the screen.

“Quite a bit of calcium.”

Beyond the calcium a gap, then a series of low mounds, foothills to the zinc