"He can be a bit much," Lynn agreed. "I'll feed Davina, then I'll throw on a dressing gown and join you."
"I can't believe he's got a result so quickly."
"He's like you were when you first started the business. He adores what he does so he doesn't mind how much time he spends on it. And he wants to share his delight with everybody else."
Alex paused, hand reaching for his dressing gown. "I was like that? It's a miracle you didn't file for divorce."
Alex found Weird in the kitchen looking terrible. The only color in his face came from the bruising that spread like greasepaint round both eyes. He sat awkwardly, hands wrapped round a mug. "You look like shit," Alex said.
"I feel like it too." He sipped coffee and winced. "Why don't you have decent painkillers?"
"Because we don't make a habit of getting hammered," Alex said over his shoulder as he left to answer the door. Jason bounced into the room on the balls of his feet, jazzed with excitement, then did a double-take that was almost comic as he took in Weird's appearance. "Shit, man. What the hell happened to you?"
"A man with a baseball bat," Alex said succinctly. "We weren't joking when we said this might be a matter of life and death." He poured a coffee for Jason. "I'm impressed that you've got something for us so soon," he said.
Jason shrugged. "When I got to it, it wasn't such a big deal. I did the microspectrophotometry to establish the color, then I ran it through the gas chromatograph for the composition. It didn't match anything in my database, though."
Alex sighed. "Well, we were expecting that," he said.
Jason held up a finger. "Now, Alex. I am not a man without resources. A couple of years ago, I met this guy at a conference. He is the world's biggest paint head. He works for the FBI, and he reckons that he's got most extensive paint database in the known universe. So I got him to run my results against his records, and bingo! We got it." He held his arms out wide, as if expecting applause.
Lynn walked in just in time to hear his conclusion. "So what was it?" she asked.
"I won't bore you with the technical spec. It was made by a small manufacturer in New Jersey in the mid-seventies for use on fiberglass and certain types of molded plastic. The target market was boat builders and boat owners. It gave a particularly tough finish that was hard to scratch and wouldn't flake even in extreme weather conditions." He opened his backpack and rummaged around, eventually producing a computer-generated color chart. A swatch of pale blue was outlined in black marker. "That's what it looked like, he said, passing the sheet around. "The good news about the quality of the finish is that if by some miracle your crime scene has survived, the chances are that you could still make a match. The paint was mostly sold on the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S., but they did export into the U.K. and the Caribbean. The company went belly-up in the late eighties, so there's no way of telling where it ended up over here."
"So the chances are that Rosie was killed on a boat?" Alex asked.
Jason made a dubious smacking noise with his lips. "If she was, it must have been a fair-sized boat."
"Why do you say that?"
He pulled some papers out of his backpack with a flourish. "This is where the shape of the paint drops comes into play. Tiny tears, that's what we've got here. And one or two very small fiber fragments, which look a lot like carpet tile to me. And this tells me a story. These drops came off a brush while something was being painted. This is a very motile paint, which means that it came off in minute droplets. The person doing the painting probably didn't even notice. Typically, it's the kind of fine spray that you'd get if you were working over your head, especially at full stretch. And because there's almost no variation in the shape of the droplets, that suggests all the paint was applied overhead and at an equal distance. None of this fits with painting a hull. Even if you had the hull upside down to paint the inside, you wouldn't be doing it somewhere carpeted, would you? And the droplets would vary in size because some of the