"George" -he looked at one of the young scientists"-this is your bailiwick."

"Those are tannin sacs." George Kilby moved closer to us, joining the discussion.

"You can see them especially well here on this radial section."

"What exactly is a tannin sac?" Wesley wanted to know.

"It's a vessel that transports material up and down the plant's stem."

"What sort of material?"

"Generally waste products that result from cellular activities. And just so you know, what you're looking at here is the pith. That's the part of the plant that has these tannin sacs."

"Then you're saying that the trace evidence in this case is pith?" I asked. Special Agent George Kilby nodded.

"That's right. The commercial name is pith wood even though technically there really is no such thing."

"What is pith wood used for?" Wesley asked. It was Cartwright who answered, "It's often used to hold small mechanical parts or pieces of jewelry. For example, a jeweler might stick a small earring or watch gear into a pith button so it doesn't roll off the table or get brushed off by his sleeve. These days, most people just use Styrofoam."

"Was there much of this pith wood trace on her, body?" I asked.

"There was a fair amount of it, mostly in the bloody areas, which was where most of her trace was."

"If someone wanted pith wood Wesley said," where would he get it? "

"The Everglades, if you wanted to cut down the shrub yourself," Kilby replied.

"Otherwise you'd order it."

"From where?"

"I know there's a company in Silver Spring, Maryland." Wesley looked at me.

"Guess we need to find out who repairs jewelry in Black Mountain." I said to him, "I'd be surprised if they even have a jeweler in Black Mountain." Cartwright spoke again.

"In addition to the trace evidence already mentioned, we found microscopic pieces of insects. Beetles, crickets, and roaches nothing peculiar, really. And there were flecks of white and black paint, neither of them automotive. Plus, she had sawdust in her hair."

"From what kind of wood?" I asked.

"Mostly walnut, but we did also identify mahogany." Cartwright looked at Wesley, who was looking out the window.

"The skin you found in the freezer didn't have any of this same material on it, but her wounds did."

"Meaning those injuries were inflicted before her body came in contact with wherever it was that it picked up this trace?" Wesley said.

"You could assume that," I said.

"But whoever excised the skin and saved it may have rinsed it off. It would have been bloody."

"What about the inside of a vehicle?" Wesley went on.

"Such as a trunk?"

"It's a possibility," Kilby said.

I knew the direction Wesley's thoughts were heading. Gault had murdered thirteen-year-old Eddie Heath inside a beat-up used van that had been rife with a baffling variety of trace evidence. Succinctly put, Mr. Gault, the psychopathic son of a wealthy pecan plantation owner in Georgia, derived intense pleasure from leaving evidence that seemed to make no sense.

"About the blaze orange duct tape," Cartwright said, finally getting around to that subject.

"Am I correct in saying a roll of it has yet to show up?"

"We haven't found anything like that," Wesley replied. Special Agent Richards looked through pages of notes as Cartwright said to him, "Well, let's get on with that, because I personally think it's going to be the most important thing we've got in this case." Richards began talking in earnest, for like every devout forensic scientist I had met, he had a passion for his specialty. The FBI's reference library of duct tapes contained more than a hundred types for the purpose of identification when duct tape was involved in the commission of a crime. In fact, malevolent use of the silvery stuff was so common that I honestly could not pass by a roll of it in hardware or grocery stores without household thoughts turning into remembered horrors.

I had collected body parts of people blown up by bombs made with duct tape.

I had removed it from the bound victims of sadistic killers and from bodies weighted with cinder blocks and dumped into rivers and lakes. I could not count the times I had peeled it from the mouths of people who were not allowed to scream until they were wheeled into my morgue. For it was only there the body could speak freely. It was only there someone cared about every awful thing that had been done.

"I've never seen duct tape like this before," Richards was saying.

"And due to its high yarn count I can also say with confidence that whoever bought the tape did not get it from a store."

"How can you be so sure of that?" Wesley asked, "This is industrial grade, with a yarn count of sixty-two warp and a fifty-six woof, versus your typical economy grade of twenty ten that you might pick up at Walmart or Safeway for a couple of bucks. The industrial grade can cost as much as ten bucks a roll."

"Do you know where the tape was manufactured?" I asked.

"Shuford Mills of Hickory, North Carolina. They're one of the biggest duct tape manufacturers in the country. Their best-known brand is Shurtape."

"Hickory is only sixty miles or so east of Black Mountain," I said.

"Have you talked to anyone at Shuford Mills?" Wesley asked Richards.

"Yes. They're still trying to track down information for me. But this much we already know. The blaze orange tape was a specialty item that Shuford Mills manufactured solely for a private label customer in the late eighties."

"What is a private label customer?" I asked.

"Someone who wants a special tape and orders maybe a minimum of five hundred cases of it. So there could be hundreds of tapes out there we're never going to see, unless it turns up like this blaze orange tape did."

"Can you give me an example of what sort of person might design his own duct tape?" I inquired further.

"I know some stock car racers do," Richards replied.

"For example, the duct tape Richard Petty has made for his pit crew is red and blue, while Daryl Waltrip's is yellow. Shuford Mills also had a contractor some years back who was sick of his workers walking off the job with his expensive tape. So he had his own bright purple tape made. You know, you got purple tape repairing your ductwork at home or fixing the leak in your kid's wading pool, and it's pretty obvious you stole it."

"Could that be the purpose of the blaze orange tape? To prevent workers from stealing it?" I asked.

"Possibly," said Richards.

"And by the way, it's also flame retardant."

"Is that unusual?" Wesley asked.

"Very much so," Richards replied.

"I associate flame- retardant duct tapes with aircraft and submarines, neither of which would have any need of a tape that's blaze orange, or at least I wouldn't think so."

"Why would anyone need a tape that is blaze orange?" I asked.

"The million-dollar question," Cartright said.

"When I think of blaze orange, I think of hunting and traffic cones."

"Let's get back to the killer taping up Mrs. Steiner and her daughter," Wesley suggested.

"What else can you tell us about the mechanics of that?"

"We found traces of what appears to be furniture varnish on some of the tape ends," Richards said.

"Also, the sequence the tape was torn from the roll is inconsistent with the sequence it was applied to the mother's wrists and ankles. All this means is that the assailant tore off as many segments of tape as he thought he would need, and probably stuck them to the edge of a piece of furniture. When he began binding Mrs. Steiner, the tape was ready and waiting for him to use, one piece at a time."

"Only he got them out of order," Wesley said.

"Yes," said Richards.

"I have them numbered according to the sequence they were used to bind the mother and her daughter. Would you like to look?" We said that we would. Wesley and I spent the rest of the afternoon in the Materials Analysis Unit, with its gas chromatographs, mass spectrometers, differential scanning calorimeters, and other intimidating instruments for determining materials and melting points. I parked myself near a portable explosive detector while Richards went on about the weird duct tape used to bind Emily and her mother. He explained that when he had used hot blowing air to open the tape receipted to him by the Black Mountain police, he counted seventeen pieces ranging from eight to nineteen inches in length. Mounting them on sheets of thick transparent vinyl, he had numbered the segments two different ways-to show the sequence the tape had been torn from the roll and the sequence the assailant had used when he taped his victims.