Chapter Four: The Missing Slide

Ruth had the Suggs memo printed and both comparison folders assembled by the time Prieto called her back in, and she watched him read the pattern the way she had — quietly, and then not quietly, pushing back from the table and asking her, twice, whether she was certain the reference slide from the Suggs case hadn’t been mislabeled or degraded over three years of storage. She understood the question. It was the right question. A three-year-old slide could fade, could pick up contamination in storage, could simply be wrong in a way that would collapse under a defense attorney’s first real challenge. She told him what she’d told juries before: pollen exines were built to survive geological time, let alone a filing cabinet, and she had control slides from the same storage batch, run the same week, that showed no degradation at all. The comparison held.

What she did not yet have — what she told Prieto plainly she did not have — was anything connecting Denny Halvorsen to Mara Suggs beyond the fact that the same rare pollen signature had turned up on both women’s clothing. He had owned the property three years ago too, records showed, but so had it existed under his father before him, and a bog didn’t care who was standing in it or why. It was entirely possible, Ruth said, turning her pen over in her hands the way she did when she was being careful about the edges of what she actually knew, that both young women had simply worked or trespassed on the same land, coincidentally, three years apart, and that whatever had happened to each of them had happened for entirely separate reasons in entirely separate ways. Pollen could put a person in a place. It could not tell you what happened to them there, or who else had been standing beside them when it did.

Prieto asked for a full evidentiary report, formal enough to take to the DA’s office, and Ruth spent the better part of two days building it — every count, every control, every chain-of-custody form, cross-referenced against her own eleven years of reference collection so that no single claim in it rested on anything she couldn’t independently defend. She locked the physical slides, both the Renner set and the Suggs set, into the fireproof cabinet in the barn where she kept everything that might someday matter in a courtroom, the way she had a hundred times before without thinking twice about it.

She noticed the cabinet was unlocked on a Tuesday morning, eleven days after she’d handed Prieto the report. Not forced — unlocked, the small brass key still in the barrel where she never, in eleven years, left it. Her first thought was that she had done it herself, distracted, the way anyone might; her second was to go through the trays methodically, count by count, checking each label against her digital log before she let herself believe anything at all. Four hundred and sixty-one reference specimens were exactly where they should have been.

The Halvorsen bog reference set — the six vials she had collected herself at the gate, GPS-tagged, the physical samples that tied the Rhododendron cultivar unambiguously to that one property and no other in the county — was gone. Not the photographs; she still had those, backed up three separate ways, useless as they were without the physical comparison behind them. Not her notes. Just the vials themselves, the one piece of evidence that couldn’t be recreated without going back through that gate a second time, past a man who had already learned, the first time, exactly what she’d come looking for.

She called Prieto before she called anyone else, and was still on the phone with him, describing the empty tray slot in more detail than she’d ever imagined narrating her own filing cabinet, when her phone buzzed with a second incoming call from a number she didn’t recognize, and let it go to voicemail rather than lose the line to Prieto. The message was eleven seconds long, a voice she didn’t know, unhurried, almost polite. It said only that she was testing the wrong bog.