The Last Precinct

The more people inbreed, the more they up their chances for genetic glitches.

using plumb lines, squeezing or dripping or pouring or projecting blood onto a variety of target surfaces from a variety of angles and heights, and walking through puddles and stamping and slapping, and experimenting. Then, of course, there is the math, the straight-line geometry and trigonometry for figuring out point of origin.

"
"And the science is?"
I explain to her that blood is ninety-one percent water. It adheres to the physics of liquid, and it is affected by motion and gravity. A typical drop of blood will fall 25.1 feet per second. Stain diameter increases as the dropping distance increases. Blood dripping into blood produces a corona of spatters around the original pool. Splashed blood produces long, narrow spatters around a central stain, and as blood dries, it goes from bright red to reddish-brown to brown to black. I know experts who have spent their entire careers affixing medicine droppers of blood to ring stands

BLOOD IS LIFE. IT BEHAVES LIKE A LIVING CREA-ture.
When the circulatory system is breached, the blood vessel contracts in a panic, making itself smaller in an attempt to diminish the blood flowing through it and out of the tear or cut. Platelets immediately rally to plug the hole. There are thirteen clotting factors and together they instigate their alchemy to stop blood loss. I have always thought that blood is bright red for a reason, too. It is the color of alarm, of emergency, of danger and distress. If blood were a clear fluid like sweat, we might not notice when we are injured or when someone else is. Bright red boasts of blood's importance, and it is the siren that sounds when the greatest of all violations has occurred: when another person has maimed or taken a life.

mitochondrial DNA is found in the walls of cells and not in their nuclei, meaning mitochondrial DNA is the anthropological DNA of hair, fingernail, tooth and bone. Mitochondrial DNA is the molecules that make up our mortar and stone, I say. The limited usefulness lies in that mitochondrial DNA is inherited only through the female lineage. I use the analogy of an egg. Think of mitochondrial DNA as the egg white, while nuclear DNA is the yolk. You can't compare one to the other. But if you have DNA from blood, you have the whole egg and can compare mitochondrial to mitochondrial_ egg white to egg white. We have blood because we have Chandonne. He had to give up a blood sample while in the hospital. We have his complete DNA profile and can compare the mitochondrial DNA of unknown hairs to the mitochondrial DNA from his blood sample.

The subject of DNA is a difficult one. Explaining human life on a molecular level tells most people far more than they can understand or care to know. Cops and prosecutors love what DNA can do. They hate to talk about it scientifically. Few of them understand it. The old joke is, most people can't even spell DNA. I explain that nuclear DNA is what we get when cells with nuclei are present, such as with blood, tissue, seminal fluid and hair roots. Nuclear DNA is inherited equally from both parents, so if we have someone's nuclear DNA we have, in a sense, all of him, and can compare his DNA profile to any other biological sample this same person has left at, say, another crime scene.

My anger stirs like a great shark deep beneath the surface of my stoical demeanor.

life and death,

you should know how important sex is. It is power. It is

Fear is a fascinating emotion. I have studied it endlessly and often tell people the best example of how it works is to recall the reaction of another driver you have pulled in front of and almost hit. Panic instantly turns to rage and the other person lays on the horn, makes obscene gestures or, these days, shoots you. I go through the progression completely, flawlessly, Shrill fear turning to fury. "I've not followed the news deliberately and certainly won't appreciate the magnitude of it," I reply. "I never appreciate having my privacy violated."