WE HAD A NICE FLIGHT BACK, CHASING THE SUN AS FAR AS Greenfield, Iowa, where we tucked in for the night. It’s a fun little airport; you have to phone the fire department to come pump the gas, and the lady who rents rooms nearby makes absolutely killer cinnamon rolls in the morning. As we crested the Rockies, I flew for a while, but mostly I slept in the back with the baby cuddled in my arms while her mom sat up front and traded off the controls with Fritz. It had been a long four days for each and every one of us.
Like I said, I wasn’t done with the Krehbeil project yet, but it’s first things first if you’re trying to have a life. The last weeks of school went by like a stampede of stallions, and before I knew it, I was writing final exams. Next, I took the ten-day short course on stable isotopes offered at the U, because I had an idea it was going to help with the analysis of Tert’s paint chips. That done, I signed up for time on the scanning electron microscope and the electron microprobe and got to work examining those chips.
I heard from Jenny, Fred, and Nigel frequently. They’d found lead in Mrs. Krehbeil’s hair and fingernails, all right—
lots
of it—but darned if the medical authorities could figure out where it was coming from. So it seemed that a bit more … er,
digging
was in order. It was my excellent luck that Fritz happened to be flying back to Baltimore again, and was willing to drop me off at Harrisburg, so I invited Agent Wardlaw to pick me up at the airport and drive me to the Pennsylvania Geologic Survey. When we walked into Fred’s office, Nigel, who was lounging in a side chair, whipped his feet off the desk and stood up, crossing his index fingers
in the sign against enchantment. “What ho!” he said. “I was expecting you, Em, but what chimera is this? Have we dog food on the hoof?”
“Knock it off, Nigel,” I said, grinning. “Wardlaw popped for doughnuts just now, so you could say we’ve kissed and made up.”
“Oh. Well. Bully. In that case, to what do we owe the incomparable honor?”
Just then Jenny arrived, and from the way Nigel ran his hands through her hair, I’d say they’d been getting better acquainted. It was hard for me to feature at first, but I noticed that he’d taken to wearing shirts that matched the colors of her fingernails.
I said, “Nigel, how tight did you say that new color IR coverage for the county was?”
“One to twenty-four hundred,” he replied.
“Can you pull up that funny little Krehbeil parcel down in the serpentine barrens again? And show me any disturbed ground?”
Nigel gave me a lascivious grin. “That would show up on the IR right and proper. The new growth of vegetation wouldn’t match the signature of the old.” He led us down the hall to his office, sat down, and tapped away at his keyboard for a while.
This time he was on a big desktop computer, and the resolution was magnificent. As Nigel zoomed in on the properties, I could all but count the dogs lined up by the fences barking at passing cars. He narrowed the view down to the Krehbeil parcel, and sure enough, out behind the dwelling structure, about three hundred yards back, tucked in behind a screen of trees, there was a patch of ground that did not match the rest. It was oblong, and approximately three by eight feet.
Nigel looked at Wardlaw and said, “A nice bit of digging for a man on the eve of his middle age, but not insurmountable. You say Dad and Auntie are already gone, Mum’s on the way, and Elder Sis is having trouble feeling her hands and feet? Well then, this is number five. How many more do we have to go?”
“One more brother, a nephew, and a niece.”
“Oh, jolly,” said Nigel. “Serial killing, right here in Lancaster County. And I had feared this would be such a sleepy little corner of creation.”
Wardlaw got on the phone to some well-placed colleagues, and by dinnertime we had a warrant and several burly sheriff’s deputies with stunners to help deter the dogs. The raid turned up one very irritable tenant
with a bright-red neck who spouted slogans concerning what it would take to get him to give up his arms, but Wardlaw pointed out that our interest lay in activities predating his six months’ residency. And the tenant’s common-law wife was only too pleased to point out where the dogs had found Cricket’s little car, deep within a shroud of greenbrier.
The inquest was scheduled for less than a week later, so I used what was left of Tert’s money to buy a commercial ticket for the return trip and stuck around. By the time the inquest began, there were lab results on Cricket’s bones. Mrs. Krehbeil was still frail, but gathering strength. She was put on the witness stand first, to avoid undue stress, but not surprisingly, she could or would tell them nothing. After she was done testifying, she was shown from the room and returned to the nursing home where she now resided.
Agent Wardlaw sat in the back of the courtroom with me. “I hope this nails the S.O.B.,” he said, “because he saw that warrant coming, and there was nothing in that little shed back in the garden.”
“No kidding.” I wasn’t surprised. Faye had insisted on leaving her “borrowed” keys by a note on the dining room table, and if I were Tert, I would have moved my camp, too.
“Oh, this is good,” he said, as Deirdre took the stand to testify.
She looked older than the last time I had seen her, as if her fires were banked low, but she held her head up with patrician rigidity the entire time she gave testimony. She won few points for sympathy. There was a bit too much condescension in her tone as she said, “She seemed worse after each of my brother William’s visits. I had become quite concerned. But of course, I thought she was merely pining for him. He so seldom comes around.”
I’ll bet you thought that,
I mused.
My testimony was requested toward the end. I was sworn in and asked to state my bona fides and how it came to be that I was present the morning that Mrs. Krehbeil first fell out of her wheelchair. I was more than pleased to answer, because it put the evidence in the public record, right where I could access it for my thesis project. “I was there because Mrs. Krehbeil’s older son, William, had hired me to analyze paint chips from a painting he had collected at his aunt Winifred Krehbeil’s ranch outside of Cody, Wyoming,” I said crisply, speaking into the microphone.
The judge asked a few questions about how I had come to notice the
symptoms of lead poisoning in Mrs. Krehbeil, then seemed ready to excuse me.
“Wait,” I said. “I have a few more points which I think might have some bearing on the case.”
The judge nodded, indicating that I should go ahead and make my statement.
I then explained the rest, about Tert’s suspicion that the painting had been copied and switched, and his assertion that there would be more paintings stored at the house.
“How does this relate to the case?” asked the judge.
“It goes to motive,” I explained. “After all, my client is a prime suspect.”
The corner of the judge’s mouth crimped at my use of terms. I suppose he thought I’d been watching too much TV. “And had the painting been altered?” the judge inquired.
“If those samples are representative of the entire painting, then it’s my belief that it is entirely a forgery,” I stated.
“And what is your evidence for that conclusion?”
I leaned closer to the mike. “First, the green paint used was incorrect. It should have been Hooker’s green, which is a mixture of Prussian blue, a synthetically produced pigment, and gamboge, which is an organic resin from Asia. The Prussian blue was present, all right, but the gamboge was not. In its place, I found a mixture of lead chromate, which is a much paler, less brownish pigment, and several other pigments meant to shift the yellow to the classic mustard tone. While Remington occasionally used lead chromate, his Hooker’s green was purchased premixed, and the yellow used was gamboge.”
“So from this you concluded that the painting was a forgery?”
I could tell by his tone that he was not going to be persuaded by one point of evidence. “No, I am a geologist, not an art conservator. I would not presume to suggest that I know Remington’s work in such detail. But a geologist is trained to examine the relative ages of materials. So I analyzed the lead in the lead white to see if there was much silver in it. While the cyanide process used today to separate those two elements was in widespread use by 1900, I thought that, if there were a significant impurity of silver in the lead, it might indicate that the pigment used was old. However, I found it to be quite pure.”
“And did you find anything else at variance with the paints Remington would have used?”
“Yes, and this last item was the most compelling. I recently took a short course in stable isotopes at the University of Utah, and I applied what I learned there in the analysis of the paints. You see, the pigments didn’t clinch the case, so I turned to the oil in which they’d been emulsified.”
“And what oil was used, Ms. Hansen?”
“Well, I don’t know. I imagine it was linseed oil. I have no reason to suspect otherwise, and that is what Remington would have used. But I wasn’t interested in the exact provenance—or origin—of the oil, just its age. You see, if the painting had been copied and switched between 1972, when the elder Mrs. Krehbeil died, the family fortunes began to slip, and the ranch where the original painting was stored was passed on to her daughter Winifred, and this winter, when my client went to fetch it, then it would be a matter of looking at the carbon isotopes present in whatever oil was used.”
“So, am I to understand that you analyzed the oil for a carbon-fourteen date? You stated that the sample was only a chip; was there enough present to establish this?”
“No, that wasn’t what I was doing.” I got out of the witness box and crossed to a chalkboard that had been set up for just such contingencies. I drew on it two lines: a vertical line, which I notched to indicate the ration of carbon-14 to carbon-12, and then I crossed it with a horizontal line, which I notched to indicate the years between 1700 and the present. I put my finger on the line with the dates. “Consider this line a baseline. Carbon-fourteen, the radioisotope, exists in our atmosphere at a steady ratio to carbon-twelve, which is stable. The way carbon-fourteen dating is done is by comparing that steady-state number with the amount found in the item tested, any organic item such as wood or a bone which was once alive. The isotope decay clock is set at the time of death of the individual, because, at death, it is no longer taking in carbon, and the unstable radioisotope continues to decay into carbon-twelve at a standard rate, called a half-life.”
I stopped to take a breath. I looked out across the courtroom at William Krehbeil III, who was staring back at me like I was a statue he did not quite like.
I said, “But there’s a glitch in our steady-state situation, and that’s why I’ve set my timeline back to the 1700s. At the beginning of the Industrial
Revolution, here”—I put my finger on about 1750—“the amount of free carbon in the atmosphere shifted. It became bound up in combustion products from the burning of fossil fuels, such as carbon monoxide. So the ratio shifted slightly over the next two hundred years.” I ran the chalk horizontally almost to the 1950 mark, slowly letting it sink below the baseline. “It’s not much, but it’s easily measurable. At that time, something else happened technologically: We split the atom.” I zigged the chalk high above the baseline, forming a sharp peak. “Above-ground testing of nuclear devices released masses of carbon fourteen, dramatically shifting the ratio. Then here—I put my finger at the top of the peak—”we banned above-ground testing. The year was 1969. The ratio once again began to decline, until now—I drew a slope leading to the present year—“it’s almost back to baseline, but not quite. The point is that, in any organic material, we can measure this ratio and plot it on this graph.”
I pulled a folded page out of my pocket and opened it in front of the judge. “In the Krehbeil samples, the oil in which the pigments had been emulsified displayed a dramatically elevated ratio. As you can see, there are two places where that level can be found on this chart.” I pointed at that level on both the rising and falling sides of the peak. “But either date is long after 1909, when Remington himself died and therefore ceased to work. So whoever mixed that paint did so after Remington’s death.”
There was a restless shifting in the chairs beyond the rail. I saw perplexed reporters trying to figure out how to make notes on what I’d said. The judge asked, “And how do you believe this bears on the case?”
“Because I believe that it proves your prime suspect’s innocence.”
Tert’s eyes widened with surprise. The courtroom broke out in a rumble of conversation and the judge called for silence.
I said, “Look, I know what the evidence is against him, because I proposed it myself. But it’s all circumstantial. His mother got sicker each time he visited. That doesn’t prove he was dosing her. He would benefit financially if she died before the land was sold into an agricultural easement, but benefit does not prove guilt, either. All the other points can similarly be tossed, because not a single bit of evidence has his fingerprints on it. And I think his interests show he in fact expected to get the painting as his inheritance, not the land. He in fact didn’t have to wait for his mother to die to get the painting. Aunt Winnie was dead, and he trooped on out there to Wyoming and collected his prize.” I realized that I had dropped several
notches in the formality of my speech. “Well, you get my point,” I said. “Tert told me how much he loved that painting when he showed me the fake. At the time I didn’t want to believe him, because I wanted to hate him. He was paying attention to my best friend Faye, and I did not approve.”