I asked. "Oh, yeah. You open the door and the alarm hums about fifteen seconds, long enough for you to punch in your code before it goes off."
"Then she must have opened the door, deactivated the alarm, let the person in, and then reset the alarm while he was still here. Otherwise, it would never have gone off later, when he left. Interesting."
"Yeah," Marino replied, "interesting as shit."
We were inside the living room, standing near the overturned coffee table. It was sooty with dusting powder. The magazines on the floor were news and literary publications, all of them several months old.
"Did you find any recent newspapers or magazines?"
I asked. "If she bought a paper locally, it could be important. Anywhere she went after getting off the plane is worth checking."
I saw his jaw muscles flex. Marino hated it when he assumed I was telling him how to do his job.
He said, "There were a couple of things upstairs in her bedroom where her briefcase and bags was. A Miami Her aid and something called the Keynoter, has mostly real estate listings for the Keys. Maybe she was thinking of moving down there? Both papers came out Monday. She must've bought them, maybe picked them up in the airport on her way back to Richmond."
"I'd be interested in what her realtor has to say…"
"Nothing, that's what he has to say," he interrupted.
"Has no idea where Beryl was and only showed her house once while she was gone. Some young couple. Decided the price was too high. Beryl was asking three hundred Gs for the joint."
He looked around, his face impervious. "Guess someone could get a deal now."
"Beryl took a taxi home from the airport the night she got in."
I doggedly pursued the details.
He got out a cigarette and pointed with it. "Found the receipt in the foyer there, on that little table by the door. Already checked out the driver, a guy named Woodrow Hunnel. Dumb as a bag of hammers. Said he was waiting in the line of cabs at the airport. She flagged him down. This was close to eight, it was raining cats and dogs. He let her out here at the house maybe forty minutes later, said he carried her two suitcases to the door, then split. The fare was twenty-six bucks, including the tip. He was back at the airport about half an hour later picking up another fare."
"You're sure, or is this what he told you?"
"Sure as I'm damn standing here."
He tapped the cigarette on his knuckle and began fingering the filtered tip with his thumb. "We checked out the story. Hunnel was shooting straight with us. He didn't touch the lady. There wasn't time."
I followed his eyes to the dark spatters near the doorway. The killer's clothing would have been bloody. It wasn't likely a cabdriver with bloody clothes was going to be picking up fares.
"She hadn't been home long," I said. "Got in around nine and a neighbor calls in her alarm at eleven. It had been going for a half hour, meaning the killer was gone by around ten-thirty."
"Yeah," he answered. "That's the hardest part to figure. Based on those letters, she was scared shitless. So she sneaks back to the city, locks herself inside her house, even has her three-eighty on the kitchen counter-show you that when we get there. Then, boom! The doorbell rings or what? Next thing you know, she's let the squirrel in and reset the burglar alarm behind him. Had to be somebody she knew."
"I wouldn't rule out a stranger," I said. "If the person is very smooth, she may have trusted him, let him in for some other reason."
"At that hour?"
His eyes flicked me as they went around the room. "What? He's selling magazine subscriptions, Good Humor bars at ten o'clock at night?"
I didn't reply. I didn't know.
We stopped at the open doorway leading into a hallway.
"This is the first blood," Marino said, looking at the dried spatters on the wall. "She got cut right here, the first cut.
I figure she's running like hell and he's slashing."
I envisioned the cuts on Beryl's face, arms, and hands.
"My guess," he went on, "is he cut her left arm or back or face at this point. The blood on the wall here's cast off from blood slinging off the blade. He'd already cut her at least once, the blade was bloody, and when he swung again drops flew off and hit the wall."
The stains were elliptical, about six millimeters in diameter, and became increasingly elongated the farther they arched left of the doorframe. The spread of drops spanned at least ten feet. The assailant had been swinging with the vigor of a hard-hitting squash player. I felt the emotion of the crime. It wasn't anger. It was worse than that. Why did she let him in!
"Based on the location of this spatter, I'm thinking the drone was right about here," Marino said, positioning himself several yards back from the doorway and slightly to the left of it. "He swings, cuts her again, and as the blade follows through, blood flies off and hits the wall. The pattern, as you can see, starts here."
He gestured toward the highest drops, which were almost level with the top of his head. "Then sweeps down, stopping several inches from the floor."
He paused, his eyes challenging me. "You examined her. What do you think? He's right-handed or left-handed?"
The cops always wanted to know that. No matter how often I told them it was anybody's guess, they still asked.
"It's not possible to tell from this blood spatter," I said, the inside of my mouth dry and tasting like dust. "It depends entirely on where he was standing in relation to her. As for the stab injuries to her chest, they're slightly angled from left to right. That might make him left-handed. But again, it depends on where he was in relation to her."
"I just think it's interesting almost all her defense injuries are located on the left side of her body. You know, she's running. He's coming at her from the left instead of the right. Makes me suspicious he's left-handed."
"It all depends on the victim and assailant's positions in relation to each other," I repeated impatiently.
"Yo," he muttered shortly. "Everything depends on something."
Through the doorway was a hardwood floor. A runway had been chalked off to enclose drips of blood leading to a stairway some ten feet to our left. Beryl had fled this way and up the stairs. Her shock and terror were greater than her pain. On the left wall at almost every step was a bloody smear made by her cut fingers reaching out for balance and dragging across the paneling.
The black spots were on the floor, on the walls, on the ceiling. Beryl had run to the end of the upstairs hall, where she was momentarily cornered. In this area there was a great deal of blood. The chase resumed after she apparently fled from the end of the hall into her bedroom, where she may have eluded him by climbing over the queen-size bed as he came around it. At this point, either she threw her briefcase at him or, more likely, it was on top of the bed and was knocked off. The police found it on the rug, open and upside down like a tent, papers scattered nearby, including the photocopies of the letters she had written from Key West. "What other papers did you find in here?"
I asked. "Receipts, a couple tourist guides, including a brochure with a street map," Marino answered. "I'll make copies for you if you want."
"Please," I said.
"Also found a stack of typed pages on her dresser there."
He pointed. "Probably what she was writing in the Keys. A lot of notes scribbled in the margins in pencil. No prints worth nothing, a few smudges and a few partials that are hers."
Her bed was stripped to the bare mattress, its bloodstained quilted spread and sheets having been sent to the lab. She had been slowing down, losing motor control, getting weak. She had stumbled back out into the hall, where she'd fallen over an Oriental prayer rug I remembered from the scene photographs. There were bloody drag marks and handprints on the floor. Beryl had crawled into the guest bedroom beyond the bath, and it was here, finally, that she died.