36
I want to be alone with the dead and alone with my thoughts.
I walk over to the officer in charge of the mapping station set up on a sturdy bright yellow tripod. He’s packing a laptop computer and an Ethernet cable, the system on pause, its oscillating mirror and rapidly pulsing laser beam quiet and still.
“Have you got this?” I indicate the kitchen I’m heading toward, assuming he’s already captured its images and measurements.
“How you doing, Dr. Scarpetta? Randall Taylor with Watertown.”
He’s got a wide, tired face with thinning hair that’s mottled gray and combed back, a pair of reading glasses perched low on his nose. In the battle dress of faded blue cargo pants and a matching shirt with the sleeves rolled up, he reminds me of an old warrior who has learned new ways of doing his job but isn’t eager anymore. Cops, even feisty ones, get worn down like a river stone and he has a smooth and easy way about him, unlike Marino who is a product of nature protecting itself like a sea urchin or a briar patch.
“We met last year at the dinner when the chief retired,” Randall Taylor says. “I wouldn’t expect you to remember.”
“I hope your former chief is enjoying a little peace and quiet.”
“They’ve moved to Florida.”
“What part? I grew up in Miami.”
“A little north of West Palm, Vero Beach. I’m angling for him to invite me down. Come January, I’ll be begging.”
“What’s been done?” I ask.
“I’ve gotten multiple scans that I’ll stitch together with point to surface, line of sight measurements and blood trajectory analysis,” Taylor explains. “So you’ve basically got each entire scene in volumized 3-D, which I’ll get to you as soon as I’m back at my office.”
“That would be helpful.”
“I worked the other room first, just finishing up in here.”
“Am I going to be in your way?” I ask.
“I’m all set but I wanted to make sure you didn’t need anything else.”
“What about stringing?”
I want to know if he’s going to use the tried-and-true method of attaching strings to blood drops and spatter to determine points of convergence. It’s a reliable mathematical way to reconstruct where the assailant and victim were in relation to each other when the blows or injuries were inflicted.
“Not yet. You don’t really need to with this.” He pats the scanner with a gloved hand.
It’s a matter of opinion but I’m not going to tell him that.
“Obvious arterial spatter patterns, fairly obvious point of origin,” he says. “The victim here in the kitchen was standing, the other two sitting, not complicated scenes except you wonder how someone took out three people like that. They must have happened really fast. But still, nobody heard anything?”
“If you cut through someone’s trachea, he can’t scream. He can’t speak.”
“The two in there” — he indicates the open steel door — “dead at their desks like that.” He snaps his blue-gloved fingers and the sound is dull and rubbery. “I’ve been careful not to touch the bodies or get too close, waiting until you got here. They’re exactly like we found them.”
“Do you know what time?”
“I wasn’t first, but from what I gather?” Randall Taylor lifts his left arm and looks at his watch. “Maybe two hours ago when Concord first arrived, following up on the envelope full of cash they found in the park, which in my opinion was in Lombardi’s desk drawer. You’ll see when you get in there that everything was rummaged through and in one of the drawers was a withdrawal slip for ten grand from two days ago, Monday. Maybe robbery’s the motive but I agree with what I overheard you talking about. Whoever it is didn’t come here to kill everyone. Something went haywire.”
“And no one else on the property knows what might have happened.” It’s a point I can’t get past.
“You and me are on the same wavelength.” He selects a menu on the touch screen to power off the system. “I’m guessing nobody wants to be involved. Each person was waiting for the other to be the one who found them.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Everywhere I look I’m seeing computer screens and cameras.” He walks over to a wall socket and unplugs the battery-charging station. “You telling me nobody saw the guy running? You telling me nobody at least tried calling here to see what was going on? Like hello, is everything all right over there? That’s just strange as hell. And then Concord made it easy by rolling up and finding the bodies. What if they hadn’t? Who was going to call nine-one-one?”
“It seems inconsistent with human nature to look the other way if you spot someone fleeing the property, I agree.” I’m noncommittal about it.
I’ve learned the hard way to be careful about my opinions, which tend to get circulated like the gospel truth.
“This whole place gives me a bad feeling.” He loosens screws and lifts the scanner off the tripod and carries it over to a large foam-lined transport container. “Like it’s way too quiet and empty and nobody sees or hears a thing, what I associate with businesses that are fronts and neighborhoods where everybody’s guilty of something.”
I pull up my synthetic white hood to cover my hair and find a safe spot to set down my field case near the kitchen, then I move inside, careful where I step. Dark red dried blood is streaked, dripped, and spurted in waves on appliances, cabinets, and the floor, and the dead woman is between the refrigerator and the counter in a dark, stagnant puddle that’s thick in the middle and separating at the edges. I smell blood breaking down and overcooked coffee.
She’s flat on her back. Her legs are straight, her arms folded at her waist, and I know right away she didn’t die like that.
I look at her for a long, careful moment, pushing thoughts out of my head, letting her body tell me the true story it knows.
I’m conscious of the ripe smell of blood. Where it’s dried and coagulating it’s dark red turning rusty brown, viscous and sticky, and the message I’m getting isn’t right for someone stumbling as she hemorrhages, finally collapsing on the floor. The killer turned her pockets inside out and he did something more. I open my field case and get out a Sharpie. I find the sheet of labels and fill in one with the date and my initials. I stick it on a plastic ruler I’ll use as a scale, and I get my camera.
She’s tall, approximately five-foot-eight, with fine features, high cheekbones, and a strong jaw, and her dark hair is cropped short and she has multiple piercings in her ears. Her eyes are barely open, dark blue and getting dull. The irises will fade and cloud as death continues its destructive changes, coldly stiffening, what seems an indignant resistance at first. Then an escalation of breaking down that always strikes me as the flesh forlornly giving up.
The injuries to her neck gape widely, and her navy blue khaki slacks and white leather sneakers are streaked with drops of blood, some elongated, some round because they fell at different angles. I’m not surprised that her palms are bloody. It’s what I expect with a severed carotid, and the top of her left index finger is cut at the first knuckle, almost through the joint. I envision her grabbing her neck to stop the bleeding, which wasn’t possible, and while her hands were there, her attacker slashed again, almost cutting off her fingertip.
What’s completely wrong is blood has soaked into the back of her kelly green button-up fleece, especially into the back of her collar. There’s no blood in front, not a single drop that bled from the deep wounds in her neck. But I notice smudges, most of them around the buttons, and the inner cuff of the right sleeve is saturated almost up to the elbow, and this isn’t what I should see if she was wearing the fleece when she was standing up and someone cut her throat.