Foreno frowned. Then he reached to the left and opened his bottom desk drawer. From my vantage, standing, I could see a dozen accordion files, all filled with manila folders. He thumbed through the files, then pulled out one folder.
He slid it to me, and stood.
“You want some lunch?” he asked. “I’m buying.”
I looked at him with surprise.
He nodded toward a chair in the corner. “It’ll take you awhile to go through that.”
“A sandwich would be nice,” I said.
He grabbed his suit coat, then headed out the door. As he left, he pulled the door closed, so that someone passing by wouldn’t be able to see me.
I found that curious, but not as curious as the file. It was thick with newspaper clippings and computer printouts, some more than a decade old.
Cult killings, ritual murders, and bodiless cases. This was Foreno’s comparison file. He was right: It took me quite a bit of time to read it. He managed to return with the sandwiches and we ate in silence while I read about beheadings and disembowlings, about corpses left in pieces all over property, about candles and black magic and pagan ceremonies.
In each, the bodies remained.
“You don’t think they did it,” I said as I tossed my sandwich wrapper into the nearby trash.
“The cult?” He shook his head. “No, I don’t think so.”
“But the evidence points to them.”
“Rather neatly,” he said.
“So why didn’t you speak up?”
“Because I had no other theory of the case,” he said.
“Do you now?” I asked.
“Does your friend work for the catering firm?” And I realized he meant the man with the angular face.
“I think so.”
“I’ll see if I can track him down.”
“And if you do?”
Foreno shrugged. “I’ll see what happens next.”
I went back to work, thinking about all that blood, all those trails. The carpets were saturated, yet there were no footprints on the hardwood floors, no evidence of someone leaving through the front or back doors. The floors had been well-scrubbed with bleach, and one of the things I testified about was the way that bleach hid all evidence, one of the few things that masked even the goriest scene.
Why, the defense attorney had wanted to know, would someone remove the footprints, but leave the blood droplets? Why leave the drag marks on the carpet uncleaned?
I had shrugged. People aren’t that thorough. They clean only what they believe needs cleaning.
Blood is blood, isn’t it? he had asked, implying that someone who cleaned footprints on the hardwood would clean it all.
It’s not that simple, I said. I’ve had employees who missed spatter on their first few jobs because the scene was too overwhelming.
Do you think the killer would be overwhelmed? the defense attorney had asked, but the prosecutor had objected to the question. I never got to answer.
Would the killer have been overwhelmed? I considered the question now, at the safety of my desk. Probably not. After all, he created the scene.
Three saturated carpets. Five dead humans. Six quarts of blood per body. That house was soaked, the scene an example — the prosecutor had said — of overkill.
We see what we want to see.
I went back to my notes and, for the first time, did the math.
There was too much blood. None of us had realized it. At least twice the amount that should have been in that house. Twice the deaths? Or had someone taken buckets of blood and poured it on the carpets, letting the liquid soak in after he had expertly sprayed the walls.
Reproducing crime scenes wasn’t hard. Hollywood did it all the time, and there were photos of other scenes everywhere from forensic journals to true-crime novels. Spatter and spray would be easy to reproduce — plant misters, set just right, would mimic the early parts of spray, and something with a bit of kick would be able to reproduce the way that blood spurted from an artery.
There’d be mistakes, but who would look for them? Especially in an overwhelming and fairly obvious scene.
Too much blood wasn’t enough for Foreno to reopen the case — it was a closed murder trial, after all. But the blood evidence, coupled with the young man I’d seen, was enough to get Foreno working it again, on the side, in his spare time.
First, he had a crime-scene friend reexamine the photos, not explaining anything about the case.
Second, he looked in the Moorhead family background.
Third, he searched for the waiter.
And those three things came together into something both expected and unexpected. The tech said the scene might’ve been tampered with. Impossible to know now, although the blood was suspicious. Maybe someone else died.
The Moorheads traveled. They were running from debt in Michigan and used charm as well as the cosignature of an old friend to secure the house, which then got them credit cards and a new future.
Until the bank was ready to foreclose. Until the credit-card companies had cut them off.
And the cosigner? The same man who had waited tables that night. The one who had watched the court case. He was living under an alias, one he’d established twenty years before after he had embezzled fifty thousand dollars from a bank in the Midwest.
The bank where his brother had once worked.
The waiter wouldn’t talk to the police — hiring a lawyer immediately — but his presence was enough to get those carpet samples tested.
Still refrigerated, still intact after all these years. Sometimes laziness was its own reward.
And that, Foreno said when he came to my office in May, was when it got interesting. The blood was all the same type — O positive — but that was all it had in common. DNA testing proved that the blood came from dozens of sources, none of them related to the so-called victims.
Just the blood on the wall came from the family and, judging by the overlap in one of the bedrooms, had been applied just like I mentioned, with a sprayer and a lot of determination.
“Why?” I asked. “Why not just disappear? These people were smart enough to create new identities once before.”
And that was when he showed me the police files. He’d actually made copies for me so that I could look at them.
Pages and pages and pages of complaints filed by the family about the neighbors, about the young people in the house at the foot of the hill, about the parties and the goings-on, about the fears of devil worship and a possible cult.
Foreno shook his head. “Looks to me like pure old-fashioned hatred.”
“For their neighbors?”
“Their young, unusual, and loud neighbors,” Foreno said.
“They set these kids up?” I asked, and felt a shock at myself. I was willing to believe that a cult could kill an entire family; I was not willing to believe that a family would set up innocent people in a way that might send them to jail for life.
“Looks like it,” he said. “We’ve got work to do. They’ve got ten years and a lot of thinking on us.”
“But you’ll find them,” I said.
“I hope so,” he said. “But in life, there are no guarantees.”
Except one.
The story leaked, and the leak coincided with the release of the annual budget. The party, the plans for the museum, and the cost to the taxpayer made page one of our usually sleepy rag.
For a while, it looked like Louise might implode because of the scandal. Then she hit on the right note: The case wouldn’t be reopened — innocent people wouldn’t be getting out of jail — if she hadn’t been interested in the house in the first place.