She withdraws the thermometer from under the dead woman’s arm and writes down ninety-seven-point-two degrees. She walks into the tiled bathroom and looks inside the shower. She looks in the toilet and the waste paper basket. The sink is dry, with no blood, not the slightest residue, which makes no sense. She looks at Marino.
“The gloves were in this sink?” she asks.
“That’s right.”
“If he-or she, I suppose-took them off after killing her and dropped them into the sink, they should have left a bloody residue. The bloody one should have.”
“Unless the blood was already dry on the glove.”
“It shouldn’t have been,” Scarpetta says, opening the medicine cabinet and finding the usual alchemies for aches and pains and troublesome bowels. “Not unless the killer had them on long enough for the blood to dry.”
“Wouldn’t take all that long.”
“It might not. You got them handy?”
They walk out of the bathroom, and Marino retrieves a large brown-paper evidence envelope from a crime-scene case. He opens the envelope so she can look inside without touching the gloves. One is clean, the other partially inside out and stained with dark-brown dried blood. The gloves aren’t talc-lined, and the clean glove looks as if it has never been worn.
“We’ll want to do DNA on the inside, too. And prints,” she says.
“He must not know you can leave prints on the inside of latex gloves,” Marino says.
“Then he must not watch TV,” an officer says.
“Don’t talk to me about the crap on TV. It’s ruining my life,” another officer comments from halfway under the bed. Then, “Well, well.”
He gets up holding a flashlight and a small, stainless-steel revolver with rosewood grips. He opens the cylinder, touching as little of the metal as possible.
“Unloaded. So that did her a lot of good. Doesn’t look like it’s been fired since it was cleaned last, if it was ever fired at all,” he says.
“We’ll check it for prints anyway,” Marino tells him. “A weird place to hide a gun. How far under the bed?”
“Too far to reach without getting down on the floor and crawling under it like I just did. Twenty-two caliber. What the hell’s a Black Widow?”
“You’re kidding,” Marino says, taking a look. “North American Arms, single-action. Sort of a stupid gun for a little old lady with gnarly, arthritic hands.”
“Someone must have given it to her for home protection and she never bothered.”
“See a box of ammo anywhere?”
“Not so far.”
The officer drops the gun into an evidence bag, which he places on a dresser where another officer begins taking an inventory of prescription bottles.
“Accuretic, Diurese and Enduron,” he reads labels. “Got no idea.”
“An ace inhibitor and diuretics. For hypertension,” Scarpetta says.
“Verapamil, an old one. Dates back to July.”
“Hypertension, angina, arrhythmia.”
“Apresoline and Loniten. Try to pronounce this stuff. Over a year old.”
“Vasodilators. Again, for hypertension.”
“So maybe she died of a stroke. Vicodin. I know what that is. And Ultram. These are more recent prescriptions.”
“Pain medications. Possibly for arthritis.”
“And Zithromax. That’s an antibiotic, right? Date on it’s December.”
“Nothing else?” Scarpetta asks.
“No, ma’am.”
“Who told the Medical Examiner’s Office she has a history of depression?” she asks, looking at Marino.
No one answers at first.
Then Marino says, “I sure as hell didn’t.”
“Who called the Medical Examiner’s Office?” she asks.
The two officers and Marino look at each other.
“Shit,” Marino says.
“Hold on,” Scarpetta says, and she calls the Medical Examiner’s Office and gets the administrator on the phone. “Who notified you about the shotgun death?”
“Hollywoodpolice.”
“But which officer?”
“Detective Wagner.”
“Detective Wagner?” Scarpetta puzzles. “What time’s on the call sheet?”
“Uh, let me see.Two eleven.”
Scarpetta looks at Marino again and asks him, “Do you know exactly what time you called me?”
He checks his cell phone and replies, “Two twenty-one.”
She glances at her watch. It is almostthree thirty. She won’t be on her six-thirty flight.
“Is everything all right?” the administrator asks her over the phone.
“Anything come up on caller ID when you got that call, the one supposedly from Detective Wagner?”
“Supposedly?”
“And it was a woman who called.”
“Yes.”
“Anything unusual about the way she sounded?”
“Not at all,” he says, pausing. “She sounded credible.”
“What about an accent?”
“What’s going on, Kay?”
“Nothing good,” she says.
“Let me scroll through. Okay,two eleven. Came in as unavailable.”
“Of course it did,” Scarpetta says. “See you in about an hour.”
She leans closer to the bed and looks carefully at the hands, turning them gently. She is always gentle, doesn’t matter that her patients can’t feel anything anymore. She notices no abrasions, cuts or bruises that might suggest binding or defense injuries. She checks again with a lens and finds fibers and dirt adhering to the palms of both hands.
“She might have been on the floor at some point,” she says as Reba walks into the room, pale and wet from the rain and obviously shaken.
“The streets are like a maze back here,” Reba says.
“Hey,” Marino says to her, “what time did you call the ME?”
“About what?”
“About the price of eggs inChina.”
“What?” she says, staring at the gore on the bed.
“About this case,” Marino says gruffly. “What the hell do you think I meant? And why don’t you get a damn GPS.”
“I didn’t call the ME. Why would I when she was standing right next to me?” she replies, looking at Scarpetta.
“Let’s bag her hands and her feet,” Scarpetta says. “And I want her wrapped in the quilt and a clean plastic sheet. The bed linens need to come in, too.”
She goes to a window that overlooks the backyard and the waterway. She looks at citrus trees pommeled by rain and thinks about the inspector she saw earlier. He was in this yard, she’s pretty sure, and she tries to pinpoint the exact time she saw him. She knows it wasn’t long before she heard what she now suspects was a gunshot. She looks around the bedroom again and notices two dark stains on the rug near the window that overlooks the citrus trees, the water.
The stains are very hard to see against the dark blue background, and she gets a presumptive blood kit out of her bag, gets chemicals and medicine droppers out of it. There are two stains several inches apart. Each is about the size of a quarter and oval-shaped, and she swabs one of them, then drips isopropyl alcohol, then phenolphthalein, then hydrogen peroxide on the swab and it turns bright pink. That doesn’t mean the stains are human blood, but there’s a very good chance they are.
“If it’s her blood, what’s it doing way over here?” Scarpetta talks to herself.
“Maybe back spatter,” Reba volunteers.
“Not possible.”
“Drips and not exactly round,” Marino says. “Looks like whoever was bleeding was upright, almost.”
He looks around for any other stains.
“Kind of unusual they’re here and nowhere else. If someone was bleeding a lot, you’d expect more drips,” he then says, as if Reba isn’t in the room.
“It’s hard to see them on a dark textured surface like this,” Scarpetta replies. “But I don’t see any others.”
“Maybe we should come back with luminol.” Marino talks around Reba and anger begins to flicker on her face.
“We need a sample of these carpet fibers when the techs get here,” Scarpetta says to everyone.
“Vacuum the rug, check for trace,” Marino adds, avoiding Reba’s stare.
“I’ll need to get a statement from you before you leave, seeing as how you’re the one who found her,” Reba says to him. “I’m not sure what you were doing just walking in her house.”
He doesn’t answer her. She doesn’t exist.