She moves it over the edges of plyboard shelving stacked with snorkel equipment and T-shirts.
“If you look closely,” she adds, “you can barely make out a lightening of the wood here and here. Possibly a splash pattern.”
Lucy gets next to her and takes the magnifier.
“I think I see it,” she says.
Today, he has been in and out and has ignored her except to bring a grilled cheese sandwich and more water. He doesn’t live here. He is never here at night, or if he is, he is as quiet as the dead.
It is late, but she doesn’t know how late, and the moon is trapped behind clouds on the other side of the broken window. She hears him move about the house. Her pulse quickens as his feet sound in her direction, and she tucks the small, pink tennis shoe behind her back because he will take it from her if it means anything to her, and then he is a dark shadow with a long finger of light. He has the spider with him. It covers his hand. It is the biggest spider she has ever seen.
She listens for Kristin and the boys as the light probes her raw, swollen ankles and wrists. He probes the filthy mattress and the soiled bright-green robe draped over her lower legs. She draws up her knees and arms, trying to cover herself as the light touches private parts of her body. She recoils as she feels him staring at her. She can’t see his face. She has no idea what he looks like. He always wears black. During daylight, he covers his face with the hood and wears black, everything black, and at night she can’t see him at all, just a shape. He took her glasses.
That was the first thing he did when he forced his way into the house.
Give me your glasses, he said. Now.
She stood paralyzed in the kitchen. Her terror and disbelief were numbing. She couldn’t think, felt as if the blood was completely draining from her body, and then olive oil in the pan on the stove began to smoke and the boys began to cry and he pointed the shotgun at them. He pointed it at Kristin. He had on the hood, the black clothing, when Tony opened the back door and then he was inside and it happened fast.
Give me your glasses.
Give them to him, Kristin said. Please don’t hurt us. Take whatever you want.
Shut up or I’ll kill every one of you right now.
He ordered the boys to lie facedown on the living-room floor and hit them in the back of the head, hit them hard with the butt of the gun so they wouldn’t try to run. He turned out all the lights and ordered Kristin and Ev to carry and drag the boys’ limp bodies down the hall and out the master-bedroom slider, and blood dripped and smeared along the floor and she keeps thinking that someone should have seen the blood. By now somebody should have been to the house, trying to figure out what happened to them, and they should have seen the blood. Where are the police?
The boys didn’t move on the grass by the pool, and he tied them up with phone cords and gagged them with dish towels even though they weren’t moving or making a sound, and he forced Kristin and Ev to walk through the dark to the station wagon.
Ev drove.
Kristin sat in the front seat and he was in the back with the barrel of the gun pointed at her head.
His cold, quiet voice told Ev where to go.
I’m taking you somewhere, then I’ll go back for them, his cold, quiet voice said as she drove.
Just call someone, Kristin begged. They need to get to the hospital. Please don’t leave them there to die. They’re children.
I said I’d go back for them.
They need help. They’re just little boys. Orphans. Both their parents are dead.
Good. Nobody to miss them, then.
His voice was cold and flat and inhuman, a voice with no feeling or personality.
She remembers seeing signs forNaples. They were heading west toward theEverglades.
I can’t drive without my glasses, Ev said, her heart pounding so hard she thought it might break her ribs. She couldn’t catch her breath. When she ran off on the shoulder, he gave her the glasses, then took them away again when they reached the dark, hellish place where she has been since.
Scarpetta sprays the cinder-block walls inside the bathroom, and they glow in a pattern of sweeps and swipes and spatters that aren’t visible when the lights are on.
“Someone cleaned up,” Lucy says in the dark.
“I’m going to stop, don’t want to risk destroying blood, if it is. You got it on film?”
“Right.” She turns on the light.
Scarpetta gets out a presumptive blood kit and swabs areas of the wall where she saw the luminol react, working the cotton tip into the porous concrete where blood might lurk, even after washing. With medicine droppers, she drips her chemical concoction on a swab and it turns bright pink, reaffirming that what is lighting up on the wall could be blood, possibly human blood. It will have to be verified in the lab.
If it’s blood, it wouldn’t surprise her if it is old, two and a half years old. Luminol reacts to the hemoglobin in red blood cells, and the older the blood, the more it oxidizes and the stronger the reaction. She continues swabbing with sterile water, gathering samples and sealing them inside evidence boxes that she labels, tapes and initials.
This has been going on for an hour, and she and Lucy are hot inside their protective clothing. They can hear Larry on the other side of the door, moving about his store. Several times, his phone rings.
They return to the storage area, and Lucy opens a sturdy black carrying case and removes a Mini-Crime scope forensic light source, a portable boxy metal unit with side intakes, a high-intensity halide lamp with a flexible arm that looks like a shiny steel hose fitted with a light guide that allows her to change wavelengths. She plugs in the scope and turns on the power switch and a fan begins to whir. She adjusts the intensity knob, setting the wavelength at 455 nanometers. They put on orange-tinted goggles that improve contrast and protect their eyes.
Lights out, and Scarpetta carries the unit by its handle and slowly sweeps the blue light over walls, shelving and the floor. Blood and other substances that react to luminol don’t necessarily react to an alternate light source, and the areas that luminesced earlier are dark. But several small smears on the floor pop up a bright, hot red. Lights on, and Lucy positions the tripod again and places an orange filter over the camera lens. Lights out, and she photographs the fluorescing red smears. Lights back on, and the smears are barely visible. They are nothing more than a dirty discoloration of a dirty, discolored floor, but under magnification, Scarpetta detects a very faint blush of red. Whatever the substance is, it doesn’t dissolve in sterile water, and she doesn’t want to use a solvent and run the risk of destroying whatever it is.
“We need to get a sample.” Scarpetta studies the concrete.
“I’ll be right back.”
Lucy opens the door and calls out for Larry. He is behind the counter again, talking on the phone, and when he looks up and sees her from head to toe in white plasticized paper, he is visibly startled.
“Did someone just beam me to the Mir space station?” he says.
“You got any tools around this joint so I don’t have to go out to the car?”
“There’s a small toolbox in back. Up on the shelf against the wall.” He indicates which wall. “A small, red toolbox.”
“I may have to mess up your floor. Just a little.”
He starts to say something but changes his mind, shrugs, and she shuts the door. She retrieves a hammer and a screwdriver from the tool box, and with a few blows, chips out small samples of the dirty red stains and seals them inside evidence bags.
She and Scarpetta remove their white clothing and stuff it into a trash can. They pack up their equipment and leave.
Why are you doing this?” Ev asks the same question she asks every time he comes in, asks it hoarsely as he points the light and it shoots through her eyes like knives. “Please get that light out of my face.”
“You’re the ugliest fat pig I’ve ever seen,” he says. “No wonder nobody likes you.”
“Words can’t hurt me. You can’t hurt me. I belong to God.”