“I think you’re in a really bad mood.”
“I think I’m tired of your avoiding me. The only time you call is at times like this.”
“No one better.”
“That’s all I am to you? A member of your staff?”
“I can’t believe you’d even ask that. You ready for me to cut the lights?”
“Go.”
Lucy pulls a string, clicking off the overhead light bulb, casting them into total darkness. Scarpetta starts by spraying luminol on a control sample of blood, a single dried drop on a square of cardboard, and it glows greenish-blue and fades. She begins spraying in sweeps, misting areas of the floor and they begin to glow vividly as if the entire floor is on fire, a neon greenish-blue fire.
“Good God,” Lucy says, and the shutter clicks again and Scarpetta sprays. “I’ve never seen that.”
The bright greenish-blue luminescence glows and fades to the slow, eerie rhythm of the spraying and when the spraying stops, the glow vanishes in the dark and Lucy turns on the light. She and Scarpetta look closely at the concrete floor.
“I don’t see anything except dirt,” Lucy says, getting frustrated.
“Let’s sweep it up before we walk on it any more than we have.”
“Shit!” Lucy says. “I wish we’d tried the Mini-Crime scope first.”
“Not now, but we can,” Scarpetta says.
With a clean paintbrush, Lucy sweeps dirt from the floor into a plastic evidence bag, then repositions the camera and tripod. She takes more context photographs, these of wooden shelving, cuts the lights and this time the luminol reacts differently. Splotchy areas light up an electric blue and dance like popping sparks, and the shutter clicks and clicks and Scarpetta sprays, and the blueness pulses rapidly, fading in and out much more quickly than is typical of blood and most other substances that react to chemiluminescence.
“Bleach,” Lucy says, because a number of substances result in false positives, and bleach is a common one, and the way it looks is distinctive.
“Something with a different spectra, certainly reminiscent of bleach,” Scarpetta replies. “Could be any cleanser containing a hypochlorite-based bleach. Clorox, Drano, Fantastic, The Works, Babo Cleanser, to name a few. I wouldn’t be surprised to find something like that back here.”
“You got it?”
“Next.”
The lights go on and both of them squint in the harsh glare of the overhead bulb.
“Basil toldBentonhe cleaned up with bleach,” Lucy says. “But luminol’s not going to react to bleach after two and a half years, is it?”
“Maybe if it soaked into wood and was left alone. I say maybe because I don’t know one way or the other, don’t know of anyone who’s ever done tests like that,” Scarpetta says, reaching into her scene bag for a lighted magnifier.
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.