Blow Fly

115

THE FIRST BLOOD IS THREE feet inside the front door, a single drop the size of a dime, perfectly round with a stellate margin reminiscent of a buzzsaw blade.

Ninety-degree angle, Scarpetta thinks. A drop of blood moving through the air assumes an almost perfect spherical shape that is maintained on impact if the blood falls straight down, at a ninety-degree angle.

"She was upright, or someone was," Scarpetta says.

She stands very still, her eyes moving from one drop to the next on the terra-cotta tile floor. At the edge of the rug in front of the couch is a bloody area that appears to have been smeared by a foot, as if the person who stepped on the blood-spotted tile slipped. Scarpetta moves in for a closer inspection, staring at the dry, dark red stain, then turning her head and meeting Dr. Lanier s eyes. He comes over, and she points out an almost indiscernible partial footwear impression of a heel with a small undulating tread pattern that reminds Scarpetta of a child's drawing of ocean waves.

Eric begins taking photographs.

From the couch, the signs of the struggle continue around a glass and wrought-iron coffee table that is askew, the rug rumpled beneath it, and just beyond, a head was slammed against the wall.

"Hair swipes." Scarpetta points out a bloody pattern feathering over the pale pink paint.

The front door opens and in walks a plainclothes cop, young, with dark, receding hair. He looks back and forth between Dr. Lanier and Eric, and fixes on Scarpetta.

"Who's she?" he asks.

"Let's start with who you are," Dr. Lanier says to him.

The cop seems threatening because he is frantic, his eyes darting back in the direction of an area of the house they can't see. "Detective Clark, with Zachary." He swats at a fly, the black hair on top of his fingers showing through translucent latex gloves stretched over his big hands. "I just got transferred into investigations last month," he adds. "So I don't know her." He nods again at Scarpetta, who hasn't moved from her spot by the wall.

"A visiting consultant," Dr. Lanier replies. "If you haven't heard of her, you will. Now tell me what happened here. Where's the body, and who's with it?"

"In a front bedroom-a guest room, it looks like. Robillard's in there, taking pictures and everything."

Scarpetta glances up at the mention of Nic Robillard's name.

"Good," she says.

"You know her?" Now Detective Clark seems very confused. He irritably swats at another fly. "Damn, I hate those things."

Scarpetta follows tiny spatters of blood on the wall and floor, some no bigger than a pinpoint, the tapered ends pointing in the direction of flight. The victim was down on the floor by the baseboard and managed to struggle back to her feet. Small, elongated drops on the wall are not the usual cast-off blood that Scarpetta is accustomed to seeing when a victim has been repeatedly beaten or stabbed and blood has flown off the weapon as it is swung through the air.

The point of origin is what appears to be a violent struggle in the living room, and Scarpetta envisions punching, grabbing, feet sliding and perhaps kicking and clawing, resulting in a bloody mess-but not thousands of drops of blood cast great distances from the swings of a weapon. Possibly, there was no weapon, Scarpetta ponders, at least not at this stage of the assault. Maybe early on, after the assailant came through the front door, the only weapon was a fist. Possibly, the assailant did not assume he would need a weapon, and then he lost control of the situation quickly.

Dr. Lanier glances toward the back of the house. "Eric, go on and make sure everything's secure. We'll be right in."

"What do you know about the victim?" Scarpetta asks Detective Clark. "What do you know about any of this?"

"Not much." He flips back several pages in a notepad. "Name's Rebecca Milton, thirty-six-year-old white female. All we really know at this time is she rents this house, and her boyfriend stopped by around twelve-thirty to take her to lunch. She doesn't answer the door, so he lets himself in and finds her."

"Door unlocked?" Dr. Lanier asks.

"Yes. He finds her body and calls the police."

"Then he identified her," Scarpetta says, getting up from her squatting position, her knees aching.

Clark hesitates.

"How good a look did he get?" Scarpetta doesn't trust visual identifications, and one should never assume that a victim found inside a residence is the person who lived there.

"Not sure," Clark replies. "My guess is he didn't stay in that bedroom long. You'll see when you get there. She's in bad shape, real bad shape. But Robillard seems to think the victims Rebecca Milton, the lady who lives here."

Dr. Lanier frowns. "How the hell would Robillard know?"

"She lives two houses down."

"Who does?" Scarpetta asks, panning the living room like a camera.

"Robillard lives right over there." Detective Clark points toward the street. "Two houses down."

"Jesus God," Dr. Lanier says. "How weird is that? And she didn't hear anything, see anything?"

"It's the middle of the day. She was out on the street like the rest of us."

The house is that of a neat person with a reasonably good income and expensive tastes, Scarpetta notes. Oriental rugs are machine-made but handsome, and to the left of the front door is a cherry entertainment center with an elaborate sound system and large-screen television. Bright Cajun paintings hanging on the walls are joyous in their loud, primary colors and primitive depictions of fish, people, water and trees. Rebecca Milton, if she is the victim, loved art and life. In whimsical frames are photographs of a tan woman with shiny black hair, a bright smile and a slim body. In several other photographs she is in a boat or standing on a pier with another woman, also with dark hair, who looks enough like her to be her sister.

"We're sure she lived alone?" Scarpetta asks.

"It appears she was alone when she got attacked," Clark says, scanning pages in his notepad.

"But we don't know that for a fact."

He shrugs. "No ma'am. We don't know much of anything for a fact at the moment."

"I'm just wondering, because many of these pictures are of two women-two women who seem to have a close relationship. And a number of the photographs were taken inside this house or in what appears to be on the front porch or perhaps in the backyard." She points out the hair swipes near the baseboard and interprets them. "Right here, she went down, or someone did, and whoever it was, the person was bleeding sufficiently for her hair to be bloody…"

"Yeah, well, she's got a big-time head injury. I mean, her face is smashed up bad," Clark offers.

Straight ahead is the dining room, with a centered antique walnut table and six matching chairs. The hutch is old, and behind its glass doors are dishes with gold around the rims. Beyond, through an open doorway, is the kitchen, and it does not appear that the killer or the victim moved in this direction, but off to the right of the living room, the pursuit continuing through a blue-carpeted hallway and ending in a bedroom that faces the front yard.

Blood is everywhere. It has dried a dark red, but some areas of the carpet are so soaked that the blood is still damp. Scarpetta pauses at the end of the hallway and examines blood droplets on the paneled wall. One drop is round, very light red inside and very dark around the rim. Surrounding it is a spray of other droplets, some almost too small to see.

"Do we know if she was stabbed?" Scarpetta turns around and asks Clark, who is hanging back at the beginning of the hallway, busy with a video camera.

Dr. Lanier has already walked inside the bedroom. He appears in the doorway and looks grimly at her. "She's been stabbed, all right," he replies in a hard voice. "About thirty or forty times."

"Along the wall here are sneeze or cough patterns of blood," Dr. Scarpetta tells him. "You can tell because the dark-rimmed drops here, here, and here"-she points them out-"indicate bubbles. Sometimes you see that when a persons bled into the airway or lungs. Or she may just have had blood in her mouth."

Scarpetta walks to the left edge of the bedroom door, where there is only a small amount of blood. Her eyes follow finger smears of whoever grabbed the door frame, and more drips on the carpet that continue through the doorway onto the hardwood floor. Her view of the body is blocked by Dr. Lanier, Eric and Nic Robillard. Scarpetta walks in and shuts the door behind her without touching any bloody surface, including the knob.

Nic sits on the back of her heels, a thirty-five-millimeter camera gripped in her gloved hands, her forearms resting on her knees.

If she's happy to see Scarpetta, she makes no sign of it. Sweat rolls down her neck, disappearing into the dark green Zachary Police Department polo shirt tucked in khaki cargo pants. Nic gets up and moves to one side so Scarpetta can approach the dead body.

"She's got really weird stab wounds," Nic comments. "The temperature of the room when I got here was seventy degrees."

Dr. Lanier inserts a long chemical thermometer under the body's arm. He leans close to the body, his eyes moving up and down it, taking his time. Scarpetta vaguely recognizes the woman as one she saw in some of the photographs scattered throughout the living room.

It isn't easy to tell. Her hair is matted with dried blood, her face swollen and deformed by contusions, cuts and smashed bones, the degree of tissue reaction to injuries consistent with her having survived for a while. Scarpetta touches an arm. The body is warm as in life. Rigor mortis hasn't begun, nor has livor mortis-or the settling of the blood due to gravity once circulation stops.

Dr. Lanier removes the thermometer, reads it and says, "Body temp's ninety-six."

"She's not been dead long at all," Scarpetta says. "Yet the condition of the blood in the living room, hallway and even some in here suggests the attack occurred hours ago."

"Probably the head injury is what got her, but it took a little while," Dr. Lanier says, gently palpating the back of the head. "Fractures. You get the back of your head smashed against a masonry plaster wall, and you're talking serious injuries."

Scarpetta isn't ready to comment on the cause of death, but she does agree that the victim suffered severe blunt-force trauma to her head. If the stab wounds cut or completely severed a major artery, such as the carotid, death would have occurred in minutes. This is unlikely-impossible, really-since it appears the woman survived for a while. Scarpetta sees no arterial spatter pattern. The woman may still have been barely alive when her boyfriend found her at 12:30 p.m. and was dead by the time the rescue squad arrived.

It is several minutes past 1:30 now.

The victim is dressed in pale blue satin pajamas, the bottoms intact, the top ripped open. Her belly, breasts, chest and neck are clustered with stab wounds that measure sixteen millimeters-or approximately three-quarters of an inch-with both ends blunt, one end slightly narrower than the other. Those injuries that are superficial indicate she wasn't stabbed with an ordinary knife. Almost in the center of those shallow wounds is an area of tissue bridging that indicates the weapon had some type of gap at the tip, or perhaps was a tool that had two stabbing surfaces, each of them a slightly different thickness and length.

"Now that's strange as hell," Dr. Lanier says, his head bent close to the body as he moves a magnifying lens over wounds. "Not any normal knife I've ever seen. How about you?" He looks at Scarpetta. No.

The wounds were made at various angles, some of them V- or Y-shaped due to twisting of the blade, which is common in stab injuries. Some wounds gape, others are button-hole-like slits, depending on whether the incisions are in line with the elastic fibers of the skin or cut across them.

Scarpetta's gloved fingers gently separate the margins of a wound. Again, she puzzles over the area of uncut skin stretching almost across the middle. She looks closely through a lens, trying to imagine what sort of weapon was used. Gently gathering the pajama top together, she lines up holes in the satin with wounds, trying to get some idea where the clothing was when the woman was stabbed. Three buttons are missing from the torn pajama top. Scarpetta spots them on the floor. Two buttons dangle by threads.

When she arranges the pajama top neatly over the chest, the way it would be were the victim standing, of course the holes don't line up with the stab wounds at all, and there are more holes in the satin than there are wounds. She counts thirty-eight holes and twenty-two wounds. Overkill, to say the least-overkill that is typical in lust murders, but also typical when the assailant and victim know each other.

"Anything?" Dr. Lanier asks her.

Scarpetta is still lining up holes and is getting somewhere. "It appears that her top was bunched up above her breasts when she was stabbed. See?" She moves up the top, which is so stained with blood, very little of the satin looks blue. "Some of the holes go through three layers of fabric. That's why there are more holes than wounds."

"So he shoved up her top before he stabbed her or while he was stabbing her? And then tore it open?"

"I'm not sure," Dr. Scarpetta replies. It's always so difficult to reconstruct, and a much more precise job will require uninterrupted hours under a good light in the morgue. "Let's turn her just a bit and check her back."

She and Dr. Lanier reach across the body and hold it by the left arm. They pull her over, but not all the way, and blood runs out of wounds. There are at least six stab wounds on her upper back and a long cut to the side of her neck.

"So she's running and he's stabbing. She's in front of him, at least at some point." It is Eric who deduces this as he and Nic return with several lamps and plug them in.

"Maybe," is all Scarpetta has to say about it.

"One smear on a wall in the hallway looks like she may have been pushed up or knocked up against it. About midway in the hallway. Maybe he shoved her against it and stabbed her in the back, and then she got away and ran in here," Nic proposes.

"Maybe," Scarpetta says again, and she and Dr. Lanier gently lower the body to the floor. "This much I can tell you: Her pajama top was in disarray when some of these stab wounds to her chest and belly were inflicted."

"The pushed-up top suggests a sexual motive," Eric says.

"This is a sexual murder with tremendous rage," Scarpetta replies. "Even if she wasn't raped."

"She might not have been." Dr. Lanier bends close to the body, collecting trace evidence with forceps. "Fibers," he comments. "Could be from the pajamas. Despite what people think, rape isn't always involved. Some of these bastards can't do it, can't get it up. Or they'd rather masturbate."

Scarpetta asks Nic, "She was your neighbor. You're sure this is Rebecca and not the other woman in the photographs? The two women are very similar in appearance."

"It's Rebecca. The other woman is her sister."

"Lives with her?" Dr. Lanier asks.

"No. Rebecca lived alone."

"For now, that will be a pending identification until we can be sure with dental records or some other means," Dr. Lanier remarks as Eric takes photographs, using a six-inch plastic ruler as a scale, arranging it next to whatever he shoots.

"I'll get on it." Nic stares without blinking at the dead woman's battered, bloody face, the eyes dully staring out from swollen lids. "We weren't friends at all, never socialized, but I saw her on the street, doing yardwork, walking her dog…"

"What dog?" Scarpetta looks sharply at her.

"She has a yellow lab, a puppy, maybe eight months old. I'm not sure, but he's not fully grown and was a Christmas present. I think from her boyfriend."

"Tell Detective Clark to make sure the police go out and look for her dog," Dr. Lanier says. "And while you're at it, tell him to make sure they send everybody they've got to keep this place secure. We're going to be here a while."

Dr. Lanier hands Scarpetta a packet of cotton-tipped swabs, a small bottle of sterile water and a sterile tube. She unscrews the caps of both the bottle and the tube. Dipping a swab in the sterile water, she swabs the breasts for saliva, the cotton tips turning red with blood. Swabs of her vagina, rectum, of every orifice can wait until the body's at the morgue. She begins to collect trace evidence.

"I'm going outside," Nic says.

"Someone needs to set up more lights in here," Dr. Laniers voice rises.

"Best I can do is bring in lamps, whatever else is around the house," Eric replies.

"That would help. Photograph them in situ before you move them, Eric, or some goddamn defense attorney will say the killer carried lamps into the bedroom…"

"A lot of hairs, dog hairs maybe, maybe from her dog…" Scarpetta is saying as she gently shakes forceps inside a transparent plastic evidence bag. "What? A yellow lab?"

Nic is gone.

"That's what she said. A yellow lab puppy," Dr. Lanier replies, the two of them alone with the body.

"The dog has to be found for a number of reasons, not the least is out of decency, to make sure the poor thing is all right," Scarpetta says. "But also for hair comparison. I can't be sure, but now I think I'm seeing quite a variety of animal hairs."

"So am I. Sticking to blood, mostly here." He points a bloodstained gloved finger at the woman's naked upper body. "Not on her hands or in her hair, though, which is where you might expect to find animal hairs if the origin of them is the floor, the carpet, here inside her residence."

Scarpetta is silent. She secures another hair in the forceps and shakes it loose inside a bag that must have at least twenty hairs in it now, the origin of all of them the dried blood on the belly.

Out on the street, someone has started whistling loudly. Voices are calling, "Here, Basil! Come, Basil!"

The front door opens and shuts repeatedly, the sounds of feet moving in the living room, the dining room, cops talking, and then a woman's voice, a woman crying and screaming.

"No! No! No! That can't be!"

"Ma'am, just show us in one of these pictures."

Scarpetta recognizes Detective Clark's voice. He is loud and trying not to sound upset, but the more the woman screams, the louder he gets.

"I'm sorry, but you can't go in there."

"She's my sister!" 1 m really sorry.

"Oh, God, oh, God."

Then the voices are quiet, and conversation recedes into a background murmur. A few flies begin to stray into the house, drawn by the scent of death, the high-pitched droning straining Scarpetta's nerves.

"Tell them to stop opening the goddamn door!" She looks up from her kneeling position, sweat rolling down her face, her knees in terrible pain.

"Jesus. What's going on out there?" Dr. Lanier is angry, too.

"Heeerrrre, Basil! Come on, boy!"

Whistling.

"Yo! Basil! Where are you?"

The front door opens and shuts again.

"That's it!" Dr. Lanier gets to his feet.

He walks out of the bedroom, yanking off his bloody gloves. Scarpetta removes another animal hair, this one black, and places it inside an evidence bag. The hairs adhered to the body when the blood was wet. They are adhering to the belly, breasts and chest but not to the bottoms of the woman's bare feet, which are also smeared with dried blood, not from injuries, but from where she stepped.

Scarpetta's breath is hot and loud behind her surgical mask, sweat stinging her eyes as she waves off flies and goes over the woman's face with a lens, looking for more hairs, every crack in dried blood magnified and more horrible, every split and cut in the skin more ragged and gaping. Flecks of paint adhere to blood, possibly transferred from the living room wall. The variety of animal hairs recovered from the body supplies Scarpetta with an important piece of information.

"We found the dog." Nic is standing in the doorway.

Scarpetta is startled back to a different dimension, one that isn't a hideous, dry red landscape behind a magnifying glass.

"Basil, her dog."

"That's not where most of these hairs are from. I'm finding dozens, different kinds, different colors. Dog hairs, possibly. Much coarser than cat hairs. But I'm not positive."

Dr. Lanier walks back inside the room, brushing past Nic, snapping on fresh gloves.

"What I'm seeing here makes me think the hairs were transferred from the perpetrator-perhaps from his clothing-directly to her upper body. Maybe if he got on top of her."

She pulls the pajama bottoms down an inch, just far enough to expose the indentations left by their elastic waistband. She sits back on her heels and stares, then takes off her mask.

"Why would someone get on top of her and not take her pajama bottoms off?" Dr. Lanier puzzles. "Why would someone transfer all these dog or doglike hairs to her naked upper body and nowhere else? And why the hell would anybody have all these dog hairs all the hell over them to begin with?"

"We found Basil," Nic says again. "Hiding under a house across the street. Just cowering and shaking. He must have run off when the killer left, I guess. Who's going to take care of him, of Basil?"

"I expect the boyfriend will," Dr. Lanier replies. "If not, Eric loves dogs."

He tears open two packets containing sterile, plasticized homicide sheets. While Scarpetta spreads one on the floor, Dr. Lanier and Eric grip the body under the arms and behind the knees, lifting it, centering it on the sheet. They spread the second sheet on top of her, rolling up the edges, wrapping her like a mummy so no trace evidence will be added or lost.