Dust

36

I want to be alone with the dead and alone with my thoughts.

I walk over to the officer in charge of the mapping station set up on a sturdy bright yellow tripod. He’s packing a laptop computer and an Ethernet cable, the system on pause, its oscillating mirror and rapidly pulsing laser beam quiet and still.

“Have you got this?” I indicate the kitchen I’m heading toward, assuming he’s already captured its images and measurements.

“How you doing, Dr. Scarpetta? Randall Taylor with Watertown.”

He’s got a wide, tired face with thinning hair that’s mottled gray and combed back, a pair of reading glasses perched low on his nose. In the battle dress of faded blue cargo pants and a matching shirt with the sleeves rolled up, he reminds me of an old warrior who has learned new ways of doing his job but isn’t eager anymore. Cops, even feisty ones, get worn down like a river stone and he has a smooth and easy way about him, unlike Marino who is a product of nature protecting itself like a sea urchin or a briar patch.

“We met last year at the dinner when the chief retired,” Randall Taylor says. “I wouldn’t expect you to remember.”

“I hope your former chief is enjoying a little peace and quiet.”

“They’ve moved to Florida.”

“What part? I grew up in Miami.”

“A little north of West Palm, Vero Beach. I’m angling for him to invite me down. Come January, I’ll be begging.”

“What’s been done?” I ask.

“I’ve gotten multiple scans that I’ll stitch together with point to surface, line of sight measurements and blood trajectory analysis,” Taylor explains. “So you’ve basically got each entire scene in volumized 3-D, which I’ll get to you as soon as I’m back at my office.”

“That would be helpful.”

“I worked the other room first, just finishing up in here.”

“Am I going to be in your way?” I ask.

“I’m all set but I wanted to make sure you didn’t need anything else.”

“What about stringing?”

I want to know if he’s going to use the tried-and-true method of attaching strings to blood drops and spatter to determine points of convergence. It’s a reliable mathematical way to reconstruct where the assailant and victim were in relation to each other when the blows or injuries were inflicted.

“Not yet. You don’t really need to with this.” He pats the scanner with a gloved hand.

It’s a matter of opinion but I’m not going to tell him that.

“Obvious arterial spatter patterns, fairly obvious point of origin,” he says. “The victim here in the kitchen was standing, the other two sitting, not complicated scenes except you wonder how someone took out three people like that. They must have happened really fast. But still, nobody heard anything?”

“If you cut through someone’s trachea, he can’t scream. He can’t speak.”

“The two in there” — he indicates the open steel door — “dead at their desks like that.” He snaps his blue-gloved fingers and the sound is dull and rubbery. “I’ve been careful not to touch the bodies or get too close, waiting until you got here. They’re exactly like we found them.”

“Do you know what time?”

“I wasn’t first, but from what I gather?” Randall Taylor lifts his left arm and looks at his watch. “Maybe two hours ago when Concord first arrived, following up on the envelope full of cash they found in the park, which in my opinion was in Lombardi’s desk drawer. You’ll see when you get in there that everything was rummaged through and in one of the drawers was a withdrawal slip for ten grand from two days ago, Monday. Maybe robbery’s the motive but I agree with what I overheard you talking about. Whoever it is didn’t come here to kill everyone. Something went haywire.”

“And no one else on the property knows what might have happened.” It’s a point I can’t get past.

“You and me are on the same wavelength.” He selects a menu on the touch screen to power off the system. “I’m guessing nobody wants to be involved. Each person was waiting for the other to be the one who found them.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Everywhere I look I’m seeing computer screens and cameras.” He walks over to a wall socket and unplugs the battery-charging station. “You telling me nobody saw the guy running? You telling me nobody at least tried calling here to see what was going on? Like hello, is everything all right over there? That’s just strange as hell. And then Concord made it easy by rolling up and finding the bodies. What if they hadn’t? Who was going to call nine-one-one?”

“It seems inconsistent with human nature to look the other way if you spot someone fleeing the property, I agree.” I’m noncommittal about it.

I’ve learned the hard way to be careful about my opinions, which tend to get circulated like the gospel truth.

“This whole place gives me a bad feeling.” He loosens screws and lifts the scanner off the tripod and carries it over to a large foam-lined transport container. “Like it’s way too quiet and empty and nobody sees or hears a thing, what I associate with businesses that are fronts and neighborhoods where everybody’s guilty of something.”

I pull up my synthetic white hood to cover my hair and find a safe spot to set down my field case near the kitchen, then I move inside, careful where I step. Dark red dried blood is streaked, dripped, and spurted in waves on appliances, cabinets, and the floor, and the dead woman is between the refrigerator and the counter in a dark, stagnant puddle that’s thick in the middle and separating at the edges. I smell blood breaking down and overcooked coffee.

She’s flat on her back. Her legs are straight, her arms folded at her waist, and I know right away she didn’t die like that.

I look at her for a long, careful moment, pushing thoughts out of my head, letting her body tell me the true story it knows.

I’m conscious of the ripe smell of blood. Where it’s dried and coagulating it’s dark red turning rusty brown, viscous and sticky, and the message I’m getting isn’t right for someone stumbling as she hemorrhages, finally collapsing on the floor. The killer turned her pockets inside out and he did something more. I open my field case and get out a Sharpie. I find the sheet of labels and fill in one with the date and my initials. I stick it on a plastic ruler I’ll use as a scale, and I get my camera.

She’s tall, approximately five-foot-eight, with fine features, high cheekbones, and a strong jaw, and her dark hair is cropped short and she has multiple piercings in her ears. Her eyes are barely open, dark blue and getting dull. The irises will fade and cloud as death continues its destructive changes, coldly stiffening, what seems an indignant resistance at first. Then an escalation of breaking down that always strikes me as the flesh forlornly giving up.

The injuries to her neck gape widely, and her navy blue khaki slacks and white leather sneakers are streaked with drops of blood, some elongated, some round because they fell at different angles. I’m not surprised that her palms are bloody. It’s what I expect with a severed carotid, and the top of her left index finger is cut at the first knuckle, almost through the joint. I envision her grabbing her neck to stop the bleeding, which wasn’t possible, and while her hands were there, her attacker slashed again, almost cutting off her fingertip.

What’s completely wrong is blood has soaked into the back of her kelly green button-up fleece, especially into the back of her collar. There’s no blood in front, not a single drop that bled from the deep wounds in her neck. But I notice smudges, most of them around the buttons, and the inner cuff of the right sleeve is saturated almost up to the elbow, and this isn’t what I should see if she was wearing the fleece when she was standing up and someone cut her throat.

As I study the coagulating puddle that reaches from under her back to some five feet away I easily deduce that this is where she was on the floor when she bled out. But originally she wasn’t in this position. Somebody moved her after she was dead and I take photographs to capture the exact position she’s in. Next I lift her arms and check her hands, strong ones, large ones, a gothic silver ring with an amethyst on the right middle finger, a plaited black leather bracelet on her right wrist. Rigor has begun in the small muscles and her temperature is tepid on the way to cool because she has very little body fat and has lost most of her blood.

There are two incisions to her throat. One begins on the left side of her neck below her ear, terminating in approximately three inches, slicing through her jaw, and the bone shows white against red tissue that is drying. I notice a peculiar wide, shallow cut with abraded edges, the skin peeled in places like a wood shaving, and it’s not something I’ve seen before. It parallels the deep incision from its beginning to where it terminates like a ragged path running along a road. I have no idea what made it. The weapon is an unusual shape or perhaps the tip of the blade is bent.

The second wound ended her life swiftly, an incision with the same strange peeled shallow cut running parallel to it, both beginning at the right side of her throat. This second fatal wound is deepest where a sharp sturdy blade first went in below the right jaw, then moved horizontally across the throat in a neat, forceful slice, severing her carotid artery, her strap muscles, and airway, cutting all the way through to her spine. I stand up.

I take in every inch of the open kitchen, getting a perspective of the two granite countertops across from each other, the one closest to the front door and the other on either side of the stovetop and the refrigerator. I note a white bakery box and inside it are two cupcakes that look fresh and smell like rich mocha and chocolate, from a food shop on Main Street in downtown Concord, based on the logo. Maybe Lombardi bought them on his way to the commuter rail station when he was picking up his visitor and I think of the three or four cupcake wrappers on one plate and the one used napkin on the sunporch. I wonder if one person ate that many cupcakes. If so, it was a lot of sugar.

Near the bakery box is a stainless-steel coffeemaker, the type that has a tank instead of a carafe. I open the lid, feeling the heat of coffee that smells strongly bitter. The gold filter is full of grounds and I check the gauge in back. There are four cups remaining, and I think of the two mugs on the table inside a space where people could have a private conversation that couldn’t be spied on or overheard.

I look across the room and don’t see coffee cups on the other desks, and there are none in the sink. I open the dishwasher and there’s nothing inside but a spoon. I try drawers and discover several are faux. Others are empty. In one are folded dishcloths that look new and unused, and in another are four place settings of silverware. I look for sharp knives but don’t find any. I pull out the trash compactor and there’s not even a bag inside.

In glass door cabinets above the dishwasher are stacks of dishes, simple white china, four place settings each, and more mugs like the ones on the sunporch. Moving to one side of the refrigerator, staying clear of blood near the handle and on the floor, I open the door. I find blood on the inner edge of it that’s also smeared on the gasket.

Coffee cream, soymilk, bottles of water, both sparkling and flat, and a take-out foam container, and I push open the lid. Inside is a leftover gyro wrapped in deli paper. It doesn’t look fresh, possibly from many days ago. Condiments and low-fat salad dressings are in the door, and inside the freezer I find ice cubes that look old and a container of grocery-store chili that’s dated October 10.

She came into the kitchen for a reason, possibly for coffee or a bottle of water, and I retrieve the UV light from my scene case. I find the switch for the kitchen lights and turn them off, then I squat by the body. I rest my weight on the back of my heels, looking again at the blood and the spread open wounds of her neck, and I turn on the UV light and the lens glows purple as I direct the black light at her head and move down, checking for trace evidence and instantly the same neon colors fluoresce. Bloodred, emerald green, and bluish purple.

The fleece she has on shimmers and then turns kelly green again when I switch off the UV light. A dusting of the same residue I saw this morning and it’s only on the fleece, and my misgivings grow about who this person is and how it’s possible she’s dressed this way. I collect samples with adhesive stubs. Then I take off my gloves. I reach Lucy on my cell phone and hear a TV in the background, Spanish, what sounds like the Dish Latino Network.

“Where are you?” I ask.

“Checking out the barn. There are monitors in here and cameras, nanny-cams for the horses.” She’s suggesting that the killer would have been picked up by security cameras if anybody was watching.

“Are you alone?”

“The housekeeper’s in here sitting by herself, watching TV. Gracias por su ayuda. Hasta luego,” Lucy calls out. “And I’m on my way to get the server before the Feds show up. Benton just drove by so they’re probably not far behind.”

“I need you to drop off evidence to Ernie and tell him I want it looked at right away.”

“Something good?” Lucy asks and she’s outside the barn. I can hear her breathing as she jogs.

“There’s nothing good about any of this” is what I say as I hear the familiar throaty rumble of a powerful sports car in the parking area.

The engine stops and silence returns and I imagine Benton getting out of his Porsche. He’ll walk around for a while before he comes inside.

Marino’s footsteps are heavy and widely spaced, never fast but with purpose like a steady train coming. Then he’s on the other side of the counter holding a fingerprint dusting kit.

“He came up behind her and inflicted this injury first.” I point to the incision on the left side of her neck and jaw.

“I’ve not dusted in here or the back offices,” he says. “I didn’t want to do that before you were done.”

He knows the routine. We’ve been doing this for more than twenty years.

“So far I’m not seeing any patent prints. No bloody ones and no footprints,” I let him know.

“He had to have stepped in blood. Benton just got here and is looking around outside.”

“I’m not seeing any indication the killer stepped in blood. The two cuts to her throat were in rapid succession and then he may have gotten out of the way and let her hemorrhage to death. Within minutes she would have been unconscious and gone into shock.” I continue glancing at the windows on the other side of the room as if I can see through the drawn shades and I think of what Lucy predicted.

Ed Granby will show up and if he does we’ll know his special interest. To protect people with money, she said while we were driving here.

“In scenes this bloody usually they step in it.” Marino has his flashlight out, shining it obliquely over the floor, and thick blood glows deep red. “It’s hard not to.”

“There’s no sign he did and no sign anything was cleaned up. There’s a partial tread pattern here.” I point it out. “But that’s from her stepping in her own blood, possibly after she was cut the first time.”

“Haley Swanson’s SUV is still parked in the projects where his uncle lives,” Marino says. “All four of his tires are flat. Maybe the same assholes doing car breaks and vandalism around there. His expensive Audi SUV is parked there often, the uncle told Machado, about a sixty-thousand-dollar SUV if Swanson got it new. I have a feeling he was doing more than visiting his uncle several times a week. Maybe mixed up with shitbags dealing drugs over there, some of the really bad designer drugs killing people around here.”

“The uncle doesn’t know where Swanson is?”

“He said he doesn’t.” Marino clips the flashlight to his belt. “But Swanson headed out around eight this morning on foot, said he needed to be somewhere and he was going to take the train. I guess we know for sure who Lombardi picked up at the commuter rail station here in Concord.”

“If you could get two thermometers from my field case?” I ask. “You can help me take photographs and there’s a notepad in there, too. She was standing upright, facing the refrigerator, holding the door open, when he attacked her from behind.”

“How can you tell about the refrigerator?” He bends over my field case on the floor. “How do you know she had the door open?”

“The blood here.” I indicate drips near the handle. “This area is in line with her neck and chin if she was standing with the door open when the left side of her neck was cut. Blood caught the edge of the door, which wouldn’t have been possible if it was shut, and then the blood was transferred to the gasket when someone closed the door.”

“Who did that?”

“I can’t tell you who.”

“You think maybe she shut the door after he cut her the first time?” Marino moves next to me, holding his camera, handing me the thermometers.

“She might have. I just know that someone did.”

The storm door in the entryway opens and Lucy is here. I give her the package with the adhesive stubs in it and she stuffs it into a big pocket on the leg of her flight suit.

“Benton’s walking around and the others can’t be far behind,” I say to her.

“I’ll be out of here in ten minutes max.”

“He didn’t come with them. He came alone. That’s my point,” I add.

“To get here first,” she says and she knows what it means.

Then she’s gone through the open steel door, jogging toward the back offices where what she wants is in a closet. It’s past three now and I’m listening for cars pulling up. I’m looking for Benton and I’m waiting for the arrival of the rest of them. He isn’t acting as if he’s part of them and I’m reminded of the way he was talking when we were following the railroad tracks. He talked about the FBI as if he wasn’t FBI and right now he’s not. Benton is here to solve these homicides and Granby is coming with a very different agenda in mind, one I certainly don’t trust.

I unbutton the top of the dark green fleece and tuck a thermometer under the arm. I set the second thermometer on top of a counter.

“It could have been a reflex when she was ambushed by the attack.” I measure the wound on the left side of her neck. “It may be as you suggested, that he came up behind her and she turned at the same time he sliced, missing major vessels, and the blade went through her jaw. Maybe she pushed the refrigerator door shut or fell against it. That incision is three and a half inches long, from left to right and upward.”

Marino squints as he scribbles on the notepad. He pats himself down for his glasses as if he can’t remember which pocket. He finds them, cleans the lenses on his shirt, and he puts them on.

“There are shallow incisions that run parallel, strange ones with abraded edges and some of the skin is peeled back.” I give him the measurements. “I have no idea unless the tip of the blade is bent.”

He looks up from his notes, his eyes magnified. “Why would he use a knife with a bent blade?”

“Maybe it got that way because of something he did with it. I’ve seen acutely bent blade tips in stabbings when the blade tip strikes bone.”

“Was anybody stabbed?”

“She wasn’t.”

“Didn’t look to me the other two were,” Marino says.

“I haven’t gotten there yet.”

“There’s no blood on their backs, no indication they have other injuries. I think he cut their throats and that was it,” he says.

“That was enough.”

“Yeah, no kidding.”

“This second incision is five inches and one-quarter and I’m thinking it was inflicted from in front. He was facing her.”

I show him the deep cut on her left index finger, across the first knuckle.

“Like this.” I get up to show him. “The first incision is when my back’s to him and I’m turning around.”

I act it out.

“I hate it when you treat yourself like an anatomical doll. It gives me the creeps,” Marino says.

“Then I’m going to grab the left side of my neck while drops of blood are falling straight down, perpendicular to the floor.” I show him. “Those drops are perfectly round like the ones close to the refrigerator door and on the tops of her shoes. Now I’m facing my attacker and he cuts again, cutting my left index finger. I’m still upright but moving this way.”

I step to the right of the refrigerator.

“Then I’m facing forward, toward the counter, possibly leaning against it, my hands on my neck.”

“Maybe he held her there.” Marino looks at the waves of arterial blood on the cabinets. “Maybe he had his hand on her back until she started getting too weak to run or struggle. I’m thinking he might have held the other two down. They’re bleeding to death at their desks and he pushes his hand against their backs so they can’t get up. It would only take a few minutes. It would explain why there’s blood only on their desks and under them. Most people would try to get up but they didn’t.”

“We’ll see when I look at them,” I reply. “Here’s the arterial pattern on the cupboard, and a mist of it on the glass from her strangling on her blood, forcibly exhaling it because her trachea is severed. She’s aspirating blood. It’s accumulating in her airway and lungs and now she’s going down and here’s the pattern on the cabinets beneath the stove and the sink.”

I point out waves of blood drips, the crests and troughs from blood spurting in rhythm to the beating of her heart. Large drops of dried blood with long tails trickle down, across a cabinet, up and down and up, getting weaker and lower.

“She’s on her knees,” I continue, “explaining the spatter here on the floor from blood dripping into blood and the blood soaked into the knees and lower area of her pants legs. And this puddle indicates where she died but not in this position.”

I look up as Lucy walks swiftly through the front office, carrying a tower server through the entryway, pushing through the doors with her foot. Marino moves the plastic ruler, using it as a scale in photographs he takes, and I show him smeared areas of blood on the floor that tell me the most important part of the story as I hear the loud rumble of Lucy’s SUV and then she’s driving away fast.

“Blood already had begun to clot when she was moved.” I point out a red outlined circle and a smear, a distinctive pattern shaped like a big tadpole. “What you’re seeing is a drop of blood that was coagulating when something was dragged over it and that happened after some time had passed. There are more of these smeared clots. Here and here and here.”

He begins taking photographs of them, placing the labeled scale next to each one.

“I wonder if you’re picking up on the same thing I am,” he says. “The way her arms are resting on her belly like she’s sleeping. It reminds me of Gail Shipton.”

“It’s similar.”

“Someone posing the body in a peaceful position. Almost like he felt bad about it.”

“He looked her in the face when he cut her throat a second time. He didn’t feel bad about it,” I reply. “I think you’re going to find this isn’t her fleece.” I remove the thermometer from under her arm, noting her black padded push-up bra.

Her chest has a wide circumference but her breasts are small.

“Eighty-point-six.” I pick up the thermometer from the counter. “It’s a seventy-one degrees in here. She’s been dead at least three hours, probably closer to four.”

“What do you mean it’s not her fleece?” Marino frowns.

“I think she was dressed in it after she was dead. It has what appears to be the same residue that fluoresces in UV. It’s all over the fleece, and the blood pattern on it is inconsistent with her injuries and the way she would have bled out.”

I unbutton the fleece all the way and turn her partially on her side, her body leaning heavily against my Tyvek-covered thigh. Livor has begun to form on her back but is far from set. When I press my finger into her flesh it easily blanches, the same way it does when someone is alive. I notice her well-defined muscularity. And when I rest her on her back again I unbutton her pants and unzip the fly. Underneath are women’s black panties. And then I touch her face with my finger and makeup is transferred to my glove. I ask Marino to open one of the kits I brought with me.

“There should be some towelettes in there,” I say to him, and he hands me one.

I wipe her cheeks and upper lip and the stubble wouldn’t have been noticeable because her face is close shaven and covered with layers of foundation and powder. Her chest and lower abdomen have been waxed, I suspect, and when I pull down her panties the answer is there.

“You got to be shitting me.” Marino stares.

“A male taking female hormones and the killer dressed him in his own bloody fleece.”

“What the hell?”

“Switching clothes because he needed to disguise himself as best he could in case he was seen somewhere. The suspect running through the park at around eleven…,” I begin to remind him. “And you wouldn’t do that if you came here intending to murder people. He came here for another reason and something went terribly wrong and now he’s got to escape.”

“Shit. The black hoodie with Marilyn Monroe on it, which is what Rooney said Haley Swanson had on this morning when he talked to him in the projects. Shit!” Marino exclaims in astonishment. “He kills Swanson and then puts his damn hoodie on? It would have been bloody as hell. What kind of fucking lunatic would do something like that?”

“Locate a photograph of Haley Swanson as quickly as you possibly can,” I tell him as the storm door in the entryway opens. “We need to see if that’s who this is.”

“Hell yeah, that’s who it is,” Marino says and he’s already stepping away to make a call, probably to Machado.

Benton is walking across the room, heading toward me, as I hear the distant noise of another vehicle or maybe more than one along the driveway.

“They’re here,” he says simply.

“Do they know you are?” I ask as he reaches us and looks at the body and the blood.

“They’re about to,” Benton says.