A Blind Eye (15 page)

T
he snow around the Holmes farmhouse had been trampled to slush. Yellow police tape rippled in the late-afternoon breeze. Four unmarked FBI vans dotted the driveway. Half a dozen orange power cables ran from the Honda generator chugging away on the porch through the front door into the parlor, where the FBI team had set up shop.

“Looks a lot bigger in the daylight,” Dougherty said.

“All I remember from that night was this tiny purple light in the distance. So small it was like a match in deep space.”

“You know what I remember?” She paused and looked to her right. They’d removed the front of the shed and torn up the rest of the floor. All that remained was a hollow depression. A dozen little white flags, whose red numbers marked precisely where this piece or that piece of evidence had been found. “I remember how hard you were to move,” she said. “How it felt like I was trying to carry a car or something.” She looked over at the house and back. “Gets me to wondering how she lugged the three of them out here and then wrapped them up in a nice little package and all. I can maybe see the boys. But the husband? I could barely move you thirty feet, with you trying to help.”

“It’s the truck that bothers
me,
” Corso said.

“What about it?”

“I keep trying to get a picture of what the scene looked like. So…what? She kills the family, hides the bodies in the shed, then goes back inside, packs up everything in the house, loads it on a one-ton truck all by herself, then gets behind the wheel and drives off into the sunset?” He shook his head. “No way, José.”

Dougherty folded her arms across her chest and thought about it. “Maybe she had Eldred and the boys load the truck before she offed them,” she said finally.

“Possible,” he conceded. “Or maybe she had help.”

Dougherty laughed. “Probably invited the neighbors over. Mind helping me move old Eldred here? He’s a mite heavy.” She giggled and hid her face with her hands. “Sorry,” she said. “I seem to be getting a little silly here.”

A movement in Dougherty’s peripheral vision pulled her eyes toward the house, where one of the forensic technicians had taken a break from detecting and was making his way in their direction. He was a short little guy with Coke-bottle glasses, wearing the standard black windbreaker with “FBI” in big white letters across the back. He moved carefully, navigating around piles of slush, trying to keep the stuff out of his shoes.

“You Margaret Dougherty?”

“That’s me,” she said.

“We need you to come inside for a minute.”

“What for?”

“We need to take your fingerprints,” he said. He cast a quick glance at Corso. “We’ve got plenty of his,” he said. “And Avalon’s got prints from both the boys. So once we get yours, anything we can’t identify pretty much has to be either the mommy or the daddy.” He smiled. “I hear they weren’t big on entertaining.”

“You can still get fingerprints after fifteen years?” Corso asked.

“Depends on what they’re on,” the little guy said. “On most things, the oil would have dried out by now and blown away. On other surfaces, if they’re not exposed to the elements”—he spread his hands—“anything’s possible.”

Corso looked to Dougherty. “You’ve never been fingerprinted?”

“Nope,” she said.

The little guy took her by the elbow and began to move her toward the house. “Won’t hurt a bit,” he assured her. She looked back over her shoulder at Corso.

“I’m gonna take a little more air,” Corso said. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

They stepped carefully across the field of frozen ruts as they made their way to the porch. “I’m Warren,” the little guy said, offering a hand, as they mounted the stairs.

She stopped in the doorway as a river of images began to flow in her head. For a long moment, she could once again hear the roar of the wind and feel the bite of the cold on her skin. The memory caused her to shudder.

The FBI had moved in. On the left, against the far wall, a series of tables had been set up for use as desks. A trio of agents sat in front of laptop computers, pecking away at their keyboards. Special Agents Fullmer and Dean were seated side by side, each with a cell phone glued to his ear, talking and taking notes at the same time. Half a dozen technicians crawled over the place like ants. Power cables grew off in all directions like orange tendrils.

They stepped over the cables as they made their way to the kitchen, where Warren handed her over to a middle-aged woman named Claire and then disappeared.

Dougherty was still wiping the last of the ink from her fingers when Warren came back through the kitchen door. “We can wait for an official comparison,” Claire said, “but I can tell you right now she’s not a match for what we got from the contact paper.” She picked up the white card upon which she’d rolled Dougherty’s fingerprints, held it by the edge, and handed it to Warren. He brought the card up close to his face and squinted at the impressions. “The exemplars on the paper were all archs and tent archs,” Claire said. “These are all whorls and double loops.”

Warren nodded his agreement. “Have Billy take some pictures of what we got from the contact paper and shoot them off to Washington. Let’s see what the computer has to say on the subject.”

Claire fanned herself with the card as she walked out onto the back porch, only to return a minute later with what must have been Billy, a balding character with a face that spoke of perpetual aggravation. Dougherty watched as the man attached a Nikon digital camera to a short stand, slid the prints under the lens one at a time, and took shots.

Finished, he stowed the gear back in his bag, popped the flash card from the camera, and headed for the computers in the front room. “We’re almost done here,” Warren said. “We got a heck of a good right hand from some contact paper we found out by the fireplace. The glue had dried out, but the impressions were plain as day. Just like they’d been made yesterday.”

“That was what I used to start a fire,” Dougherty said. “It was lining the kitchen drawers.”

“That’s what we figured,” the little guy said. “If they’re not yours—which Claire is right about, they’re not—then they pretty much gotta belong to whoever lined the drawers in the first place, which I’m figuring is most likely the missing mommy.”

He turned to Claire. “I think that’s a wrap,” he said. “Everything we turned is consistent with the lab findings, so why don’t we get everybody packed up and head for the motel.”

Claire rolled her eyes. “Another night at the Timber Inn,” she said. “Be still, my beating heart.”

Warren tried to cheer her up. “We’ll be back home in Madison by noon,” he said.

“If the food doesn’t kill us first,” Claire said, and headed for the porch.

Warren squinted out through the open back door to the snow-covered yard beyond. “They were laid out right there in the backyard someplace,” he said.

“Laid out?”

“The lab estimated they were dead for at least seventy-two hours prior to being wrapped up in plastic. Left outside, probably naked.” He looked myopically around the room. “Everything we’ve found supports that thesis.”

“How’d they figure that?” Dougherty asked.

“The maggots,” he said. “They found a bunch of third instars in the rectal cavities.”

“Third what?”

“Third instars. It’s a stage in maggot development.”

The putrid look on her face seemed to encourage him. “Okay now, this isn’t strictly my field. This would be what a forensic entomologist does, so…you know…I’m just kind of winging it here.” He grinned. “If you’ll forgive me the phrase.” And winked. “So if you take a body and you put it outside, the first things that are going to find it are the flies. Most likely the blowflies and the common house flies are gonna come upon it first. Now as soon as they get there they’re gonna lay masses of eggs in any natural body openings they can get to or in any wounds they find.”

“Eggs?”

“Millions,” he said. “This is where it gets interesting. Depending on the temperature and the species of fly involved, the eggs take anywhere from fifteen to thirty hours to hatch. Most cases somewhere right around twenty hours. So anyway, the eggs hatch into the first-stage maggot.”

“A first instar.”

“Exactly. Okay, so after hatching, they immediately begin to feed on the tissues, and of course they start to grow. Real quick they get too big for the cuticle.” He stopped. “That’s like this little flexible case the maggot lives inside of. They call it a cuticle. Anyway, soon as it grows too big for its cuticle, it makes a new cuticle and then sheds the old one. Most maggots do this three times in their life cycle.”

“First, second, and third instars.”

“Precisely. The first instar usually takes the shortest time. Averages about sixteen hours. The second goes about twenty-three and the third-stage about thirty hours. All in all, you average it out, you find third stage instars, the body’s been there about three days. You find them in the rectal cavity, the body was probably found naked. There’s easier ways to get into a body than crawling up under somebody’s shorts.” He offered her a shy smile. “Did I mention that the bodies had been set on fire? Postmortem. Then probably hosed off before they were packaged.”

“Why would anybody do that?”

He made a “who knows” face. “If I had to guess, I’d say the stiffs were all covered with creepy crawlies, and whoever did it wanted to get rid of them before they moved the bodies. Or…maybe they just liked to burn things. You put the family album in the grave with your family, and the way I see it, that makes you pretty much unpredictable. Either way, the fire didn’t harm the bodies much, but it killed the maggots before they got a chance to do their thing. The plastic kept subsequent generations of flies from laying eggs on the bodies, so they just sat out there in the shed and more or less mummified.”

“Any word on what killed them?”

He looked insulted. “Didn’t exactly take a rocket scientist,” he said. “Head trauma. Nonblunt. Something like a hatchet or a small ax.” He pointed to the stairway. “They got it in their beds. The father first and then the kids.”

She pulled back. “You’re messing with me here.”

“Swear to God,” he said. “It’s all right there.”

“You mean to tell me…all these years later, you can come in here—with the place completely deserted and all—and figure out how these people died and what happened to them after that, and in just a few hours?”

“You want to see?”

“Yeah, sure,” she said. “That’d be great.”

He walked over to the pile of cop equipment against the front wall, dug around for a moment, and came out with a black fanny pack, which he buckled around his waist. He reached into the heap again and produced a yellow flashlight. He flicked it on with his thumb, made sure it was working, and then started across the room.

He reached up over the entrance to the stairs, pulled a couple of ties loose, and allowed a canvas curtain to flop down over the doorway. “Gotta be dark,” he said.

He held the curtain aside long enough for Dougherty to step through. He put a hand on her waist as they mounted the stairs, moving tentatively behind the dancing circle of light. At the top of the stairs, he guided her to the right, into a bare room overlooking the front of the house. He pointed the flashlight beam at the far wall. Moved it back and forth a little. “The bed must have been right about there,” he said. “Hubby slept on the left. Mommy on the right.”

“Come on,” Dougherty scoffed. “Give me a break.”

“Watch,” he said, taking her by the hand and pulling her across the room. He held out the flashlight. “Hold this.” She took the light. Moved it around the peeling walls, while Warren unzipped the pack and pulled out what looked like an oversized electric flash unit. A little black ray gun was attached to the pack by a three-foot length of telephone cord.

“Turn off the flashlight,” he said. Dougherty thumbed the light, and for a moment they stood in total darkness until, with the flick of a switch, a purple light appeared in his hand. “Ultraviolet,” he said. He held the light up to the wall. “Look.” Dougherty stepped in closer. In the ghostly light, a glowing chartreuse stain spread upward along the wall like a galaxy, thick and dark at the bottom, then growing more sparse as it flew upward and outward and finally trailed off in a series of bright yellow dots.

“Blood,” he said. “You spray a little luminol on it, and it doesn’t matter how old it is or how hard anybody tried to scrub it off, luminol will light it up.”

Instinctively she reached out and touched the stain.

“Hubby was laying right here.” He smoothed out a place in the darkness, then walked over next to the imaginary bed. “The perp stood right here. He or she was right-handed.” He raised his free arm. “Just hauled off and hit the victim, like this.” He demonstrated a chopping motion, then pointed to another splash on the wall. “First one didn’t kill him,” Warren said. “So the perp hauled off and belted him again. This is the mark from the second.”

She winced. “What a bad way to go,” she said.

“Are there any good ways?” he asked. When she didn’t answer, he turned the light her way. “Look behind you,” he said.

The floor showed a ghastly trail of yellow and black blotches leading back to the door, some of the trails wispy, where they’d been painted by hair.

“They go all the way through the house and out the back door. See the black spots?” he said. “That’s where somebody tried to clean up afterward.” He shook his head. “Waste of time.”

They followed the trail to the head of the stairs, where a river of yellow stains adorned every tread, culminating in a pool of chartreuse at the foot of the stairs. He pointed with the purple light. “See how the blotches are all over the place? Not in a straight line? On the walls in some places. That suggests the victims were brought to the upper landing and then just kicked down the stairs, one on top of the other, until the perp had them all down there and could drag them out the back door.”

Dougherty looked behind her. Another pair of ghostly trails meandered down from the far end of the dimly lit hallway. Warren pointed the light in that direction. “Boys’ room’s down the hall.”