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 for Naples. They were heading west toward the Everglades.
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 toolbox, 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.”
“Look at you. Who would have you. You’re thankful I pay attention to you, aren’t you.”
“Where are the others?”
“Say you’re sorry. You know what you did. Sinners must be punished.”
“What have you done with them?” She asks the same question she always does. “Let me go. God will forgive you.”
“Say you’re sorry.”
He nudges her ankles with his boots and the pain is horrific.
“Dear God, forgive him,” she prays out loud. “You don’t want to go to hell,” she says to him, the evil one. “It’s not too late.”
Chapter 36
It is very dark, the moon like a shadowy shape on an x-ray, vague behind clouds. Small insects swarm in the light of street lamps. The traffic never quits on A1A, and the night is filled with noise.
“What’s bothering you?” Scarpetta asks as Lucy drives. “This is the first alone time you and I have had since I can’t remember when. Please talk to me.”
“I could have called Lex. I didn’t mean to drag you out.”
“And I could have told you to. I didn’t have to be your partner in crime tonight.”
Both of them are tired and in humorless moods.
“So, here we are,” Lucy says. “Maybe I used this as an opportunity for us to catch up. I could have called Lex,” she says again, staring straight ahead as she drives.
“I can’t tell if you’re making fun of me.”
“I’m not.” Lucy looks over at her without smiling. “I’m sorry about things.”
“You should be.”
“You don’t have to be so quick to agree. Maybe you don’t always know what my life is like.”
“The problem is, I want to. You consistently shut me out.”
“Aunt Kay, you really don’t want to know as much as you think you do. Did it ever occur to you that maybe I’m doing you a favor? That maybe you should enjoy me as you know me and leave the rest of it alone?”
“What is the rest of it?”
“I’m not like you.”
“In the important ways, you are, Lucy. We’re both intelligent, decent, hard-working women. We try to make a difference. We take risks. We’re honest. We try, we really try.”
“I’m not as decent as you think. All I do is hurt people. I’m good at it, getting better at it all the time. And every time I do it, I care less. Maybe I’m turning into a Basil Jenrette. Maybe Benton ought to enroll me in his study up there. I bet my brain looks like Basil’s, like all the other fucking psychopaths.”
“I don’t know what’s going on with you,” Scarpetta says quietly.
“I think it’s blood.” Lucy makes one of her fast breaks again, changing the subject so abruptly, it’s jolting. “I think Basil’s telling the truth. I think he killed her in the back of the shop. I have a feeling it will turn out to be blood, what we found back there.”
“Let’s wait and see what the labs say.”
“The entire floor lit up. That was weird.”
“Why would Basil say anything about it? Why now? Why to Benton?” Scarpetta says. “That bothers me. Worries me, actually.”
“There’s always a reason with these people. Manipulation.”
“It worries me.”
“So he’s talking to get something he wants, to get his rocks off. How could he make it up?”
“He could know about the missing people from The Christmas Shop. It was in the paper, he was a Miami cop. Maybe he heard about it from other cops,” Scarpetta says.
The more they talk about it, the more she worries that Basil really did have something to do with what happened to Florrie and Helen Quincy. But she can’t imagine how he could have raped and murdered the mother in the back of the store. How did he get her bloody, dead body out of there, or get both dead bodies out of there, assuming he killed Helen, too.
“I know,” Lucy says. “I can’t envision it, either. And if he did kill them, why didn’t he just leave them there? Unless he didn’t want anyone to know they were murdered, wanted them presumed missing, presumed missing of their own volition.”
“That suggests motive to me,” Scarpetta says. “Not compulsive sexual homicide.”
“I forgot to ask you,” Lucy says. “I’m assuming I’m taking you to your house.”
“At this hour, yes.”
“What are you going to do about Boston?”