Trace (25 page)

    
Back at her work table, she seats herself, puts on the headphones and a pair of glasses, and slides the purple-spotted drawing under the lens of the imager scope. She turns it on, then turns on the UV lamp and looks into the eyepiece at a field of bright green, and she smells the unpleasant odor of the cooked chemical and paper. The pencil marks of the eye are thin white lines, and then there is pale ridge detail in a finger mark near the iris of the eye. She adjusts the focus, making the image as sharp as possible, and the ridge detail shows several characteristics and is more than enough to run in the FBI's Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System. When she ran the latent prints she lifted from the bedroom after Henri was almost murdered, the search produced nothing because the beast has no ten-print card on file. This time, she'll do a latent-to-latent search against more than two billion prints in the IAFIS database, and she'll also make sure her office does a manual comparison of the latents from the bedroom and the ones from the drawing. She mounts a digital camera on top of the scope's eyepiece and begins taking photographs.

    
Not five minutes later, when she is taking more pictures of another finger mark, this one a smudge with partial ridge detail, the first human sound comes through her headphones, and she turns up the volume and tinkers with the sensitivity level and makes sure one of the recorders is capturing what she is hearing live.

    
"What are you doing?" Kate's drunk voice sounds clearly in Lucy's headphones, and she leans forward in her chair and checks to make sure everything in the command center is up and running fine. "I can't play tennis today," Kate slurs, and her one-sided conversation is picked up clearly by the transmitter hidden in the adapter Lucy plugged into the wall socket near the window that overlooks the back of Lucy's house.

    
Kate is in the gym and there is no background noise of the treadmill or elliptical machine, not that Lucy expects her neighbor to be working out when she is drunk. But Kate isn't too drunk to spy. She is looking out the window at Lucy's house and has nothing better to do than spy, and she probably never has had anything better to do than spy and get drunk.

    
"No, you know I think I'm getting a cold. You hear it too. You should have heard me earlier. I'm so stopped up and you should have heard me when I got up."

    
Lucy stares at the red light on the tape recorder. Her eyes wander to the sheet of paper beneath the lens of the mounted crime scope. The paper is curled from the heat, and the purple smudges on it are large, large enough to be a man's maybe, but she knows better than to make assumptions. What matters is there are prints, assuming they are the prints of the beast who taped his beastly drawing to Lucy's door, assuming it is the one who came into her house and tried to kill Henri. Lucy stares at the purple remnants of him, his tracks, his amino acids from his perspiring oily skin.

    
"Well, I have a movie star next door, how 'bout them apples?" Kate's voice violates the inside of Lucy's head. "Heck no, honey, not surprised in the least. Let me tell you, I thought so all along. People in and out, all those fancy cars and pretty people in a house that cost what? Eight, nine, ten million? And a gaudy house, you ask me. Just like you expect with gaudy people."

    
He doesn't care if he leaves prints. He doesn't care, and Lucy's heart feels hollow, because if he cared she would be better off. If he cared, it would indicate that he very likely has a criminal record. He has no ten-print card in IAFIS or anywhere. He isn't worried, damn him. He doesn't care because he believes a match isn't going to happen. We'll see about that, Lucy thinks, and she feels his beastly presence as she looks at the purple smudges on the heat-curled drawing of the eye. She feels him watching and she feels Kate watching, and anger seethes inside Lucy, deep inside where her anger crawls and hides and sleeps until something pokes it.

    
". . . Tina . . . Now do you believe it? Her last name's flown right out of my head. If she ever told me. Of course she would have. She told me all about it, and her boyfriend and that girl that was attacked and moved back to Hollywood ..."

    
Lucy turns up the volume and the purple on the paper blurs as she stares hard and listens closely to her neighbor talk about Henri. How did she know Henri was attacked? It wasn't in the news. All Lucy told Kate was that there was a stalker. Lucy never said a word about anyone being attacked.

    
"A cute thing, very cute. Blonde, nice face and nice figure, nice and thin. They're all like that, those Hollywood types. Now that part I'm not sure of. But my feeling is he's the other one's boyfriend, Tina's boyfriend. Why? Well now that's pretty obvious, hon. If he was the blonde's beau, don't you think he would have left when she did, and she's not been here since the house got broken into and all those police cars and the ambulance showed up."

    
The ambulance, damn it. Kate saw the ambulance, saw a stretcher being carried out, and she assumes this means Henri was assaulted. I'm not thinking straight, Lucy thinks. I'm not making the connections, she thinks angrily and in growing frustration and panic. What's wrong with you, she says to herself as she listens and stares at the tape recorder inside the briefcase on top of the table near the Krimesite imager. What the hell is wrong with you, she says to herself, and she thinks of her stupidity in the Ferrari when the Latino was following her.

    
"I wondered the same thing, why not a word in the news. I looked for it, believe you me," Kate talks on, her words chewy and distorted because she is around the bend and more drunk than before. "Yes, you would think so," she says with emphasis, the slurring more emphatic. "Movie stars and nothing in the news. But that's what I'm getting at. They're here in secret, so the media doesn't know. Well, it does too make sense. It does if you think about it, you silly goose ..."

    
"Oh for God's sake, say something important," Lucy mutters to the room.

    
I've got to get a grip, she thinks. Lucy, get a grip. Think, think, think!

    
The long curly dark hairs on the bed. Oh dammit, she thinks. Dammit, I didn't ask her.

    
She pulls off the headphones and places them on the table. She stares around the room as the tape recorder continues to capture her neighbor's one-sided conversation. "Shit," she says out loud, realizing she doesn't have Kate's phone number or even know her last name, and she doesn't feel like spending the time and energy to find out either. Not that Kate will answer the phone if Lucy calls her.

    
Moving to a different desk, Lucy seats herself before a computer and creates a simple document from a template. She fabricates two VIP tickets to the premiere of her movie,
Jump Out,
which will be shown June 6 in Los Angeles, with a private party for the cast and special friends to follow. She prints out the tickets on glossy photographic paper and cuts them to size, and tucks them inside an envelope with a note that reads, "Dear Kate, loved our chat! Here's a movie trivia quiz: Who's the one with the long dark curly hair? (Can you figure it out?)," and she includes a cell phone number.

    
Lucy hurries outside and back to Kate's house, but Kate isn't answering the door or even the intercom. She is around the bend, past drunk and on her way to unconscious, if she isn't already unconscious, and Lucy places the envelope inside Kate's mailbox.

Chapter 21

    
Somehow Mrs. Paulsson
is now in the bathroom off the hallway. She doesn't know how she got there.

    
It is an old bathroom that hasn't been renovated since the early 1950s, the floor a checkerboard of blue and white tiles, and there are a plain white sink, a plain white toilet, and a plain white tub with a pink and purple floral shower curtain drawn across it. Gilly's toothbrush is in the toothbrush holder on top of the sink, the tube of toothpaste dented, half used up. She doesn't know how she got into the bathroom.

    
She looks at the toothbrush and toothpaste and cries harder. She splashes cold water on her face but it doesn't do any good. She is sorry she can't hold herself together as she leaves the bathroom and returns to Gilly's bedroom, where the Italian woman doctor from Miami waits for her. That big policeman is thoughtful enough to set a chair in the room, not far from the foot of the bed, and he is sweating. It is cool in the room and she realizes the window is open, but his face is flushed and glistens with sweat.

    
"Take a load off," the policeman dressed in black says to her with a smile that really doesn't make him look any friendlier, but she likes the way he looks. She likes him. She doesn't know why. She likes to look at him and she feels something when she looks at him or gets close to him. "Sit down, Mrs. Paulsson, and try to relax," he says.

    
"Did you open the window?" she asks, sitting in the chair and folding her hands in her lap.

    
"I was wondering if it might have been open when you came home from the drugstore," he replies. "When you walked in this bedroom, was the window open or shut?"

    
"It gets hot in here. The heat's hard to regulate in these old houses." She is looking up at the policeman and the woman doctor. It doesn't seem right to be sitting near the bed and looking up at them. She feels nervous and frightened and small as she sits looking up at them. "Gilly used to open that window all the time. It might have been open when I got home. I'm trying to remember." Curtains stir. The white gauzy curtains flutter like ghosts in the sharp cold air. "Yes," she says. "I think the window might have been open."

    
"Did you know the lock is broke?" the big policeman asks, standing perfectly still, his eyes on her. She can't remember his name. What was it? Marinara or something.

    
"No," she answers, and fear is cold around her heart.

    
The woman doctor walks over to the open window and shuts it with her white-gloved hands. She looks out at the backyard.

    
"It's not very pretty this time of year," Mrs. Paulsson says as her heart thuds. "Now in the spring, you should see it."

    
"I can tell," the woman doctor replies, and she has a way about her that Mrs. Paulsson finds fascinating but a little scary. Everything is scary now. "I love to garden. Do you?"

    
"Oh yes."

    
"Do you think someone came in the window?" Mrs. Paulsson asks, noticing black dust on the windowsill and around the window frame. She notices more black dust and what look like tape marks on the inside and outside of the glass.

    
"I lifted some prints," the big policeman says. "Don't know why the cops didn't bother, but I got some. We'll see if they're anything. I'm going to need to take yours for exclusionary purposes. I don't guess the cops took your prints?"

    
She shakes her head no as she stares at the window and the black dust everywhere.

    
"Who lives behind your house, Mrs. Paulsson?" asks the big policeman in black. "That old house behind the fence."

    
"A woman, an elderly woman. I haven't seen her in a while, a long while. Many years. In fact, I can't say she still lives back there. Last time I saw anyone back there was maybe six months ago. Yes, six months ago or so, because I was picking tomatoes. I have a little vegetable garden back there by the fence, and last summer I had more tomatoes than I could shake a stick at. Someone was on the other side of the fence, just walking back there, doing what I don't know. My impression was that whoever's back there isn't especially friendly. Well, I doubt it's the woman who used to live there, who lived there eight, nine, ten years ago. She was very old. I suppose she might be dead by now."

    
"Do you know if the police might have talked to her, assuming she ain't dead?" asks the big policeman.

    
"I thought you're the police."

    
"Not the same kind of police who've been here already. No, ma'am. We're not the same as them."