Denial. It’s not just a river in Egypt.
“What do you have for me?” I tried to keep my tone brisk and business like as I swept into Howard’s lab. Everyone knew I had a special connection to the case, but it wouldn’t do to show just how close I was to breaking down. I was in charge, and if I wanted to stay that way I was going to have to put my feelings on the back burner.
“The preliminary reports are… mixed,” he said. He fiddled with some knobs on his microscope. “Based on the DNA we have, it matches both the DNA in the hairbrush at the apartment and the DNA of the blood. Granted, a lot of it was destroyed by the bleach…” He looked up and frowned. It was rare to see the great Howard looking perplexed, and despite the situation I felt the ridiculous urge to grin. Or maybe it was just caffeine deprivation. I made a mental note to grab a cup of coffee as soon as I was done here.
“What?” I knew just enough about this stuff to be dangerous, and it was looking like it was going to be a long and difficult afternoon. They put me out on the field, and not in a lab, for a reason.
“Well, some of the blood looks a little odd. I’ve seen what bleach can do to blood cells – goodness knows we’ve seen enough crime scenes people have tried to clean up – but some of this damage seems wrong. I don’t know.” He rubbed a hand across his eyes in a weary gesture, then shook his head.
“But you found undamaged blood cells to make a DNA comparison?” I almost sounded like I knew what I was talking about.
“Wes, there were some blood droplets on the floor that the killer missed. It was a pretty shoddy clean-up job, to be honest. Almost more like the killer just wanted to make identifying the victim impossible. They obviously did not care if we found out a crime had been committed.”
“Obviously,” I agreed.
“So what kind of killer wants to let everyone know that they’ve killed someone, but not who? That is the million-dollar question, and the key to the case.”
“But there’s no body,” I said. I sounded hopeful and I cursed myself.
Howard shook his head sadly. “No, there’s no body. But the amount of blood… the amount of blood we found at the apartment was… well, the loss of that much blood is inconsistent with life.”
What a way of putting it. Inconsistent with life. What he was telling me was that if Sandra lost that much blood, she’s dead. And they found that much of her blood. I didn’t say anything.
“We found what we think amounts to five to six pints of blood between the crime scene and the towels and the clothes. That’s more than half of her blood volume. They had to wrap the body in something, as well, which probably soaked up some…” He trailed off lamely when he saw the expression on my face. “I’m sorry, Jake, I really am.”
“It’s okay, never mind me.” I cleared my throat. “Let’s work on the facts. You said there was something odd about the blood?”
“Yeah, but I can’t put my finger on it. Perhaps the killer cleaned up with more than bleach, or used boiling water. I’m not sure. It’s just a blip, though, something to nag at me. You know how caught up in the details us science types get.” He tried to grin, but it fell flat. I nodded. “Anyway, the blood splatter…” he paused. I nodded again. “The blood splatter would indicate she was attacked as she walked in the door. The killer struck several times, and she crumpled to the floor. He continued to stab, we’re guessing in the torso. There’s no spray to indicate the neck was hit, most of the blood seems to be pooled, as if it oozed out of the body.”
He was getting into a rhythm, the cold, clinical, detached scientist reporting his findings. I found myself able to separate what he was saying from the image of Sandra, substituting a nameless, faceless victim. I admitted to myself that I still didn’t believe she was dead. Sandra was too smart to walk into an ambush like that. Sandra wouldn’t have stood there and let herself be killed. She would have left us evidence, wounded her attacker. Sandra would have done something.
“Was there any other blood at the crime scene? Did the victim manage to wound the attacker?” I flipped through the crime scene photos, studying them with a critical eye. I found that as long as I stopped thinking of Sandra as the victim, I could concentrate on the case.
“No, none that we’ve found. We did even find traces of blood in the bathroom sink, where the killer likely washed up, but it was too minute an amount to do any testing on. We just know it was there. But we’ve tested the blood from the shoeprints and the smudges on the cabinets, and even though it’s damaged, we can tell with a fair amount of certainty it was hers. Unless you had a killer who happened to have the same blood type. Which would be possible if we were talking about O positive blood, but A negative is much more rare.”
I nodded, flipping through more photos. These showed the tracks down the hallway. “Any info on the shoe? It looks like you got some pretty good, clear prints.”
“Not just info, we have them.” Howard hoisted a clear plastic bag onto the metal table. “Found in a dumpster with a pair of jeans and a flannel shirt a few blocks away. They were stuffed into a plastic bag.”
“Any prints on the bag?” I flipped through more photos. The crime scene tech had taken hundreds of them. Every conceivable speck of blood had been photographed and carefully documented, distance and close-up shots with rulers.
“No, none we could find. We looked for any discarded gloves, and didn’t see any. Well, actually, we saw a lot. I never realized how many people used those rubber kitchen gloves to do their dishes. I tried that once, and all I did was plunge my hands so far into the dishwater that it topped the glove and filled it up. Rather pointless, if you ask me.” He stopped himself mid-ramble and pulled back on topic. “But none of them showed traces of blood.”
[Author’s Note: it’s here that, if it were not NaNo, and things had not already been ‘published’ and read, I would go back and fix the scene where Sandra dumps the stuff to clarify that she did leave the gloves on until after she dumped the bags, and kept them with her to dispose of once she got to her new home. Because it is possible to get fingerprints off the inside of a glove, though unlikely, and she would have thought of this. So pretend I did that, okay?]
“So what about the shoes?” I fiddled with the pictures in my hands, shuffling them back and forth aimlessly. Bloody shoe print, bloody smudge on the cabinet, drop of blood, pool of blood, the front of the refrigerator, smear of blood…
“Men’s size eleven, nothing special. The brand is one sold at stores everywhere. They’re relatively new, so we could try to track down every pair sold, but….”
“Undoubtedly a wild goose chase. Probably thousands sold, and if the killer was smart, he’d have used cash to pay, anyway.”
“And most stores don’t keep surveillance footage past a week, if they even keep it for twenty-four hours. I’m guessing that would just be a lot of wasted man-hours. Same with the shirt and jeans. New, but frighteningly generic. No way to track down which of the hundreds of stores it could have been sold at, and when you combine that with even a week’s timeframe, if not more…” He shrugged.
“Yeah, pointless. Any contract killer has dozens of generic outfits hanging in his closet, purchased at various times. And as much as this is supposed to look like a crime of passion, I don’t believe it for an instant.”
“Nor do I, though all evidence indicates a frenzied attack. Except the clean-up, which points more towards something meant to keep us chasing our tails.” He looked meaningfully at me. “Like trying to prove that she’s still alive.”
I ignored that. “Any evidence on the shirt or jeans?”
“There were some hairs, but initial study seems to indicate they belong to San- the victim. We’re combing over everything, but the killer was careful. No trace of him as far as we can tell.”
“Not a single hair? Isn’t that a bit suspicious?”
He shrugged again. “Not really. It could be that the killer shaves everything. In this day and age, the criminals have to get pretty creative to stay one step ahead of us. And remember, we’re not talking about a garden-variety burglar or mugger. We’re talking about a professional. I honestly didn’t expect to find much coming in to this case, given the circumstances. I don’t think forensic evidence is what’s going to solve it.”
I looked down at the photos I was mindlessly shuffling in my hands. I had stopped on a picture of Sandra’s pearl necklace, laying in situ in a pool of blood. The clasp had been wrenched open. Howard followed my gaze.
“It’s evidence right now,” he said softly. “But I’ll make sure you get it back. I know how much it meant to her. She never took it off, even after you two broke up.” He smiled sadly.
“Evidence?” I stared at the picture. Something was niggling in the back of my brain.
“It was torn off her neck in the struggle. Tossed under the couch.” He pulled the photos from my hands, and I let them go. My brain had latched on to one very important detail. Sandra hadn’t been wearing the necklace when I’d last seen her. It had been in her pocket, and she’d pulled it out to look at it. Then she’d stuffed it back into her purse. She hadn’t been wearing it in the car. I was sure of it.
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