During Sara’s tenure, the clinic had always been well maintained. Now, the place was starting to go downhill. The driveway hadn’t been pressure-washed in years. The paint on the trim was chipped and faded. Leaves and debris clogged the gutters so bad that water flowed down the side of the building.
Lena followed the signs to the rear entrance. There were cheap stepping-stones laid in the dead grass. At one time, there had been wildflowers back here. Now there was just a mud track leading to the creek that ran through the back of the property. The torrential rains had turned it into a fast-flowing river that looked ready to flood the clinic. Erosion had taken hold. The channel was wider now, at least fifteen feet across and half as deep.
She pressed the buzzer by the back door and waited. Hare had been renting space in the building since Sara left town. Lena had to think that Sara would’ve never let her cousin work alongside her when she owned the clinic. They were close, but everybody knew Hare was a different kind of doctor from Sara. He saw it as a job, whereas Sara saw it as a calling. Lena was hoping this was still the case, that a doctor like Hare would view her as a billable office visit instead of a blood enemy.
Lena pressed the buzzer again. She could hear the bell ringing inside along with the quiet murmur of a radio. She tried to flex her hand. There was less movement now. Her fingers were fat and swollen. She pulled back her sleeve and groaned. Red streaks traced up her forearm.
“Shit,” Lena groaned. She put her hand to her cheek. She was burning up. Her stomach was sour. She hadn’t felt right for the last two hours, but it all seemed to be catching up with her at once.
Her phone started to ring. Lena saw Jared’s number. She gave the buzzer by the door one last push before answering. “Hey.”
“Is this a bad time?”
She paced in front of the door. “I just quit my job.”
He laughed like she had told an unbelievable joke. “Really?”
She leaned her back against the wall. “I wouldn’t lie to you about that.”
“Does that mean you’d lie about other things?”
He was kidding, but Lena felt her heart drop when she thought about how all of this could’ve blown up in her face. “I want to get out of town as soon as possible.”
“All right. We’ll start packing tonight. You can move in with me and we’ll figure out later what you’re going to do.”
Lena stared at the river. She could hear the rush of the current. The sound was like boiling water in her ears. Even though the rain had stopped, the river was still rising. She conjured the image of a huge wave crashing down the hill, flooding out the street and taking away the police station.
“Lee?” Jared asked.
“I’m all right—” Her voice caught. She couldn’t start crying now or she’d never stop. “I should be home in an hour or two.” Her throat started to tighten. “I love you.”
She ended the call before he could answer. Lena looked at her watch. There was a doc-in-the-box in the drugstore over in Cooperstown. Maybe she could find a physician’s assistant who needed some cash and wouldn’t ask questions. She pushed away from the wall just as the back door opened.
Lena said, “Oh.”
“I didn’t see your car out front.”
“I’m parked across the street.” Lena held up her hand, showing the dangling Band-Aids. “I … uh … kind of have a problem I can’t take to the hospital.”
There was none of the expected reluctance. “Come on in.”
The smell of bleach hit Lena as she walked into the building. The cleaning staff had been thorough, but the stench made her stomach turn.
“Go into exam one. I’ll be right there.”
“All right,” Lena agreed.
Being in the doctor’s office seemed to give her body permission to hurt. Her hand was throbbing with every heartbeat. She couldn’t pull her fingers into a fist. There was a high-pitched noise in her ears. Then another one. She realized she was hearing sirens.
Lena bypassed the exam room and went to the front of the building to see what was going on. The pocket door to the front office took some coaxing to open. The blinds were drawn, the room dark. She turned on the lights and saw the source of the odor.
Two gallon jugs of bleach were on the desk. Leather gloves soaked in a stainless steel bowl. Cotton swabs and paper towels littered the floor. A wooden baseball bat was laid out on a sheet of brown craft paper. Blood was embedded in the letters around the Rawlings logo.
Lena put her hand to her gun, but she was too late. She felt a drop of blood trickle down her neck before her body registered the pain of the cold steel of a knife pressing into her skin.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Charlie Reed bounded down the dorm stairs with a smile showing under his mustache. He was in a white clean suit, covered head to toe in Tyvek. “Glad you’re here. We were just about to start the magic.”
Will tried to return his smile, but the effort failed. Charlie was a forensics expert. He had the luxury of looking at cases through the lens of a microscope. He saw bone and blood that needed to be photographed, analyzed, and catalogued, where Will saw a human being whose life had been ended by a cold-blooded killer who seemed to be doing a very good job of evading justice.
Despite Will’s earlier hopes, none of the evidence they’d found so far had been useful. Jason Howell’s Saturn station wagon was remarkably tidy. Aside from some breath mints and a couple of CDs, there was nothing personal in the car. The blanket Will had found in the bathroom stall held more promise, but that had to be analyzed in the lab. This process could take a week or more. The hope was that the killer had injured himself or leaned against the blanket, leaving trace evidence that might link him to the crime. Even if Charlie found DNA in the material that did not belong to Jason, they could only run it through the database and hope that their killer was in the system. More often than not, DNA was a tool used to rule out suspects, not track them down.
“This next bit should go a little faster.” Charlie leaned down and rummaged through one of the open duffel bags at the bottom of the stairs. He found what he was looking for and told Will, “Suit up. We should be ready in five minutes.” He bounded back up the steps two at a time.
Will grabbed one of the folded clean suits from the pile at the bottom of the stairs. He tore the package open with his teeth. The suit was meant to limit skin and hair transfer to the crime scene. It had the added bonus of making Will look like a giant, elongated marshmallow. He was tired and hungry. He was pretty sure he smelled, and though his socks were dry now, they had dried in such a way as to feel like sandpaper rubbing across the blister on his heel.
None of this mattered. Every second that ticked by gave Jason and Allison’s killer the freedom to move about freely, planning his escape or, worse, planning his next murder.
Will glanced at Marty Harris. The man was still guarding the front door with his usual degree of thoroughness. Marty’s head was back against the wall, glasses askew. His soft snores followed Will up the stairs.
Charlie knelt in the middle of the hallway, adjusting a fixture on top of a tripod. There were three more tripods spaced evenly across the hall, going all the way to the bathroom. Similarly Tyvek-suited men all adjusted gauges as Charlie told them to go up or down. They had been here for hours. Photographing the scene, graphing the measurements of the hall, the bathroom, Jason’s room, his desk and his bed. They had documented every item from the inside out. Finally, they had given Dan Brock permission to remove the body. Once Jason was gone, they had taken more photos, diagrammed more graphs, and finally started bagging any evidence that seemed pertinent to the case.
Jason’s laptop was toast, soaked to the core. There was a Sony Cyber-shot with some provocative photos of Allison Spooner in her underwear. All of Jason’s schoolwork and notebooks seemed to be what you’d expect. His Dopp kit contained the normal toiletries and no prescription bottles. The strongest drug he had in the room was an expired bottle of Excedrin PM.
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br /> Jason’s cell phone was more interesting, if not more helpful. The contacts list contained three numbers. One belonged to Jason’s mother. She wasn’t pleased to be talking to the police twice in one day about a son she apparently didn’t care that much about. The second number dialed the main switchboard to the physical engineering building, which was closed for the holiday. The third belonged to a cell phone that rang once, then announced that the voice mailbox was full. The cell phone company had no record of who the number belonged to—it was a pay-as-you-go deal—an expected revelation considering none of these kids seemed to have good enough credit to get a phone in their own names.
Will assumed the cell phone with the full mailbox belonged to Allison Spooner. She had called Jason fifty-three times over the weekend. Nothing came in after Sunday afternoon. Jason’s only outgoing call had been made to his mother three days before he died. Of all the details that Will had discovered about the victims in this case, Jason Howell’s sad, lonely life was the most depressing.
“Almost ready,” Charlie said, the excitement building in his voice.
Will stared into the hallway, wishing he never had to see this place again. The dingy tan linoleum on the floors. The scuffed and dirtied white walls. Making it worse was the lingering smell of Jason’s body, even though the kid had been removed several hours ago. Or maybe it was all in Will’s mind. There were crime scenes he had visited years ago that felt like they’d left their mark on his nasal passages. Just thinking about them could evoke a certain odor or bring a sour taste into the back of his throat. Jason Howell would forever be trapped in the pantheon of Will’s bad memories.
“Doug, move that a little to the left,” Charlie said. He’d divided the crime scene into three areas: the hall, Jason’s room, and the bathroom. They had all agreed that their best bet was finding something in the hallway. The group of assembled men hadn’t needed to articulate the problems associated with looking for DNA in a communal boys’ bathroom, but Will could tell none of them were looking forward to crawling around on that particular floor.
Charlie tinkered with the light on the tripod. “This is the ME-RED I told you about.”
“Nice.” Will had already gotten an earful about the extremely fascinating qualities of the Mobile Electromagnetic Radiation Emitting Diode, which as far as Will could tell was fancy jargon for a gigantic black light that had a longer range than the Wood’s lamps that had to be carried around by hand. The lights would pick up visible traces of blood, urine, and semen, or anything else that contained fluorescent molecules.
For the traces that were less visible, Charlie and his team had sprayed the hallway with Luminol, a chemical that reacts to the presence of iron in blood. Crime shows had made the general public well aware of the blue glow emitted by Luminol when the lights were turned off. What they hadn’t shared was that the glow usually lasted around thirty seconds. Long-exposure cameras had to be used to record the process. Charlie had set these up on tripods in all four corners of the hallway and staggered more around the entrance to Jason’s dorm room. For good measure, he had tilted the security camera back down to capture it all in real time.
Will stood at the mouth of the stairs, watching the team make last-minute adjustments. He wondered if the murderer had paused here on the stairs to psych himself up for the kill. It was all so premeditated, so well thought out. Enter through the back door. Push up the cameras. Go up the stairs. Weapons in hand. Gloves on. Plan ready: Incapacitate Jason with the bat. Drag him to the bed. Cover him with the blanket. Stab him repeatedly. Hide the blanket in case it contained any trace evidence. Go back down the stairs. Leave by the back door.
Was it really as calculated as that? What went through a person’s mind before they went to someone’s dorm room, their home, and fractured their skull with a baseball bat? Would the killer’s pulse quicken? Would his stomach tighten the way Will’s did when he thought about the gruesome crime scene? There had been so much blood, so much brain and tissue, spattered around the room that Charlie and his team had been forced to make a grid so that they could clear a path to fully document the carnage.
What kind of person could stand over that bed and methodically stab another human being?
And what about poor Jason Howell? Lena was probably right that the killer had known Jason well enough to hate him. Despise him. What kind of trouble had the kid gotten himself into that he would become the object of such fury?
“I think we’ve got it.” Charlie grabbed a handheld video camera and pulled Will toward Jason’s room. He told Doug, “Go get the lights.” Doug took off down the stairs and Charlie explained the plan to Will. “First we’ll see what the Luminol brings out, then we’ll go to the black light.”
“Ready?” Doug called.
“Ready,” Charlie yelled back.
The hall went dark. The Luminol responded quickly. Dozens of small, elongated circles glowed blue just outside Jason’s open doorway. They were smeared where the killer had tried to wipe them up, but the pattern was easy to follow. The drops revealed his movements. After stabbing Jason to death, the killer had walked out of the room, heading toward the stairs, then changed his mind and doubled back toward the bathroom.
“The original plan was probably to take the blanket with him,” Charlie said. He held the video camera low, documenting the drips. Will could hear the steady, slow click of the long-exposure cameras capturing the evidence.
He asked, “What about this?” A larger stain, more like a puddle, was on the floor just beside the bathroom entrance. Three feet above it was a patterned mark on the wall.
Charlie twisted up the LCD screen of the camera. Will saw the images in double as he recorded the luminescent blobs. “Our killer comes out of the room, heads toward the stairs, then he realizes the blanket is dripping. He goes toward the bathroom, but first—” Charlie pointed the camera toward the glowing stain on the floor. “He leans something against here. I’d guess a bat or a club. That’s the mark on the wall.” Charlie zoomed in close to the wall where the top of the weapon had rested. “Uh-oh, fingerprint.”
Charlie got down on his knees and pointed his camera at an almost perfect circle. “Gloved, it looks like.” He zoomed in closer. The glowing dot started to fade. “We’re losing it.”
The Luminol’s reaction time varied depending on the content of iron in the blood. The dot slowly disappeared, then the puddle on the floor was gone. Charlie muttered a curse as the hall was plunged back into darkness.
Charlie rewound the camera to look at the print again. “He was definitely wearing gloves.”
“Latex?”
“Leather, I think. There’s a grain.” He showed Will the LCD, but the light was too intense for him to see anything but a blob. “Let’s see if it still shows up under the diodes.” He called, “Black light, please.”
There were a couple of popping noises, then a steady hum. The hallway lit up like a Christmas tree, illuminating every protein-based fluid ever left here.
“Impressive, right?” Charlie’s lips glowed a bright blue, probably from the Vaseline in his lip balm. He knelt down on the floor. The blood trail that had glowed so brightly minutes before was barely visible. “Our killer did a good job cleaning up after himself.” He took a few more photographs. “Good thing he didn’t use bleach or we wouldn’t be able to see any of this.”
“I don’t think he planned to leave a mess,” Will said. “Our guy is careful, but the only things he probably brought with him were the weapons—the knife and a bat or club. He used the blanket on the bed to catch the spatter. He tried to leave with it, then like you said, he changed his mind because it was dripping.” Will felt himself smile as he remembered, “There’s a supply closet beside the stall where I found the blanket.”
“You’re a genius, my friend.” They both went into the bathroom. Charlie flipped on the lights. Will clamped his hands over his face, feeling like his eyeballs were being stabbed.
“Sorry about that,” Charlie apologi
zed. “I should’ve warned you to close your eyes and open them slowly.”
“Thanks.” Spots exploded in front of his eyes with every blink. Will put his hand on the wall so he wouldn’t trip over his own feet.
Charlie stood in front of the supply closet with his video camera. “We can check the photographs, but I’m sure this door was closed when we got here.” His hands were still gloved. He carefully turned the knob.
The closet was shallow, a metal shelving unit taking up most of the space. There was nothing unusual about the contents of the shelves: gallon jugs of cleaning products, a box of rags, sponges, two toilet plungers, a mop tucked into a rolling yellow bucket. Two spray bottles hung from a bungee cord on the back of the door. Yellow liquid for spot-cleaning stains. Blue liquid for windows and glass.
Charlie documented the contents of the shelves with the camera. “These cleaners are industrial grade. They’re probably thirty percent bleach.”
Will recognized the Windex label on one of the spray bottles. He had the same cleaner at home. It contained vinegar to help cut the grease. “You can’t mix vinegar and bleach, right?”
“Right. It forms a chlorine gas.” Charlie followed Will’s gaze to the spray bottle. He laughed as he made the connection. “I’ll be right back.”
Will let out a deep breath that he felt like he’d been holding for the last two days. Bleach glowed just as brightly as blood when sprayed with Luminol, obscuring any evidence. Vinegar, by contrast, formed a natural bond with iron, making it more visible when it was sprayed. That explained why the spots in the hall glowed with such intensity. The killer had used the Windex to clean up the floor. He might as well have drawn an arrow to the bloodstains.
Charlie was back with Doug and another assistant. They worked in tandem, taking photographs and handing Charlie the brush and powder to check the Windex bottle for fingerprints. Charlie was methodical, starting from the top down, going from one side of the bottle to the other. Will had expected him to find fingerprints immediately. The bottle was half full. The janitorial staff must have used it. The closet wasn’t locked. The students would have access.
The Will Trent Series 5-Book Bundle Page 158
