Cruel and Unusual ks-4

by Patricia Cornwell

  As much as it was possible to do so, we began to re create the scene of Robyn's death. “Okay, the ficus tree goes over there, I said like a stage director. “Right, but slide the couch back about two more feet, Neils. And that way just a little bit more. The tree was maybe four inches from the left armrest. A little closer. That's good”

  “No, it's not. The branches are oar the couch.”

  “The tree's a little bigger now.”

  “I can't believe it's still alive. I'm surprised anything could live around Professor Potter except maybe bacteria or fungi.”

  “And the rug goes?” Wesley took off his jacket.

  “Yes. She had a small runner by the front door and another small Oriental under the coffee table. Most of the floor was bare.”

  He got down on his hands and knees and began to roll up the rug.

  I went over to the television and studied the VCR on top and the cable connection leading into the wall.

  “This has got to go against the wall opposite the couch and the front door. Either of you gentlemen good with VCRs and cable connections?”

  “No,” they answered simultaneously.

  “Then I'm left to my own devices. Here goes.”

  I disconnected the cable and the VCR, unplugged the TV, and carefully slid it across the bare, dusty floor. Referring to the photographs again, I moved it a few more feet until it was directly opposite the front door. Next I surveyed the walls. Potter apparently collected art and was fond of an artist whose name I could not quite make out, but it looked French. The sketches were charcoal studies of the female form with lots of curves, pink splotches, and triangles. One by one they all came down and I propped them against the walls in the dining room. By this point, the room was almost bare and I was itching from the dust.

  Wesley wiped his forehead on the back of his arm. “Are we about ready?”

  He looked at me.

  “I think so. Of course, not everything is here. She had three barrel chairs right over there.”

  I pointed.

  “They're in the bedrooms,” Vander said. “Two in one bedroom and one in the other. Do you want me to bring them out?”

  “Might as well.”

  He and Wesley carried in the chairs.

  “She had a painting on that wall over there, and another one to the right of the door leading into the dining room,” I pointed out. “A still life and an English landscape. So Potter couldn't live with her art but didn't seem to have a problem with anything else.”

  “We need to go around the house and close all blinds, shades, and curtains,” Vander said. “If any light is still coming through, then tear off a section of this paper” he pointed to a roll of heavy brown paper on the floor “and tape it over the window.”

  — For the next fifteen minutes, the house was filled with the sounds of footsteps, venetian blinds rattling, and scissors slicing through paper. Occasionally somebody swore loudly when the paper had been cut too short or the tape stuck to nothing but itself. I stayed in the living room and covered the glass in the front door and in the two windows facing the street. When the three of us reconvened and turned out the lights, the house was pitch-black. I could not even see my hand in front of my face.

  “Perfect,” Vander said as the overhead light went back on.

  Putting on gloves, he set bottles of distilled water, chemicals, and two plastic spray bottles on the coffee table. “Here's the way we're going to work this,” he said. “Dr. Scarpetta, you can spray while I videotape, and if an area reacts, just keep spraying it until I tell you to move on.”

  “What do you want me to do?” Wesley asked.

  “Keep out of the way.”

  “What's in this stuff?” he asked as Vander unscrewed the caps from bottles of dry chemicals.

  “You don't really want to know,” I replied.

  “I'm a big boy. You can tell me.”

  “The reagent's a mixture of sodium perborate, which Neils is mixing with distilled water, and three-aminophthalhydrazide and sodium carbonate,” I said, getting a packet of gloves out of my pocketbook.

  “And you're certain it will work on blood this old?” Wesley asked.

  “Actually, aged and decomposed blood reacts better with luminol than do fresh bloodstains because the more oxidized the blood, the better. As blood ages, it becomes more strongly oxidized.”

  “I don't think any of the wood in here is salt treated, do you?” Vander looked around.

  “I shouldn't think so.”

  I explained to Wesley, “The biggest problem with luminol is false positives. A number of things react with it, such as copper and nickel, and the copper salts in salt-treated wood.”

  “It also likes rust, household bleach, iodine, and formalin,” Vander added. “Plus, the peroxidases found in bananas, watermelon, citrus fruit, a number of vegetables. Also horseradish.”

  Wesley looked at me with a smile.

  Vander opened an envelope and removed two squares of filter paper that were stained with dried, diluted blood. Then he added mixture A to B and told Wesley to hit the lights. A couple of quick sprays, and a bluish white neon glow appeared on the coffee table. It began to fade almost as quickly as it had appeared.

  “Here,” Vander said to me.

  I felt the spray bottle touch my arm, and took hold of it. A tiny red light went on as Vander depressed the power button on the video camera; then the night vision lamp burned white and looked wherever he did like a luminescent eye.

  “Where are you?”

  Vander's voice sounded to my left.

  “I'm in the center of the room. I can feel the edge of the coffee table against my leg,” I said, as if we were children playing in the dark.

  “I'm way the hell out of the way.”

  Wesley's voice carried from the direction of the dining room.

  Vander's white light slowly moved toward me. I reached out and touched his shoulder. “Ready?”

  “I'm recording. Start and just keep going until I tell you to stop.”

  I began spraying the floor around us, my finger non-stop on the trigger as a mist floated over me and shapes and geometrical configurations materialized around my feet. For an instant, it was like speeding through the dark over the illuminated grid of a city far below. Old blood trapped in the crevices of the parquet emitted a bluewhite glow. I sprayed and sprayed, without having any real sense of where I was in relation to anything else, and saw footprints all over the room. I bumped against the ficus tree and dim white streaks appeared on the planter that held it. To my right smeared handprints flashed on the wall.

  “Lights,” Vander said.

  Wesley turned on the overhead light and Vander mounted a thirty-five-millimeter camera on a tripod to keep it still. The only light available would be the fluorescence of the luminol, and the film would need a long exposure time to capture it. I retrieved a full bottle of luminol and, when the lights were out again, resumed spraying the smeared handprints on the wall while the camera captured the eerie images on film. Then we moved on. Lazy, wide swipes appeared on paneling and parquet, and the stitching on the leather couch was a neon hatch line incompletely tracing the square shapes of the cushions.

  “Can you lift them out of the way?” ander asked.

  One by one I slid the cushions onto the floor and sprayed down the couch's frame. The spaces between the cushions glowed. On the backrest appeared more swipes and smears, and on.the ceiling appeared a constellation of small, bright stars. It was on the old television that we got our first pyrophoric display of false positives, as metal around the dials and screen lit up and cable connecters turned the blue-white of thin milk. There was nothing remarkable about the TV, only a few smudges that might be blood, but the floor directly in front of it, where Robyn's body had been found, went crazy. The blood was so pervasive that I could see the edges of the parquet's inlays and the direction of the wood fibers constituting the grain. A drag mark feathered out several feet from the densest concentration of
luminescence, and nearby was a curious pattern of tangential rings made by an object with a circumference slightly smaller than a basketball.

  The search did not end in the living room. We began to follow footprints. At intervals we were forced to turn on lights, mix more luminol, and move clutter out of the way, particularly in the linguistic landfill that once had been Robyn's bedroom and now was where Professor Potter lived. The floor was several inches deep in research papers, journal articles, exams, and scores of books written in German, French, and Italian. Clothes were strewn about and draped over things so haphazardly it was as if a whirlwind had kicked up in the closet and created a vortex in the center of the room. We picked up as best we could, creating stacks and piles on the unmade double bed. Then we followed Waddell's bloody path.

  It led me into the bathroom, with Vander at my heels.

  Shoe prints and smudges were scattered about the floor, and the same circular patterns that we had found in the living room fluoresced by the side of the bathtub. When I began spraying the walls, halfway up and on either side of the toilet, two huge handprints suddenly appeared. The video camera's light floated closer.

  Then Vander's voice said excitedly, “Flip on the light.”

  Potter's powder room was, to say the least, as disreputably maintained as the rest of his domain. Vander almost had his nose to the wall as he scrutinized the area where the prints had appeared.

  “Can you see them?”

  “ LJmm. Maybe barely.”

  He cocked his head to one side, then the other, squinting. “This is fantastic. You see, the wallpaper is this deep blue design, so nothing much is going to show to the naked eye. And it's plasticized or vinyl - a good surface for prints, in other words.”

  “Jesus,” said Wesley, who was standing in the doorway of the bathroom. “The damn toilet doesn't look like it's been cleaned since he moved in. Hell, it's not even flushed.”

  “Even if he did mop up or wipe down the walls from time to time, you really can't get rid of every trace of blood,” I said to Vander. “On a linoleum floor like this, for example, a residue gets down in the pebbly surface, and luminol is going to bring it up.”

  “Are you saying that if we sprayed down this place again in another ten years, the blood would still be here?” Wesley was amazed.

  “The only way you could eradicate most of the blood would be to repaint everything, repaper the walls, refinish the floors, and pitch the furniture,” Vander said. “If you want to get rid of absolutely every trace, you'd have to tear down the house and start over.”

  Wesley looked at his watch. “We've been here three and a half hours. “

  “Here's what I suggest we do,” I said. “Benton, you and I can begin restoring the rooms to their normal state of chaos, and Neils, we'll leave you to do what you need to do. “

  “Fine. I'll get the Luma-Lite set up in here, and keep your fingers crossed that it can enhance the ridge detail.”

  We returned to the living room. While Vander carried the portable Luma-Lite and camera equipment back to the bath, Wesley and I looked around at the couch, the old TV, and the dusty, scarred floor, both of us somewhat dazed. With the lights on there was not so much as the slightest trace of the horror we had seen in the dark. On this sunny winter's afternoon, we had crawled back in time and witnessed what Ronnie Joe Waddell had done.

  Wesley stood very still near the paper-covered window. “I'm afraid to sit anywhere or lean up against anything. Christ. There's blood all over this goddam house.”

  As I looked around, I pictured fading white in the blackness, my eyes traveling slowly from the couch, across the floor, and stopping at the TV. The couch's cushions were still on the floor where I had left them, and I squatted to take a closer look. The blood that had seeped into the brown stitching was not visible now, nor were the streaks and smears on the brown leather backrest. But a careful examination revealed something that was important but not necessarily surprising. On the side of one of the seat cushions that had been flush against the backrest I found a linear cut that was, at most, three-quarters of an inch long.

  “Benton, was Waddell left-handed, by chance?”

  “It seems to me he was.”

  “They thought he stabbed and beat her on the floor near the TV because there was so much blood around her body,” I said, “but he didn't. He killed her on the couch. I think I need to go outside. If this place weren't such a sewer, I'd be tempted to pinch one of the professor's cigarettes.”

  “You've been good for too long,” Wesley said. “An unfiltered Camel would land you on your ass. Go on and get some fresh air. I'll start cleaning up.”

  I left the house to the sound of paper being ripped down from the windows.

  That night began the most peculiar New Year's Eve in memory for Benton Wesley, Lucy, and me. I wouldn't go so far as to say the holiday was all that odd for Neils Vander. I had talked to him at seven P.m., and he was still in his lab, but that was fairly normal for a man whose raison d'etre would cease to exist were the fingerprints of two individuals ever found to be the same.

  Vander had edited the scene videocassette tapes to a VCR and turned copies over to me late that afternoon. For the better part of the early evening, Wesley and I had been stationed in front of my television, taking notes and making diagrams as we slowly went through the footage. Lucy, meanwhile, was working on dinner, and came into the living room only briefly from time to time to catch a glimpse. The luminescent images on the dark screen did not seem to disturb her. At a glance, the uninitiated could not possibly know what they meant.

  By eight-thirty, Wesley and I had gone through the tapes and completed our notes. We believed we had charted the course of Robyn Naismith's killer from the moment she walked into her house to Waddell's exit through the kitchen door. It was the first time in my career I had retrospectively worked the scene of a homicide that had been solved for years. But the scenario that emerged was important for one very good reason. It demonstrated, at least to our satisfaction, that what Wesley had told me at the Homestead was correct. Ronnie Joe Waddell did not fit the profile of the monster we were now tracking.

  The latent smudges, smears, spatters, and spurts that we had followed were as dose to an instant replay as I had ever seen in the reconstruction of a crime. Though the courts might consider much of what we determined was opinion, it did not matter. Waddell's personality did, and we felt pretty certain that we had captured it.

  Because the blood we had found in other areas of the house clearly had been tracked and transferred by Waddell, it was realistic to say that his assault of Robyn Naismith was restricted to the living room, where she died. The kitchen and front doors were equipped with deadbolt locks that could not be opened without a key. Since Waddell had entered the house through a window and left through the kitchen door, it had been surmised that when Robyn returned from the store, she had come in through the kitchen. Perhaps she had not bothered to relock the door, but more likely she had not had time. It had been conjectured that while Waddell was ransacking her belongings, he heard her drive up and park behind the house. He went into the kitchen and got a steak knife from the stainless steel set hanging on a wall. When she unlocked the door, he was waiting. Chances are, he simply grabbed her first and forced her through the open doorway that led into the living room. He may have talked to her for a while. He may have demanded money. He may have been with her only moments before the confrontation became physical.

  Robyn had been dressed and sitting or supine on the end of the couch near the ficus tree when Waddell struck the first blow with the knife. The blood spatters that had appeared on the backrest of the couch, the planter, and the dark paneling nearby were consistent with an arterial spurt, caused when an artery is severed. The resulting spatter pattern is reminiscent of an electrocardiogram tracing due to fluctuations of arterial blood pressure, and one has no blood pressure unless he or she is alive.

  So we knew that Robyn was alive and on the couch when she was
first assaulted. But it was unlikely she was still breathing when Waddell removed her clothing, which upon later examination revealed a single three-quarters-of-an-inch cut in the front of the bloodstained blouse where the knife had been plunged into her chest and moved back and forth to completely transect her aorta. Since she was stabbed many more times than that, and bitten, it was safe to conclude that most of Waddell's frenzied, piqueristic attack on her had occurred postmortem.

  Then this man, who later would claim he did not remember killing “the lady on TV,” suddenly woke up, in a sense. He got off her body and had second thoughts about what he had done. The absence of drag marks near the couch suggested that Waddell carried the body from the couch and laid it on the floor on the other side of the room. He dragged it into an upright position and propped it against the TV. Then he set about to clean up. The ring marks that glowed on the floor, I believed, were left by the bottom of a bucket that he carried back and forth from the body to the bathtub down the hall. Each time he returned to the living room to mop up more blood with towels, or perhaps to check on his victim as he continued raiding her belongings and drinking her booze, he again bloodied the bottom of his shoes. This explained the profusion of shoe prints wandering peripatetically throughout her house. The activities themselves explained something else. Waddell's post-offense behavior was inconsistent with that of someone who felt no remorse.

  “Here he is, this uneducated farm boy who's living in the big city,” Wesley explained. “He's stealing to support a drug habit that's rotting his brain. First marijuana, then heroin, coke, and finally PCP. And one morning he suddenly comes to and finds himself brutalizing the corpse of a stranger.”

  Logs shifted in the fire as we stared at big handprints glowing as white as chalk on the dark television screen.

  “The police never found vomit in the toilet or around it,” I said.

  “He probably cleaned that up, too. Thank God he didn't wipe down the wall above the john. You don't lean against a wall like that unless you're commode-hugging sick.”