“Damn,” Windy said, frustrated by not being able to figure out what the object was. She turned away from the void and kept going.
There was an immense quantity of blood trailing over the rose-trellis bedspread and puddling by the edge of the bed, which showed Windy where Mrs. Waters had been killed. There was also faint blood spatter on the ceiling, and a wavy line of spray against the wall. Three sets of footprints, one leading to the puddle, and two leading away, all appeared to have been made with the same shoes. Opening the closet from the bottom corner so she wouldn’t disturb fingerprints on the knob if there were any, Windy shined her flashlight over the shoes neatly arranged in rows, stopping on a pair of formal black wingtips that Windy would have bet Dr. Waters had worn to his wedding and not since. The front of the left toe had a dark spot on it, a smudge. The killer had worn Dr. Waters’s best shoes to kill his wife.
Shining her flashlight on the wicker laundry basket, she spotted a blue button-down shirt, slightly frayed at the collar, on the top of the pile of clothes. It was saturated with blood.
This time the killer had not only put on the father’s shoes, but also his shirt. Was this just sound practice, so he would not have to walk around covered in telltale blood? Or was it part of the evolving ritual of control? Of feeling at home.
Windy stood in one place, looking around, thinking out loud, talking into the recorder. “Either before or after I changed into Dr. Waters’s clothes—change into him?—I put packing tape on Mrs. Waters’s mouth.” The coroner’s report from the Johnson family had turned up traces of adhesive around the mouths of all three victims, adhesive that corresponded with clear packing tape. Windy expected the same would be found here, and was fairly sure that the bloody outline of a butcher knife that had shown up next to each of the Johnsons was made when the killer set the weapon down to remove the tape from their mouths. Most killers used duct tape, so the selection of packing tape was notable. Windy wondered if the killer liked it because it was clear, less noticeable. Or maybe just because it was easier to manage.
“I suspect it is when I am trying to tape her mouth that the struggle ensues which knocks over the reading lamp. It stays that way until after I have finished with her. Then I lay the knife on the bed, leaving a bloody mark on the bedspread, remove the packing tape, put the table and lamp back where they should be.” Like the empty place on the table, the mark on the bedspread would have to be measured and photographed, compared with the one from the Johnsons’, but Windy felt fairly confident it would match. There was no question in her mind that the Waters family had died by the same hand as the Johnsons.
Which raised more questions than it answered. The two-bedroom, one-bath apartment the Waters family lived in could have fit into the Johnsons’ pantry. Economics were not the only thing that separated the two families: they lived in different parts of Las Vegas, were different ages, had come from different states originally, were different races, and had different numbers of children. They were both being supported by the fathers in the family, but each man did different work, one a doctor, one a banker. There was no apparent point of similarity, no overlap. Ash would have a dozen men combing through the minutiae of the lives of both families looking for anything—a travel agent, a bath product, a piano teacher, a wrong turn—that could link them. So far they were linked only by a well administered knife cut to the throat.
Windy followed the footprints out of the master bedroom, down the hallway, and toward the second bedroom, the one occupied by the twins, finding what she expected, two dark puddles, two knife prints on top of their Barney comforters. Four trails of blood from the room out to the living room, as though he had carried a body in each arm and a head in each hand. Very efficient.
“I’m not getting any good tread prints, a few partials, but mostly just this mess,” Larry’s voice, not happy, broke into her thoughts. He was pointing to three sheets of plastic attached to cut-up file folders and Windy was relieved to see he had remembered to use smooth paper. She had once had a case destroyed in court because someone in the evidence room had used a pizza box to store electromagnetic lifts of tire treads and the fibers from the cardboard had obliterated the tracks.
The sheets Larry pointed at each showed something that looked like an asterisk, as if an object had been dragged repeatedly and from different angles toward the center. “Do you want me to keep going?” he asked, daring her to waste his time with more busy work.
“Show me exactly where these came from,” Windy said. Larry aimed a finger at the places and looked up, surprised, when she said, “Oh boy.”
“Does this mean something to you?” he asked but she was gone. When she came back he had eight asterisks lined up next to the places he’d found them, and was taking measurements of the two shallow divots she had pointed out. She was carrying a chair from the kitchen.
“What are these?”
“Footmarks.” She placed the chair over one of them. Its other three feet sat exactly on three of the places Larry had just lifted the star-shaped rubbings from, and it was clear from the other indentation and marks that another identical chair had been placed next to it. The star-shaped tracks Larry had lifted showed where someone had tried to rub out the indentations in the carpeting, like with a toe.
Larry was a little impressed. “Okay, so he brought two kitchen chairs into the living room,” he said. “But why? So he could sit there and look at th—” He stopped to clear his throat rather than finishing.
“No. He wasn’t sitting here,” Windy said, looking at the chairs. “If it had been only one chair, that might have been the explanation but with two, and the depth of the indentations—no. There is a large mirror in the master bedroom. I think he carried it out here and propped it on the chairs.”
“Why?”
“So he could sit there—” Windy pointed to the gap between the twins and Mrs. Waters on the bloody couch, the gap framed by Mrs. Waters’s extended arm. “—and look at himself.” Trying the family on for size, Windy thought, her mind going to Goldilocks and the three bears: one family too big, the other too small. Would he stop when he hit just right?
CHAPTER 17
Larry had his face under control when the rest of the crime scene team came in two minutes later. Ned Blight, seeming more composed than the others, probably because he had more experience, gave Windy a grim but deferential salute and said, “I was thinking I’d start in the kitchen.” Windy nodded, got the rest of the team started on bagging the victims’ hands and printing the doors. She asked Larry to do his own walk-through, to see if he came up with a different interpretation of the crime than she had, and went back to staring at the kitchen chair.
Unlike Larry, what struck her most was not the fact that the killer had wanted to sit among his victims and admire his handiwork, see how it felt. It was that he’d wanted to keep that a secret. He had replaced the chairs and the mirror to their original locations, and the asterisk-shaped scuff marks showed he’d tried to even out the carpeting again afterward. If he had not missed two of the divots, they would not have known to look for his voyeuristic moment. Usually when a killer posed bodies he did it to exert control over the reaction of the people who found them. But this killer appeared to have another agenda—one he wanted kept secret.
Which, theoretically, made it that much more valuable for the investigation.
Theoretically. In reality Windy had no idea what it meant.
How and What, not Why, she reminded herself. That is your job. “Why” was what gave you bad dreams and woke you up at night with goose bumps, feeling inadequate, asking, Why did I have to push, Why—
Leave Why to someone else.
But the question was twisting into her stomach when Larry came up to make his own report on the sequence of events. Understanding how the crime happened, the order in which killings took place, would help the criminalistics team more efficiently collect and work with the evidence. Windy had an idea but she knew that no matter how hard she tried to be
scientific, her take on the scene would be subjective, so she always assigned someone else to work it out on their own. Chances were that neither of their theories were exactly right, but each of them might reveal holes in the other’s.
Larry started with, “I got it down cold,” setting Windy on edge right off. She had asked Larry to do it to punish herself for not liking his mannerisms, not giving him the benefit of the doubt, but he was making it hard. He said, “Our guy does the same thing here he did at the Johnson house, putting on Dr. Waters’s shoes—the wear pattern matches the ones I picked up in the living room and there were fibers from the carpet on the soles, so he was wearing them when he rubbed those marks out. Anyway, he slips on the good doctor’s wingtips, then makes the little girls lie on their stomachs on the bed and kills them, then does the mom the same way in her room.”
“Why lie on their stomachs?”
“Those huge puddles of blood? The only way you could get those is if he makes the vics lie on their stomachs, pulls it so their necks are at the edge of the bed, and slashes down.”
“That doesn’t explain the blood on the ceiling. Or the blood on the front of their thighs.”
“That’s from being dragged through the puddle.”
“Wouldn’t they have blood on their calves then too? And did you find any drag marks?”
“No.” Larry, getting defensive now, his color rising. “Okay, what do you think happened?”
“I think he made them kneel at the edge of the bed and killed them there, the knife coming up from underneath, propelling some of the blood onto the ceiling, while most of it drained down their fronts and on their thighs.”
“If you already knew what you wanted to hear, why did you ask me to do this?”
“It’s not what I want to hear. It’s what happened.”
“Sure. Okay, if they were kneeling, why isn’t there any blood on their feet? You know, like on the backs of their feet? Wouldn’t the blood fly there.” He picked up Minette’s foot, showing how pristine it was.
Windy said, “They were wearing socks,” and pointed to an indented line just above the ankle of all three victims.
“I didn’t find any bloody socks. Where are they?”
“I don’t know. I guess he must have taken them with him.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“No, not yet,” Windy agreed.
“And why did he make them kneel? What is that about? He would have had more leverage with them on the bed.”
“Maybe he was letting them pray.”
“You seem to have an answer for everything. I guess you don’t need me.”
Windy reminded herself that she was supposed to be a professional. She’d had to do that too many times today. “That’s not true. How do you know he killed the children first? He killed the mother first at the Johnsons’.”
Larry’s confidence was back in a flash. “Maybe so, but here at the Waterses there were two children in one room. Tactically, he’d want to subdue them first, before heading out for his real target, the mother. I’ve been reading a book by this profiler guy, Kit Wilson? He talks about how these guys work, getting more violent every time they kill, you know, more like moving toward killing their mothers. All these guys have a thing about their mothers. So maybe, leaving her alive a little longer it, like, increased his thrill.”
Great, Windy thought. Larry could not have picked a better way to antagonize her. She wasn’t crazy about profilers in general, they tended to screw up crime scenes, but she’d worked with Kit Wilson at the FBI and thought he was a nincompoop. She’d even told him that to his face. She couldn’t say that to Larry, though, so she settled for, “Is there any evidence to support this idea? And how did he keep Mrs. Waters from interfering while he killed her children?”
“Locked her in her bedroom.” Larry looking triumphant now. “The key is missing.”
“Do you know where your bedroom door key is? Most people don’t. It’s the first key to get lost in a house, particularly an old house, with old hardware. But let’s say it was there, and Mrs. Waters was locked in. Wouldn’t she have tried to break out? If a killer was roaming her house, with her kids, wouldn’t she be fighting like crazy? Did you see any marks on the door? Kick marks? Pry marks?”
“Nothing like that. Maybe he tied her up.”
“Is there any sign of that? Any bruising on her wrists?”
“He could have used something soft like a T-shirt. Or he could have threatened her.”
“He could have. But did he? Let’s focus on what we know. We know Mrs. Waters fought with the killer in her room because the lamp was knocked over, but there is no evidence she was held captive in there. And then there’s the blood trail from her bedroom into the living room.”
“What do you mean? There is no blood trail from the master bedroom into the living room.” Larry smarmy now, the kid with all the answers at school.
“Exactly,” Windy agreed. “No blood trail because she wasn’t bleeding any more when she was moved. She was killed first and bled out on her bed. The side of the couch the twins were on is the really bloody part. Their bodies were moved when they were fresher.”
“Okay,” Larry said, not so confident now, but not giving up, especially, Windy surmised, because Ned Blight had just joined them. “So maybe she was killed first. So what?” Then, getting an idea. “Hey, there’s no evidence that the girls tried to break out of their room either? Right? If he locked them in there, how come they didn’t kick the walls? And—” really warming up now, “—they don’t have signs of having been tied up or anything.”
“I know,” Windy said quietly. “I can’t figure that out.” Getting Cate to stay in her room quietly was an almost superhuman feat; achieving that with two six-year-olds would have required—she did not want to think about what it might have required. “What do you make of the Lysol?”
“What?”
“In the air. I’m pretty sure that’s what it is, I’ll know for sure when I get the results back from the lab of the air sample. I had an officer ask Dr. Waters and he didn’t spray any. I think the killer did it.”
“Why would he do that?”
“My best guess would be that he has or thinks he has a bodily odor that he is uncomfortable with. See if you can come up with anything. I’ll be in the twins’ room trying to figure out how he kept them subdued.”
She heard Larry mutter “This is bullshit,” as she walked away, probably purposely saying it loud enough to get a rise out of her, but she didn’t pursue it. He might think of it as personal, but deep down she knew it wasn’t. She had given him a hard job and he had to be frustrated.
There was a corkboard hanging on the back of the closet door in the girls’ room, covered with thumbtacked pieces of paper, a fancy-looking certificate proclaiming that Minette had read a book by herself, another one, with a scratch and sniff sticker on it, praising Martine’s tooth brushing skills, a few drawings. She was standing in front of it when she heard someone come in, and turned to see Ned.
“I hate working cases with dead kids,” he said.
She nodded. “Did you find anything in the kitchen?”
Ned didn’t answer right away, sucking on something in his cheek. “Sorry,” he explained. “It’s tobacco. I don’t chew any more but I always have a plug when there are corpses around. Keeps the taste out of my mouth.”
Windy knew what he meant. Crime scenes had smells, but they went away when you took a shower. Or two. There was a taste, though, that got into your mouth and stayed with you.
“Anyway,” Ned said, “I didn’t believe it at first. Spent the past hour in there looking around, another one convincing myself. After that, I’ve got no choice. There’s not a sign of blood anywhere in the kitchen. Not a drop. According to the father, there’s an Elvis lunch pail missing, but he’s not even sure of the last time he saw it, it could have been months ago, and that’s it for suspicious circumstances. We found the bread and the strawberry jam in the
cupboard but the only prints on them were Mrs. Waters’s. No smudges like at the Johnsons’. No blood. Nothing. As I see it, there are two possibilities.” Ned held up two fingers. “Either he cleaned up too good for us this time. Or he’s started skipping meals.”
The third option occurred to Windy ten minutes later.
CHAPTER 18
Ash had just come through the door to see if the bodies were ready for the medical examiner’s people to take them away for autopsy when he heard a noise in front of him and saw Windy leaning over the part of the couch where the twins’ bodies were. The noise was something between a gasp and a groan.
“What did you find?” Ash asked.
Windy swung around, startled, and very pale. She said, “There are crumbs on the back of Martine’s nightgown.”
Ash frowned, understanding only that this was somehow horrible, but not why.
Windy took two breaths. “There was no blood in the kitchen this time,” she began, her voice almost steady, “so we thought, maybe, he had decided against a family breakfast. But then I had an idea.” She moved toward the kitchen.
Ash followed her in, saw her opening the refrigerator. “What are you doing?”
“Checking the jam. The strawberry jam was in the cupboard with the bread. They both had Mrs. Waters’s prints on them.”
“Of course. I mean, she lived here.”
“Fresh ones. On top. The twins made Dr. Waters his sandwiches when he worked late and then chose a lunch pail for him from the collection under the sink. He worked late today. Yesterday. Whenever.” Windy shook her head with impatience as she lifted a bag of Nature’s Best 100% Whole Wheat Bread from the cupboard and laid it on the counter.
“Mrs. Waters’s prints,” Ash was repeating as she unscrewed the top of the jam jar. “Do you think he used her hands, after he’d killed her, to—” he started to say, then stopped. Next time it will be worse. He said, “He had breakfast with them when they were still alive.”
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