Blood Will Tell (10 page)

Kenny blinked and shook himself. What had he been doing? He was still holding the lid of the cat food can. He rinsed it and set it aside for recycling. Later he would tuck it into the cleaned can and crimp the edges so it couldn't slide out and cut someone.

Cut someone.

Oh God.

He had bought his own produce knife, and he kept it sharp for work, but he had never imagined he would put it to the use it had been put to last night. He kept telling himself that. It had all been a terrible accident.

Today along the crime scene tape there had been talk about installing dead bolts, buying guns, and resurrecting the neighborhood watch. His neighbors were convinced there was a crazed killer on the loose. They attributed all kinds of powers to him. According to them, the killer must be strong and smart. Fiendishly clever.

They wouldn't have believed him if he had stepped in front of them and confessed every detail.

Kenny, that quiet guy who had lived with his mom forever? The guy who had never left even as everyone he had grown up with moved away? Even as they went on to college and girlfriends and wives and families, to new cities and new countries. Or at least new zip codes. That sad-sack mumbler? The one who worked as a produce guy at Strickler's in the West Hills?

He had watched and listened from the sidelines. It sounded like the girl had still been barely alive when someone found her this morning.

All night, when he hadn't been able to sleep, she had been deep in her own kind of sleep, only a hundred yards away. When he had left, he had been sure she was dead.

Looks could be deceiving. Next time he would have to be sure.

Only what was he thinking? There wasn't going to be a next time.

Definitely not.

 

CHAPTER 24

ALEXIS

MONDAY

ROLLER COASTER

On the way back to the sheriff's office, the van was absolutely quiet. Some people leaned against the windows; others just closed their eyes and let their heads hang down.

Alexis stared out at the flat darkness pressing against the glass. It was punctuated by occasional streaks of light from a passing car. Only Bran could make her forget this day. Tonight they had planned to get together to study. After hearing about the search, he had texted, asking if they should cancel, but she needed to see him.

It wasn't just that spending nine hours on your hands and knees was exhausting. The whole day had been a roller coaster. The excitement of finding the mitten, and then later the horror of realizing just what Nick had crawled through. Despite his tough talk, he had almost passed out, and Alexis had felt queasy herself when he showed her his stained gloves. Her stomach twisting, she had checked her own, but they seemed to have been in contact with nothing more than dirt.

And then there was the moment when she had gone to her knees in front of the victim's grieving mother and gathered her into her arms. Alexis had reacted out of instinct, an instinct honed by years of experience. The older woman had been crying so hard it was like trying to hold someone in the grip of a seizure, wordless and primal. And the press of the woman's hot, wet cheek against hers, the sound of her ragged wails in her ear, had been all too familiar.

Alexis's mother was bipolar. Some people still called it manic depression. Which was certainly more descriptive. When she was in the grip of the depressive phase, she suffered the blackest of moods. Alexis had lost count of the times she had hidden the scissors and knives, or worried that shoelaces and bathrobe ties might be too tempting, or the times she had held her mother while she cried. Or grabbed her hands when she beat her fists against her own head.

“You are the only reason I even bother to stay alive,” her mother had told her during one of her dark times, her face red and twisted and wet from weeping. “If I'm not your mother, then I'm nothing.”

That was one of the reasons why Alexis was careful to make sure that no adult ever found out exactly what her home life was like.

For one thing, what if the authorities separated them and her mom killed herself? And for another, who knew what kind of place they might send Alexis to? She had heard enough horror stories about foster care to know that anything was possible.

A few weeks ago her mom had been in a manic phase. A whirling dervish, seeming to thrive without food or sleep. Barefoot despite the cold, she had insisted on blessing people in the park.

But after an involuntary stay in a mental health ward, she had come home with a crumpled brown paper bag holding a new batch of pills. Right now she was on lithium, Neurontin, Celexa, Klonopin, and a couple more drugs whose names Alexis couldn't remember.

The miracle was that so far they seemed to be working.

It wasn't as if her mom were cured. Alexis knew that. Cured was too much to hope for. The doctors never used that word or even the word
normal
. Instead they said
asymptomatic
.

Still, it was wonderful to be the kid again. To have her mom cook and clean and ask how school was going. To have her make sense.

Ruby's voice interrupted Alexis's thoughts. “You look very tired.”

Alexis turned. Trust Ruby to state the obvious. The girl didn't have any filters. Last week in class they had practiced moving injured people. One of the sheriff's deputies had been playing mock patient. Ruby had told him, “You're too fat to lift easily,” and not even noticed how the guy winced and tried to suck in his beer belly.

“I am tired,” Alexis agreed. She looked at Ruby, really looked. Not just at her bright red hair and milk-pale skin, but at her expression, at how she was chewing her gum faster than seemed humanly possible. The other girl dropped her gaze. Trying to look Ruby straight in the eye was like trying to bring together two magnets with the same polarity. Your eyes just pushed hers away. “You don't look tired at all.”

Ruby's face held a small, secret smile. She hardly ever smiled. She really didn't do much with her face. Unlike most girls, you couldn't guess what she was thinking—or what she wanted you to think she was thinking—by looking at her expression.

“It was an interesting day. Seeing that double perimeter. And I've read about that casting material, but I've never seen it used.”

Alexis only nodded. She hadn't paid that much attention to either of those things, but she knew if she showed even a tiny bit of interest, Ruby would talk nonstop. When the van pulled up at the sheriff's office, Bran's small brown Honda was already waiting in the parking lot. After calling a good-bye to Ruby and putting her pack in his trunk, Alexis climbed into the passenger seat.

“It's so good to see you,” she said. “Today was tough.” Tears stung her nose. “Really tough.” She waited for him to offer sympathetic words or pull her into a hug.

“Worse than yesterday?” He sounded skeptical.

“Way worse. I mean, for one thing, this girl was murdered.” This morning, Mitchell had told them that even though Mariana had had to have surgery to fix her broken leg, the doctors still expected her to make a full recovery. “Today Nick actually ended up crawling through the victim's blood.” She shivered.

“Oh.” Bran started the car, looking straight ahead. “You still need to get your books, right?”

“Right. And maybe we could stop at Mickey D's?” She hadn't eaten much of her sandwich at lunch.

“Sure. Whatever.” His voice was a monotone.

She finally focused on him. “What's wrong?”

“Nothing.”

Thinking back to how he had acted last night, she made herself say it. “Are you mad at me, Bran?”

It took him a half beat to answer her, and during that space of time, some part of Alexis died. When he turned his head and his eyes finally met hers, they were blindly innocent.

“Mad? Of course I'm not mad.” He turned back to the street, signaled, and then pulled into the order lane of the nearby McDonald's.

Maybe he was telling the truth. Maybe he wasn't mad. But he was definitely
something
.

He ordered a double hamburger, large fries, and a large chocolate shake. Alexis mentally counted her money and decided to get two things from the dollar menu. He didn't protest when she dropped the two dollars into his lap. He didn't do anything, including look at her. Or talk to her. All he did was pull forward to the pickup window.

Alexis tried again. “But it sort of seems like you're not here. Like you're thinking about something else. You were the same way last night.”

The cashier slid open the window and Bran handed over the money, then he gave Alexis the bag. “I've got a lot of things on my mind.”

“Like what?” She kept her voice bright as she half unwrapped his burger, releasing the smell of warm grease, and handed it to him.

“Things.” He pushed the word at her. “Why do you have to keep asking? Can't you see I don't want to talk about it?”

It felt as if he had slapped her. “Maybe you should just take me home, then.”

“Maybe that's a good idea.”

Alexis hadn't known Bran long, but she had thought she knew him. But the guy she knew wouldn't act like this. They rode in silence. Alexis tried to keep her breathing quiet, even as it hitched in her chest. She left her food in the bag. She wasn't hungry anymore. Bran's hamburger was in his lap, but he wasn't eating, either. A week ago they had fed each other french fries.

When he stopped in front of her building, she turned toward him. But he kept his hands on the wheel, his gaze on the road. “Good-bye,” she said. In her own ears, it sounded like a question.

Bran still didn't move, didn't look at her. “Good-bye.” It sounded like an answer. An answer she didn't want to hear.

She managed to hold back her tears until she put her key in the lock of her apartment. But as she turned the handle, she started to sob. Then the door swung open into blackness.

“Mom?” she called out, holding her breath.

No answer. But what was that in the far corner of the living room?

“Mom?”

The McDonald's bag fell from her suddenly boneless hands.

 

CHAPTER 25

PAUL

TUESDAY

IT'S ALL BLOOD

Detective Paul Harriman sat in the observation room overlooking the autopsy suite. Below him was the dead girl, the medical examiner, a pathology assistant, and a criminalist from the forensic division.

“Can you hear me okay?” Medical examiner Thomas—Tommy, except when he was testifying in court—Chapman looked at him over the edge of his surgical mask. Only on TV did pathologists talk with uncovered mouths over victim's bodies, spraying tiny drops of DNA-containing spit.

“Loud and clear.” Paul took another slug of his twenty-ounce mocha with four shots of espresso. Now it was time to see what Lucy Hayes could tell them. IDing her had been straightforward. Her wallet was still in her purse, and the picture on her driver's license matched the dead girl. Maybe other counties did it differently, but here you would never have the family ID the victim. Too hard for everyone.

Lucy lay faceup on the stainless steel autopsy table. Both hands—the one with the mitten and the one without—were covered with brown paper bags, tied at the forearm. She was still wearing her coat, sweater, and bra, but they had been cut up the front and back by the paramedics so they could examine the knife wound and see if there were others. If Lucy had made it to the ER alive, all her clothes would have been removed there.

If, if, if.
There were no more
if
s for Lucy.

Tommy pressed a floor pedal and began to dictate into the transcribing machine. He reeled off the facts of what had once been Lucy: her race, sex, age, hair color, eye color. “Decedent is wearing a thigh-length dark blue Columbia parka, a black V-neck sweater, jeans, and calf-length black boots.” As he spoke, the criminalist snapped photos.

After removing the bag, Tommy carefully examined her bare hand. “I don't see anything under her nails, but I'm still going to collect both sets,” he told Paul. First he swabbed them, then he clipped them, putting the clippings into a test tube. With luck, there had been a struggle and she had scratched tiny fragments of tissue from her killer's skin.

Paul leaned forward to speak into the mic. “How long do you think we'll have to wait for test results?”

“Two days, three at the outside,” Tommy said. Before moving on to her other hand, he changed gloves and got a new test tube so he wouldn't transfer DNA from one part of her body to another. Later he would take a blood sample so Lucy's own DNA could be ruled out from whatever the crime lab found. Her single mitten went into its own evidence bag.

Next Tommy and the assistant took off Lucy's clothes, rolling her from side to side. The back of her clothing was soaked with blood, and Tommy noted the holes in her jacket and shirt from the knife. The assistant put each item in its own paper bag, stapled it, and labeled it with the case number.

Her clothes would go to the crime lab to be examined for trace evidence, particularly touch DNA. Back when Paul started, DNA tests had required a bloodstain at least the size of a dime. Now all it took was about a hundred cells—the same amount left behind in a single fingerprint. And if you happened to be dragging someone, you were leaving behind far more than a hundred cells. Paul just hoped the killer hadn't been wearing gloves. Of course, the lab might find DNA from three people: the victim, the perpetrator, and the boyfriend. The last two of which might be the same thing.

The sad truth was, the first place you looked for murder suspects was among friends and family.

Before Tommy opened up the body, he X-rayed it. Paul hoped they might find the tip of the knife broken off inside her, but there was nothing unusual on the films.

When Tommy turned on the saw and made the Y-incision in her torso, Paul didn't look away. Didn't even blink. The only time he was no good at remaining detached was when the victim was a baby.