Darby McCormick: Fear The Dark Part 4

Darby frowned, thinking.

Bleach wouldn't fluoresce unless it had been sprayed with luminol. When that chemical reacted with bleach, it gave off a blue glow. Here inside the toilet she was seeing a dull green glow. Some chemical other than bleach had been dumped inside the toilet.

But what? She doubted the killer had brought his own stuff to clean up with. More than likely he had used something here inside the house.

Darby examined the floor around the toilet. Nothing fluoresced, but she found a residue of a white, powdery substance. It definitely wasn't talc; this was more granular. After she collected a sample, she placed an evidence marker next to it, got to her feet and moved to the linen closet across from the shower. She used a pen to open the bi-fold doors.

Five shelves. The bottom two packed with an array of cleaning products bought in bulk from a warehouse club like Costco. Darby went down on one knee and, with her gloved hands, rooted through the rolls of paper towels, cans of disinfectant, and bottles of Scrubbing Bubbles, Mr Clean, Windex and Clorox.

In the far back of the bottom shelf, tucked against the wall and hidden behind rolls of toilet paper, she found a blue bucket with a handle.

Darby removed the bucket. It was dry and empty, and it didn't smell of bleach. When she ran the forensic light inside the bucket, dull green patches glowed from the plastic walls.

'Did he use that bucket?' Williams asked.

'Maybe. Why else hide it in the far back of the bottom shelf, behind all the rolls of toilet paper? The bucket and the toilet have the same green glow.'

'Bleach?'

'No. Something else.'

Darby rooted through the rows of chemicals on the shelves and in the cabinets underneath the sink. Then she returned to the bedroom. While Coop set up his camera to take close-up shots of the victims, she ran the forensic light across the hardwood floor and walls, the victim's clothing, the bedding and furniture. The blood appeared black in her goggles.

The wall to the right of the ivory armchair glowed with dull green patches. She found more green patches and smears on the skirting board, and in and around the chair.

'This is where he cleaned up,' Darby said. 'He wiped down almost everything in this corner.'

She told Coop and Williams about the green marks she'd found inside the bathroom.

'Bleach doesn't fluoresce under an FLS unless it's been treated with something like luminol, Coop said.

I found a bottle of Mr Clean in the linen closet,' Darby said. 'That product does react to FLS it glows green. The marks along the wall and floor are faint, which, if I had to guess, means that there was a faint residue of Mr Clean or something similar in the bucket and he moved the chair to clean behind it. I found a few drip marks along the side and the back splash marks from when he used a rag or sponge or whatever to wipe down this area. He moved the chair so that he could clean the wall, floor and skirting board with a rag or sponge. Whatever he used, I didn't find it in bathroom trash can.'

'Might have used the Mr Clean, or taken it with him.'

'But not the bucket. Decided to hide it instead.'

Outside, Darby heard an approaching car engine.

Williams had heard it too. 'Probably some of my guys,' he said, shutting his notebook. 'Them, or the coroner. Excuse me.'

Coop was on his knees, his gaze roving across the wall and floorboards.

'What the h.e.l.l would he be cleaning up here, in this corner?' he said, more to himself than to her.

'I don't know,' Darby replied. 'But we're going to tear this room apart until we find out.'

10.

The two agents on loan from the Denver office were a Mutt-and-Jeff pair named Eric Hayes and Victor Ottaviani. Hayes was the short one. He had piercing blue eyes and short and s.h.a.ggy blond hair, and, while his sharp black suit had been tailored for his pencil-thin frame, Darby thought he looked like a skateboarder who had dressed up for a court appearance.

Ottaviani Otto, as he liked to be called was the polar opposite. He was an inch or two shy of six feet and he had a shaved head and a sizeable paunch. His eyegla.s.ses had metal frames that were considered out of style in the eighties, and he wore a drab navy-blue suit that, had it been donated to either Goodwill or the Salvation Army, would have immediately been tossed into the 'discard' pile.

Otto went to help Coop dismantle the bathroom drainpipes and swab them for s.e.m.e.n, while Hayes joined her inside the m.o.f.o. Darby had worked in her fair share of vehicles billed as rolling crime labs, but she found them to be haphazard affairs, a desk or two with only basic forensics equipment hastily installed inside the back of a van or box truck.

Not so with this one. It was housed in a long semi-trailer, and everything inside, from the worktops to the equipment, had been carefully laid out. Smelling of fresh paint and metal, and with its strong lights, white counters and floors, and gla.s.s cabinets, it had a Steve Jobs/Apple store design vibe about it. Everything Darby saw looked showcase perfect, not a scratch anywhere. She wondered if this was the mobile lab's inaugural run.

'm.o.f.o's got pretty much anything you might need stocked in here,' Hayes told her. The soundproofed walls filtered out the dull roar of the vehicle's running diesel engine, but she could feel it rumbling beneath her feet. 'You need any help, just shout.'

Hayes retreated to one end of the trailer to use the ma.s.s spectrometer, which would identify the composition of the oil from the sliding gla.s.s door and the white, powdery residue she had found on the floor near the toilet. Darby took the evidence bags holding the duct tape to a workstation equipped with a Superglue Fingerprint Fuming Chamber.

For the next twenty minutes Darby oriented herself with the equipment and the locations of the tools and chemical solutions. Hayes was right: pretty much everything she needed was inside the trailer, including a tank of liquid nitrogen. Perfect. She went to work on the tape.

In addition to fingerprints, epithelial cells, hair and dead skin, the adhesive side of duct tape also picks up an array of trace evidence. Darby examined all six strips for hair and fibres. She found plenty, along with a lot of blood. After meticulously collecting and labelling each sample, she made very detailed notes on her clipboard.

Duct tape is notoriously sticky. Even if a killer wears gloves, often the adhesive is strong enough to pull off a piece of a latex. Tucked into a torn edge of tape she discovered a sliver of latex half the size of a pencil eraser; on one ragged end was a nearly invisible, pin-sized black smear. After marking and photographing it, she used the tip of a knife to carefully prise it away.

Darby examined the smear underneath a microscope. Given what she saw, she suspected it was ink. The ma.s.s spectrometer would be able to identify the sample.

She placed black fingerprint powder, distilled water and was.h.i.+ng-up liquid inside a gla.s.s beaker and mixed everything together using a fingerprint brush made of camel hair. She put it aside and, slipping on a fresh pair of gloves, moved to the nitrogen tank. She released the tank's locking tab, removed the metal dipstick with the cone attached to the end and poured the liquid nitrogen into the stainless-steel container she had placed on the worktop near the sink.

Carefully she dipped the first strip of tape into the container. She separated the smooth layer from the adhesive side. The smooth layer went into the Superglue Chamber; the adhesive side went on a tray, where she worked the fingerprint solution she'd mixed into it. It went on thick and black, and, after the tape was completely covered, she carried it to the sink. The solution would stick to any fingerprints; the rest would wash away.

Darby held the tape under the running water.

No fingerprints. She bagged the tape and then went to work on the next piece.

'That white powder you found on the bathroom floor?' Hayes said. 'It's an aminoglycoside antibiotic called neomycin. Not the ointment for skin infections I'm talking about an actual oral pill, which I didn't even know existed. It kills bacteria in the intestinal tract. It's used to treat E. coli infection and a condition called hepatic coma. That's when the liver stops filtering out toxins and they build up in the blood. It's also used to treat something called I'm going to mangle this p.r.o.nunciation hepatic encephalopathy, which is a worsening of brain function that happens when the liver fails at removing the aforementioned blood toxins.'

Darby had just finished hanging the last smooth side of tape inside the Superglue Chamber when the back door opened. It was Otto.

'Cooper wants you in the bedroom,' he called out over the diesel engine.

'I bet he does.'

His face coloured slightly. 'I didn't mean '

'Relax, I was just busting your b.a.l.l.s.'

Hayes called out over his shoulder, 'Hey, Otto, pause the s.e.xual hara.s.sment and come on up here and give me a hand with this computer s.h.i.+t. The satellite feed just c.r.a.pped out. Again.'

11.

While Darby had been in the m.o.f.o, the bodies had been removed and taken to the medical examiner's office in Brewster, which serviced Red Hill as well as four other nearby towns. The ME's office, Williams had told them, was, because of years of steep cutbacks, woefully understaffed, and there was a backlog of autopsies. The office had only one full-time doctor on staff. The part-time doctor who had been helping out had retired at the end of last year, and the office's request for a deputy coroner had been denied.

She didn't need to explain the importance of having an autopsy performed before the organs had completely deteriorated. Williams had followed the morgue van to Brewster to plead his case to Ben Stern, the district coroner and chief medical examiner. Williams promised he'd beg on his knees, if necessary to get the autopsies slated for sometime tomorrow.

Darby doubted Ray Williams would have to go to such lengths. Like Coop, the Red Hill detective had been blessed with effortless charm, someone who could get both men and women to do favours, pull strings and jump through hoops with smiles on their faces.

Darby entered the house. She put on a mask, then signed the log and moved up the stairs. Coop appeared in the bedroom doorway, his head and face covered by a hood and a respirator mask.

'Bad news on the duct tape,' she said to him. 'No prints on the adhesive side. The smooth side, I don't know yet; they're in the Superglue Chamber.'

'Not that surprising. We know this guy's careful.'

'What I did find, though, was a small piece of latex that's marked with what looks like ink. If we can get sweat or some skin cells off it, we might have a DNA sample.'

'Otto and I just finished using luminol. Our man didn't use bleach to wipe down anything inside the bathroom, and he didn't dump it down any of the drainpipes either. We took them apart and swabbed them just to be sure. Now come and take a look at this.'

She followed him to the corner of the bedroom. A square section of flooring had been removed and then taken apart and placed inside evidence bags.

'In addition to using Mr Clean on this area, he also used bleach,' Coop said. 'I sprayed it with luminol and everything glowed. The hardwood is old and scuffed it's probably the original flooring. The poly sealant is pretty much gone, which is good news for us. The chemicals and rag or whatever he used couldn't penetrate the crevices between the boards.'

'You find blood?'

'Yeah,' Coop said. 'A ton of it.'

I find Red Hill incredibly depressing this time of year grey winter mornings and short afternoons where the wind hits your skin like a drill bit, keeping people off the streets and tucked inside their homes. By 4 p.m., the world is swallowed inside a pitch-black darkness.

And yet it is during this time what I call my 'black hole hours' when I feel the most alive when the part of me that I keep hidden during the daylight is wide awake, throbbing for attention.

Just a glimpse, I tell myself as I drive. Just a glimpse, and then I'll go home.

My destination tonight is two towns away, a place called Kelly's Bar and Restaurant. I have no idea if Tricia's working tonight; this trip is a last-minute idea, a way to clear my head and think. Still, my heart sinks into an acid pit of worry and fear at the idea of her not being there. I need to see her tonight or I won't be able to sleep.

When I pull into the parking lot, I spot a white Honda Civic with a battered rear b.u.mper and a University of Denver decal stuck to the rear window. The anxiety caged inside my chest uncoils, and I immediately feel myself start to relax.

The bar's Christmas decorations are still up. A fake wreath hangs on the front door and, secured to a railing with a bungee cord, is a big, glowing plastic Santa that I'm pretty sure was rescued from a garbage dump. It's sc.r.a.ped and stained; a chunk of plastic the size of my fist is missing from Santa's head.

The interior is small, just a handful of tables sprinkled around a U-shaped bar of polished walnut, its edges decorated with white lights shaped like icicles. The warm, fetid air smells of fried food, even though the dining-room tables are empty, and there is only one person seated at the bar, an old timer wearing a red flannel s.h.i.+rt. His ruddy cheeks are peppered with patches of grey whiskers, and the remaining wisps of white, downy hair lie across his liver-spotted scalp like feathers.

Standing behind the bar and refilling his gla.s.s with cheap Scotch is the purpose of my visit: Tricia Lamont, a leggy marvel with a prominent nose and jawline, her dark brown hair with its expensive blonde highlights spilling across her shoulders and falling in tangles against the V-neck scoop of a black T-s.h.i.+rt embossed with the bar's name and slogan KELLY'S. WHEN YOU'RE HERE, YOU'RE FAMILY. The tee barely fits her. Whoever owns this place makes his ladies (he employs only women, each one no older than thirty) wear a tee one size too small so it hugs their firm and perky b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Every time one of them bends over or leans forward to pour a drink, as Tricia is doing right now, the bottom of the tee rides up just a wee bit to show a tantalizing flash of belly, every one of their stomachs as flat as a board.

I pull out a corner stool. I'm hanging my coat over the back when Tricia walks up to me, smiling brightly. She doesn't know my name, and she has seen me only once last month, the week before Christmas. The Connelly family John, Lisa and their sixteen-year-old daughter, Stacey, who were, at that time, the Red Hill Ripper's latest victims had been laid to rest that afternoon, and I decided to stop by here for a drink. The family and whatever mistakes that might possibly have been made at the crime scene weighed heavily on my mind.

'What can I get'cha?' Tricia asks, her eyes seemingly alight with genuine pleasure.

'You have k.n.o.b Creek bourbon?'

'Sure do.' She smiles. 'You have great taste.'

'Make it a double, neat.'

As she moves to the bottles, I watch her, l.u.s.tfully conjuring up all sorts of wonderful scenarios of her lying naked in my bed, the soft moan that escapes her lips and caresses my ear as I enter her. The feel of her thighs sliding up against the sides of my chest and the moment when she presses the b.a.l.l.s of her feet against the small of my back and pushes, begging me to go deeper Is Tricia a fighter? Or will she act like the others, mewing and crying and begging for it to stop?

Sarah never fights or cries. Even in the beginning when she first saw the rope, she did what I asked with a smile on her face.

Tricia comes back with my drink and places it on a napkin. She tucks her hair behind an ear, playful and s.e.xy. I suspect correctly, I think that Tricia, with her beautiful looks and hard yoga body, belongs to that cla.s.s of women who view men as walking wallets. A woman who wants to squirt out a kid or two, then hire a nanny so she can drive her new BMW to her Pilates cla.s.s and then spend the afternoon inside a hotel s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g some young stud.

'Want to start a tab?'

Absolutely. I want to stay here and drink and watch you and feed my growing hate and think about that moment when I slip the noose around your neck.

The phone behind the bar rings. 'Excuse me,' she says, and as she walks away I think about what an odd choice she is for me. The four other candidates I have in mind are nowhere near as attractive or as physically fit, but at least I've meticulously researched their backgrounds. Their routines, habits and schedules. I've been inside their homes and on their computers. I've slept in their beds.

That's not the case with Tricia Lamont. I know she's twenty-two, a graduate from the University of Denver with a degree in business communications. Like the good majority of recent college graduates trying to enter the workforce in this monstrous economy, she's had a difficult time landing a job, which is why she's most likely living back home with her parents, Rick and Jennifer, who own three dry-cleaning stores. Tricia works at one and supplements her income by bartending here. I don't know if she has a serious boyfriend or if she's playing the field or whatever these young wh.o.r.es call it these days. I haven't read her texts or been on her computer yet.

My thoughts s.h.i.+ft to the tools sitting inside my trunk. Everything I need to break inside her house is in there. I could leave here and, if her parents aren't home, let myself in and play with her things for an hour or two. I've already cased her house. I know the best way to approach it without being seen, and I know the perfect spot where I can park my car.

It's tempting. As I sip my bourbon, I actually consider it for a moment.

But I know better. Everything comes down to impulse control. That's the key to not getting caught. You don't strike or take any action when you're fevered with bloodl.u.s.t, as I clearly am right now. You plan meticulously and then you execute the plan so you don't make any mistakes. And I can't afford to make any mistakes, especially now that the FBI are in Red Hill.

The news has been circulating all over town for the past week. That's the downside to living in a place as small as Red Hill; anything out of the norm instantly burns its way like a brushfire across the town's grapevine. Terry Hoder, the famous monster hunter, is here in Red Hill to track down the Red Hill Ripper it's all anyone's talking about.

I smile and sip my drink. The Red Hill Ripper. What a ridiculous name.

Tricia stands at the other end of the bar, her back to me as she talks on the cordless. I stare at her, marvelling at the way her dark jeans hug her a.s.s, and wonder if she does that hot yoga thing, Bikram. Probably does that with her girlfriends and then they all go out afterwards to Starbucks and order low-cal scones and skim-milk cappuccinos and talk about how they use men.

I have plenty of time to find out. I can wait. Hoder can't. At some point Hoder and his band of merry men will pack up and leave, and then I'll decide when to take Tricia or one of the others. They're not going anywhere, my candidates. All I have to do is wait and be patient. Then, when the time is right, I'll choose one.

Maybe I'll bring Sarah along with me. No matter what time of night, people aren't afraid to open the door to a woman.

Tricia laughs. It's a lovely sound.

I wonder what her screams would sound like.

Just a glimpse, I promised myself. And now I've had it. Besides, there's one other thing I need to do before I go home. I knock back the rest of my bourbon and place a ten on the table. I pick up my coat, feeling warm and comfortable and satisfied. Hopeful.