Amid the Shadows (3 page)

5

“So,
that’s
Christine,” Buckley said.
 
They stood at the window upstairs watching
Christine down on the street, fumbling with a car seat in the back of her
Honda.
 
She finally managed to get it
right and buckled Sarah in.

 
“Yeah.”

Buckley nodded.
 
“She’s cute.”

“Shut up,” Griffin replied, watching the car drive
off.

Buckley turned from the window and looked at
him.
 
“So, what was the problem again?”

“She has…some issues.”

He nodded.
 
Both men turned around when someone called out for them.

“Phone call on line six!”

Griffin walked to a nearby desk and picked up the
phone. “This is Griffin.”

Buckley turned and watched a large television on
the wall where several officers were following the coverage of the explosion at
Saint Patrick’s.
 
All of the major news
channels were onsite.
 
As he watched,
another officer approached and handed him a Post-it note.

After a few minutes, Griffin thanked the caller
and hung up.
 
He turned back to
Buckley.
 
“Do you know a Glen Smith over
at FBI?”

Buckley shook his head.

“Said he was supposed to meet with Barbara Baxter
today.”

“About what?”

Griffin shrugged.
 
“He didn’t know.
 
Says she
wouldn’t tell him over the phone.”
 
He
paused.
 
“What did she do for a living?”

“Secretary for a law firm.”

“Right.” Griffin looked out the window thinking.

Buckley held up his note.
 
“We just got a message from forensics; looks
like they found blood in the stairwell at the hotel.
 
And it doesn’t match the victim.”

“Let’s check it out.”

In the forensics lab, Patty Eisendrath sat across
the room on a stool, dressed in her usual white lab coat and staring into a
large electron microscope.
 
Eisendrath
was arguably the best forensic scientist in New York state and, according to
Buckley, one of the prettiest, too.
 
So
far though, his queries had resulted in zero dates.
 
Which was just another reason why Griffin
considered her about as smart as they came.

They walked up behind her and waited quietly.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” she said without taking
her eyes from the microscope lenses.

The detectives looked at each other.
 
Before they could speak, she answered their
question.

“It’s Buckley’s cologne.”

Buckley, shorter and stockier than Griffin and
showing the first signs of losing some hair, almost blushed.

Patty turned away from the instrument and held up
a finger while she jotted down some quick notes.
 
She looked up expectantly.
 
“You obviously got my message.
 
Did you check out the hotel?”

Griffin nodded.
 
“We just came from there.
 
Saw the
blood in the stairwell.
 
Looks like he
made a run for it out the back parking lot.”

“He and the others,” she said standing up.

“Others?” Buckley asked.
 

They followed her to a large desk where she sat
down and brought up a computer file, displaying several pictures of blood
drops.
 
“These are the blood samples we
found descending the stairwell and out through the parking lot.
 
Same blood type, same DNA, so one person was
bleeding.”

Griffin leaned in for a closer look.
 
“You said others?”

Patty nodded and pointed to one of the drops.
 
You can see a pattern here in this
drop.”
 
She zoomed in to display a higher
resolution image of shapes within the drop of blood.

“What is that?” Buckley asked.

“That’s a shoe print.”

“A shoe print?” he asked again.
 
“It just looks like some random markings.”

“Most of it is, but here,” she highlighted an area
of the screen, “you have a few impressions that are clearly part of a design
from a shoe tread.”
 
She zoomed in on
another large drop.
 
“And here we have
part of a tread again, but this one’s a little different.”
 
She spun her chair to face them.
 
“And since it’s nearly impossible to step on
your own blood drops while running, that means there was a minimum of three
people fleeing the scene, probably at the same time.”

Buckley raised his eyebrow.
 
“So we need to start tracking down sole
patterns of popular shoes.”
 

Patty smirked.
 
“No, I just thought you might find it helpful.
 
There’s not enough here to determine what
kind of shoes they
 
were.
 
Besides, we would have to factor in
additional variables such as speed of the run, the body’s natural tendency to
pivot the foot while running, and a host of other things.”

“Okay,” Griffin said, looking at her.
 
“I’m guessing you didn’t call us in to show
us something that was just
helpful
.”

Patty frowned.
 
“Of course not.
 
What I wanted to
show you was the other sample, which is much more interesting.”

“What other sample?” Griffin asked.

“They didn’t tell you there was another sample?”

Both Griffin and Buckley looked at each other and
shook their heads.

Patty smiled.
 
“Well then, this is really going to cook your noodle.”
 
She brought up another sample.
 
This one was much larger.
 
“The blood on the stairs was noticed first,
which is why those were the first samples.
 
However, when the investigators came back upstairs, they checked all the
floors and carpets with Luminol.”

Griffin and Buckley were both very familiar with
Luminol.
 
It was the crystalline agent
used to make blood visible in a darkened room, primarily by reacting with the
hemoglobin in blood.
 
Every forensics
team used it.

“When they sprayed the hallway outside the room,”
Patty continued, “it lit up like a Christmas tree!”

“So there was more blood in the hallway,” Buckley
surmised.

“Not just more blood,” Patty corrected, “a
lot
of blood!
 
And from a different person.”

She brought up a picture of the hallway.
 
“It wasn’t noticed originally because the
carpet is dark red.
 
But judging from the
sheer amount detected, this person stayed in that hallway for a long time.”

Griffin looked at Buckley.
 
“So someone else was injured, and they just
decided to hang around?”

Buckley shook his head.
 
“But security was there in a few
minutes.
 
How much could someone bleed
standing in the hallway for three or four minutes?”

“Well, let’s put it this way,” Patty said folding
her arms. “I’ve never seen that much blood without a dead person lying next to
it.
 
Whoever it was, I would say they had
less than twenty minutes to make it to an emergency room, at the most.”

6

The site of the Saint Patrick’s explosion was
somber, with only a third of the cathedral still standing.
 
The rest of the area was leveled and covered
in dust and rubble over twenty feet high.
 
Every pane of glass, even from the walls that were still standing, was
gone and now scattered in millions of fragments, some landing as far as two
hundred yards away.

On three sides, the site was surrounded by
emergency vehicles and construction equipment.
 
Three days later, the crews were still finding bodies beneath the
destruction.

Several bulldozers and backhoes belched smoke and
picked through the rubble, lifting and moving the largest pieces so the search
and rescue crews could comb below them.
 
From a distance, hundreds of people watched and hoped for miracles, for
another person to be carried out with a stretcher instead of a body bag.

Among all of the rescue workers, one individual
was not looking for survivors.
 
He was
looking at something else.
 
Carefully
stepping through the large pieces of crushed stone, he examined the walls that
were still standing.
 
He looked at them
thoughtfully, then turned and traced out where the cathedral’s multiple altars
had been located.

His tanned, bald head was covered in a light
coating of dust as he methodically cleaned the debris from an altar and
examined it.
 
Flipping up a pocket on his
khaki style shirt, the man withdrew a small camera.
 
He zoomed in and snapped several high
resolution pictures before standing up, pushing the debris back in place with
his boot.

7

Christine sat at the table with the phone to her
ear. While she listened, Christine watched Sarah slowly wander around the small
living room looking closely at all the framed photographs.
 
Most of the pictures were of Christine in her
younger years and included what appeared to be her parents, always smiling with
their arms around her.
 
Sarah continued
studying the pictures and noticed that her father was missing from a number of
them.
 
The more recent photos included
only Christine and her mother.

Christine was speaking to Liz Iverson, a longtime
friend and now her boss.
 
Christine’s old
department had been disbanded due to budget cuts. Luckily Liz had been able to
make a position available for her in her city social services department, in spite
of her lack of experience.

“Okay, that’s fine,” Liz said through the phone’s
speaker, “but she’ll need to see a doctor tomorrow.”

Christine shrugged and looked across the room at
Sarah.
 
She kept her voice low.
 
“I’ll try, but she was really reluctant.”

“That’s normal.
 
Where are you now?”
 

The pitch in Christine’s voice changed
slightly.
 
“Um, my apartment.”

Liz’s sigh could be heard through the phone.
 
“Christine, it’s against policy to take them
to our homes.”

“I know,” she replied.
 
“But she fell asleep in the car, she wouldn’t
go to the doctor’s, and she didn’t want to go into the office.
 
I didn’t know what else to do.”
 
Christine watched Sarah bend down and gently
pet the top of her cat’s head.

“Alright, alright,” Liz
said.
 
“It’s not the end of the
world.
 
Just get her into the office as
soon as you can.”

Christine nodded.
 
“Okay, I will.”

“Don’t worry Chris,
you’re doing fine.
 
I’ll see you
tomorrow.”
 
With that Liz hung up, and
Christine pushed the button on her cordless phone to end the call.
 
She sighed and looked around her tiny
apartment.
 
How did she manage to get
herself into this?
 
It was her first real
assignment and it felt like she was already doing everything wrong.

She looked up when she
heard her cat hiss.
 
Sarah was grasping
the cat by the tail, trying to keep it from going through the cat door.
 

“Oh honey!” Christine
exclaimed and ran over to help.
 
“It’s
okay, she’s allowed to go outside.”
 
She
grabbed Sarah’s hand and gently pulled the cat’s tail free.
 
Sarah whined as the small calico quickly
darted away, jumping through the tiny plastic door and leaving it swinging
behind her.

“It’s okay, she’ll be
back.”

Sarah frowned and
abruptly pulled away from Christine.
 
It
was hard to tell whether she was sad or irritated.
 

“Are you hungry Sarah?”
she asked, standing back up.
 

Sarah nodded and
lowered herself down on the couch.

“Do you like eggs?”
Christine walked into the small kitchen and opened the refrigerator.
 
“I think I have some cereal, or maybe…a piece
of pizza?”

There was no answer.

She turned and looked
back around the corner.
 
“Sarah?”

Sarah was looking at
the pictures again.
 

“Is this your
mommy?”
 
Sarah asked pointing to one of
the pictures.
 

Christine walked up
behind her.
 
“Yes.”

Sarah looked closer at
another.
 
It showed Christine’s mother
standing next to her wearing a white lab coat with her shoulder length brown
hair put up.
 
“Why is she wearing that?”

Christine leaned in and
looked at the picture.
 
“My mother was a
pharmacist.”

Sarah raised her
eyebrows excitedly.
 
“She worked on a
farm
?”

“No, no.”
 
Christine chuckled. “A pharmacist is someone
who gets medicine for people.”

“Oh,” Sarah said with a
hint of disappointment.
 
She pointed to
another, older photo.
 
“Is this your
daddy?”

“Mmm hmm.”
 

Sarah looked up with
her large green eyes.
 
“What happened to
him?”

“He’s…in heaven.”
 
Christine frowned and changed the
subject.
 
“Hey, do you want to sleep in
my big bed tonight?”

Sarah shrugged her tiny
shoulders.
 

“It’s a great bed, and
I’ll be right here on this couch.
 
Just a
few steps away.”

Sarah nervously looked
at the couch and then back at the bedroom door.

“And you know what?”
Christine added. “My kitty cat Cassie likes to sleep in my bed.
 
Maybe she’ll sleep with you.”

“She won’t,” Sarah said
sadly, looking down at the floor.

“Well, she probably
just needs to get used to you.”
 
Christine bent down and gave her an awkward squeeze around the
shoulders.
 
“Okay then,” she said
clearing her throat, “let me see what I can find to eat.”