Blood Will Tell (7 page)

“So how do you know where to set up the first perimeter?”

“My rule is you want to rope off at least one hundred feet from the farthest item of visible evidence. Since all we have right now is the spot where the girl was found and the brick and I'm hoping to find more, I had them set the crime scene tape 250 feet from there. We don't need anybody destroying evidence by walking on it or picking it up. Some people will tell you this amount of space is too big, but it's way easier to make it smaller than to make it bigger.”

“That makes sense.” Ruby appreciated the logic of it.

He was staring straight into her eyes. “Why do you ask so many questions, anyway?”

Ruby had to look away. What did Harriman think of her? More than once she had been accused of being shifty or dishonest.

After a pause, she said in a rush, “I want to be a cop. Actually, I want to be a homicide detective. Like you.” It was the first time she had ever told anyone.

After a pause he said, “You're observant. So that's good. But you need some better people skills. Maybe try not to be so blunt.”

Blunt
was what people called it when you said what everyone was already thinking.

“I'm just logical. I'm aware that can cause problems because ordinary conversation doesn't always proceed logically, and I'm working to improve that.” Ruby took a deep breath. “Besides, I'm no more blunt than you are.”

His laugh sounded like a bark. “You might be right about that, Ruby. You might be right.”

 

CHAPTER 18

K

MONDAY

BETWEEN MEMORY AND NIGHTMARE

A screaming siren had torn him from his dreams. Or not dreams, exactly. He had been someplace halfway between memory and nightmare. In a place where she had made that sound, a desperate intake of breath. In a place where his knife flashed silver in the moonlight. In a place where blood steamed in the icy air.

He lay panting on his pillow. It was real.
It was real.
What would his mother think if she knew?

Another siren. And another and another.

Before he even got out of bed, he called in sick to work. It wasn't really a lie. He was sick, especially when he thought about what might happen to him.

And then he waited. Waited until there were dozens of people lined up along the crime scene tape. All of them there because of what he had done, but none of them knew.

In his ball cap, he blended in. Just one more gawker. One more lookie-lou. He moved among them, but they did not know him. They had no idea. No idea of what he was capable of.

Until last night, even
he
hadn't known.

He took his hands from his pockets and looked down at them. They weren't shaking at all. Last night his hands had done what had to be done. Had done it before his brain or his heart could give a different order.

He was just lucky that he had been wearing gloves. Afterward, when he got home, he had thrown them into the woodstove, ignoring the stench, poking at them until they were nothing but ash. Just like his life.

His mind kept returning to what had happened, playing it over and over.

One minute he had been offering her some comfort. The next she had given him a tremulous smile as she reached for the paper towel to wipe her face, her cheeks streaked with mascara.

Then he stepped forward and tried to put his arm around her. He hadn't meant anything by it, just one human being comforting another in crisis. But her face changed. Her eyes narrowed, her lips pulled back. And then she had turned and run. Run in those ridiculous boots of hers.

He imagined what was going to happen. She was going to call the police. And she was going to claim that he had attacked her. When that was not what had happened at all.

He ran after her. In less than a dozen strides, he caught up with her and grabbed her wrist. She snapped back to him like the final roller skater in a game of crack the whip. They stared at each other, breathing hard. Only each of her breaths ended with a whimper.

“Calm down and listen to me.” His voice was an urgent hiss. “Listen to me!”

But she wouldn't listen. She wouldn't even be still. She twisted and turned in his grasp, looking at him like he was a monster. Then she opened her mouth and sucked in her breath, getting ready to scream.

How could he persuade her to be quiet? And then he remembered the knife, the knife that was as much a part of him as one of his fingers. He slipped it free, the blade glinting in the streetlight. He just meant to scare her into silence.

Looking back, he was nearly certain of this.

Her eyes were so wide they showed the whites on either side. She twisted her arm and suddenly she was free and making a run for it. He grabbed her shoulder and yanked her back.

So hard that he pulled her into him. Into him—and into the knife.

He didn't have time to think about what had just happened before she rabbited off. The knife still in her back. He chased her. In the dark. Through the vacant lot. And then her feet tangled and she fell.

The brick was in his fist before he was even aware he had picked it up from the ground. And then it came down on the back of her head.

After it was over, he let the brick fall and braced his hands on his knees, gasping. He hadn't meant for any of this to happen. He wasn't even sure how it
had
happened.

His gorge heaved, but he clamped his lips closed. There must be some way he could fix this.

Some way that didn't end with him strapped to a gurney and a prison doctor injecting him with poison.

Nothing he could do would bring this girl back.

A car went down the street. He froze. Had they seen him? Or—more important—had they seen her? Seen him with her?

He had to get out of here. Right now. But if he left her here, she was in clear sight of the street. He grabbed her under the arms and started to drag her. Then he saw the knife. He was wearing gloves—thank goodness for that—but the knife might still be traced back to him. He had to step on her back to wrench it free. Not knowing what else to do with it, he put it back in its sheath.

He started pulling at her again. He lifted heavy boxes all day, but this took every ounce of his strength. When he got to the part where the ground began to slope, he let go. She tumbled, boneless, until she was half hidden by a blackberry bush. She might not even be found for a while.

Shaking, trembling, he had left. Burned his gloves, soaked his knife in bleach, scrubbed his skin raw in the shower. He didn't even know her name. There was nothing to connect them.

Was there?

 

CHAPTER 19

ALEXIS

MONDAY

HOW A RABBIT FELT

After the people from Team Delta arrived, Mitchell clapped his hands. “Okay, people, line up and count off!”

Alexis was standing between Nick and Ruby, which meant Nick was eleven, she was twelve, and Ruby was thirteen. Jackie, a certified, was number one, so she would guide off the edge of the crime scene tape. Max, number seventeen, was at the other end of the line, wearing the string pack. It was a giant roll of string that buckled in front and rested on the back of his hips. He began tying the string to the street sign. When they made the second pass it would serve as Jackie's new guideline.

Detective Harriman cleared his throat. “In addition to the knife, we're especially interested in footprints. The drag trail seems to have gone over the killer's footprints, effectively wiping them out. The guy who found her skidded down to where she was, which may have lost us some more prints. The girl was wearing boots with a round heel about two inches across, so that's pretty distinctive. We're not sure what type of shoe the killer was wearing.”

Mitchell added, “Remember that we are looking for anything God didn't put here. It's not your job to decide if something is too old to be connected to what happened here last night, or even if it's evidence at all. Your job is just to find it.”

Alexis and the others nodded.

“Okay, then.” Mitchell raised his voice and looked in the direction of the TV camera. “Team forward!”

“Team forward,” they echoed. Together, they dropped to their hands and knees, so that they were shoulder-to-shoulder.

“One entering grid!” Jackie called out as she crawled under the yellow tape. Ezra, who was number two, followed a split second later. In a few moments they were all under the tape and creeping forward. The rule was that you never got ahead of the person to your left, so the line they made was slightly diagonal.

Alexis's breath clouded the air in front of her. Anything in shadow glittered with frost. It was definitely still below freezing, but she was dressed in so many layers she wasn't cold, except for her hands. The chill even seeped through her leather gloves. At least Alexis had leather gloves now, and painter's kneelers. On her first evidence search, she hadn't had either. Afterward, she had to rub her fingers to get the feeling back. But leather gloves and kneelers were too expensive to buy, and neither ever showed up at Goodwill. A week later Jon had slipped her both, claiming he had found extras in the back of the equipment closet. They both had pretended to believe him.

Now, inch by slow inch, the teens crawled forward. Alexis's eyes scoured the ground. She was careful to brush back the leaves of larger weeds to look under them. She didn't want to miss something small, like a torn fingernail. Dirt, pebbles, small rocks, slightly bigger rocks, weeds, brown leaves, red leaves, yellow leaves, multicolored leaves. A snail in its shell, which she was careful not to crush as she crawled over it. In Portland, you usually didn't see snails, just slugs.

Beside her, Ruby sucked in her breath. Before Alexis could ask what was wrong, the other girl bellowed, “Team halt!”

Rubbing her ear and wincing, Alexis echoed “Team halt” with the others, and then straightened up. Her gaze followed Ruby's pointing finger. It had been drilled into them not to touch anything they spotted. Touch it and they became part of the official chain of custody.

Mitchell hurried up behind them. “Who called team halt?”

Ruby said, “Thirteen. Possible evidence.”

Mitchell leaned down to look as Harriman came up.

“What did you find, Ruby?” Harriman asked.

“A beer bottle cap.” It was upside down, the inside flecked with rust.

“Flag it and keep going.” Harriman sounded disappointed. It was hard to imagine that the rusty cap had anything to do with the dead girl.

Mitchell handed Ruby a small orange plastic flag on a wire, which she poked into the dirt next to the cap. By the time they were done, this lot would be dotted with dozens of flags.

“Team forward!” Jackie called.

“Team forward,” Alexis echoed with the rest.

“Keep the line tight,” Mitchell called out as they started moving forward again. “Shoulder-to-shoulder. We want a high POD.” POD meant probability of detection.

They ended up stopping every fifteen or twenty seconds. Nick found a yellow napkin from McDonald's. Ruby spotted some broken glass. Alexis called a halt for the lid to a coffee cup.

As she stuck the flag into the ground, Alexis glanced ahead. Her path would soon intersect with a blackberry bush, the one near where the police thought the girl had been initially stabbed. How many times had Mitchell told them, “Go where your grid takes you”? And “If you can't see through it, you have to go through it”? The saying didn't apply to tree trunks—even SAR hadn't figured out how to do that yet—but they had been told it did to blackberry bushes. A bad guy might be counting on you not finding his gun because you weren't willing to brave thorns.

Right before she reached the clump, Ezra found a cigarette butt and called another halt. While Harriman was looking at it, Alexis was frowning at the blackberry bush. It was a four-foot-tall mass of canes studded with wicked-looking thorns at least a half inch long. How in the heck was she supposed to go through
that
?

Behind her, Mitchell cleared his throat. “Want some advice?”

“Um, sure.” She turned. Mitchell's normally pale face had two high spots of color.

He dropped to his knees behind her. “Tuck your chin down and push forward and down.” He demonstrated, butting his head against the air. But he was a little too enthusiastic and ended up bumping his helmet against her butt. Nick giggled. Face flaming, Mitchell got to his feet.

Alexis eyed the canes dubiously. “It still seems like I'm going to get all scratched up.”

He shook his head. “I know we always say ‘go through,' but when you've got an established clump like this, you don't want to try to wade through it. If you do, it will take you forever and you probably
will
get scratched. What you want to do is go over or under. And since we're looking for a knife, it's much more likely it is going to be on the ground. So you need to go under, where the evidence will be. You don't want to just push vegetation down onto your evidence and hide it more.” He flattened the air with his hands. “I once saw a guy literally step on a shotgun and not realize it because of everything he was pushing down on top of it.”

“So I go under,” Alexis repeated doubtfully. She imagined the thorns raking her back, ripping through her Gore-Tex jacket. Which hadn't been cheap, even at a thrift store.

“Once you get under, there's more space than you might expect. Just think of the helmet as your battle armor. It actually does a pretty good job of getting you in there. Use it to shove yourself in as far as you can physically go. Then you literally just lift the whole mass of vines across your back.” Mitchell lifted his open hands and pushed them over his shoulders. “There's a reason we've been called the ‘forest eradication team.'” He let out a laugh that squeaked at the end.

“Since you already know how to do it, maybe you should be the one.” Alexis liked this idea so much that she started to get to her feet so they could trade places.