Defensive Wounds (15 page)

“You need us to turn off the lights?” Neil asked.

“For starters.”

They drew the curtains, overlapping the sides and using the uninvolved chair to hold them in place. The hair dryer in the bathroom had a night-light built in, so that had to be unplugged. Ditto the clock radio and the telephone. The TV had a red “ready” light, but she could live with that. With all the other lights out, the crack under the door glowed like a Times Square billboard, and Theresa shoved a towel into it, all the while shaking the plastic spray bottle with her other hand to dissolve the reagent. Then she made her way back to the far side of the bed.

“Ow.”

“You all right?” A voice from her left—Neil.

“Yeah, just hit the bed frame,” she said, despite believing she might have broken one of two of her toes. Then she stepped into something large and soft.

“That's me,” Powell growled. “Is this really necessary? We only closed the curtains before.”

“We were looking for semen with an alternate light source and colored goggles. The Bluestar will make the blood fluoresce, but more or less depending on the amount of blood present, and colored filters won't intensify it. On top of that, the reaction begins to fade instantly.” She moved gingerly, going around him, passing by the warmth of Neil's body in front of the dresser. “Despite what you see on TV, just turning out the lights isn't going to do it. The darker it is, the easier it will be to see any reaction.”

Her eyes finally learned to use what little sunshine crept from the edges of the curtain, and she knelt next to the nightstand, in front of the armchair. She pulled a Sharpie from her pocket to mark any positive reactions. Tape wouldn't work, because the surface would be wet from the Bluestar, and she figured the carpet was a goner anyway. “Ready?”

She heard cloth moving, as if they were trying to nod before realizing how pointless it was. “Yes,” Neil said.

She shook the bottle one last time and sprayed, starting with the bed. Nothing but a vague luminescence, probably from the cleaning products. Then the nightstand, where the cast-off patterns she'd seen before sprang into view as a tiny, glittering chain. Then she twisted to try the armchair. Nothing. She did not spray the murder weapon, the straight-backed desk chair. She already knew that had blood on it and didn't want to wash any fingerprints away with the Bluestar. The chair would be processed at the lab.

She turned to the carpet, avoiding the blood pool—it would only blind them. The first smear she'd seen, on the cream-colored fleck, showed up. She crawled in its direction, drew a circle around it with the Sharpie, and continued spraying. She heard the detectives back up, probably to avoid getting Bluestar on their shoes.

“Should we be breathing that stuff?” Powell asked. “With no ventilation in here?”

“It won't hurt you.”

As if to mock him, the air conditioner chose that moment to switch on and gave a discreet hum.

Another smudge, near the middle of the foot of the bed. She marked and moved on. The detectives moved back again, more fumbling sounds. Powell swore. Theresa smiled, since no one could see. “It's not that bad. At the M.E.'s we get used to working with both pitch dark and dead bodies together.”

“No way,” Powell breathed. He sounded truly startled.

“Way. Trace-metal detection tests, where we spray the hands looking for a reaction from a gun or knife. It's so dark you can't see your hand in front of your face. If there's any chance the job is going to give you the creeps, that will be your litmus test.”

“It doesn't bother you?” Neil asked.

“They don't come back to life.” She sprayed. Another smudge, growing a bit fainter. “Then there's infrared photography and X-ray development. You get used to the dark pretty quick.” She didn't tell them that the only thing she wouldn't have anything to do with when the light burned out was the freight elevator. We all had our limits. “We're up to the door, and there's still a faint trace. We're going to have to go into the hallway.”

This was much easier said than done. A guest wandering out of his room or off the elevator into the pitch dark could trip and break something, for which the hotel would be held responsible. Worse, the guest might feel uncomfortable, and the Ritz-Carlton prided itself on the comfort of its guests. Having to find her way to her room by touch might convince a guest to make next month's reservation at the Renaissance.

So it took two maids, Karla the day manager, and head of security Marcus Dean himself to make sure that all the rooms on the floor were empty, then man the elevators and both stairwells for the safety of the guests. And that didn't even address the question of turning out the lights.

The lights in the hallways were designed to never, ever turn off. If some blackout or nuclear attack occurred, the emergency lights would turn on. These, too, had no on-off switch but would have to be dismounted and their batteries removed. The regular lights had no wall switch, not even behind a locked electrical panel. All lighting controls were down in the security office, and in addition the entire hotel was hardwired together. To get one hallway dark, all would have to go dark, and all the murders in the world couldn't convince the hotel to take on that kind of liability.

“How about this?” Theresa suggested to Dean. “Can we just unscrew the bulbs?”

He summoned two maintenance men, who disabled both the lights and the emergency backups. It was a lot of work just to make a hallway dark, but Theresa had become accustomed to it. Spraying a blood-detection fluid always turned into two hours of preparation for two minutes of glowing bluish stains.

Finally they were ready. One maintenance man stood on a ladder, his heavily gloved hand on the last lightbulb, far enough away, she hoped, that the trail would not lead past him. She didn't want to blunder into his ladder in the dark.

She took up her position on the floor at the door to Bruce Raffel's room and insisted that Powell and Neil flank her, ready to observe the brief reactions that could indicate a trail of blood.

“And this isn't going to stain the carpets?” Marcus Dean asked, for the third time.

“You'll never know we were here,” Theresa assured him.

“Then why you got a Sharpie in your hand?”

“Good point,” she conceded, and pulled out a supply of glow-in-the-dark stickers in the shape of hollow squares. “But no one can kick these things out of place once I put them down, understand? They're not going to stick to the carpet, because it will be wet.”

“Wet?” the day manager asked with a note of panic.

What part of “spraying” hadn't she understood? “Just a little wet,” Theresa soothed. “Watch your feet around these squares or we'll have to start over.”

“Okay,” the woman squeaked, as if already holding her breath. “You're Rachael's mother, aren't you?”

“Go ahead,” Theresa said to the maintenance man. The hallway and all present were plunged into blackness.

She let her eyes adjust. It didn't take long. The draperies at each end of the hallway were meant to decorate, not block light, and though she had added her own tarps, the bright sunlight outside still leaked around the edges and from under the doors to the empty guest rooms. Not perfect, but as perfect as they could get it. She shook the bottle in her hand and sprayed in a wide fan. She could hear the liquid squirt, but it had no odor to speak of.

The cops scuttled out of the way, as if still convinced that the liquid might somehow damage their shoes.

There. The small, amorphous stain that the killer's shoe had picked up glowed at a spot to her right. She placed a sticker, reminding everyone again not to bump it and reminding herself most of all. She moved carefully to one side, already feeling the wetness in her knees, and sprayed another fan.

Another stain. It came as no surprise to her that the killer had not taken the elevator.

She sprayed again, used another glow-in-the-dark sticker. The intensity was holding up fairly well—the killer must have really soaked that one little piece of his shoe. She couldn't see any sort of consistent shape to it, no clues to the tread. Because of the looped carpet threads, it appeared slightly different at each incarnation.

More spray. A little harder to see, either because the blood had worn off the shoe or because the light from an emergency-exit sign interfered with her eyesight. Just as she'd thought: The killer had come out of Bruce Raffel's room and made a beeline for the exit.

Theresa stated the obvious. “He went into the stairwell.”

Marcus Dean heaved a sigh that should have rattled the windows. “Oh, shit.”

Despite this pronouncement, making the stairwell dark turned out to be both easier and more complicated than the hallway. There were no outside windows to leak light, but there were also thirty-two floors' worth of emergency-exit doors that had to be manned to keep guests from breaking their necks, legs, and other litigious parts. In the end they took the bulbs out of the lighting four floors up and four floors down and put staff members at the doors to those floors only. And Theresa had to promise to work fast.

She began at the hallway door, spraying to see several small glowing spots jump to life. Most took on the obvious shape of drips, spilled liquid, some sort of cleaner, or food that fluoresced. One had a sharp edge, however, almost a semicircle; that could be her partial footprint. The spot had seemed larger but less defined on the carpeting. The soft carpeting pressed up into every nook and cranny of the sole, but the rigid and not-perfectly-level concrete floor of the hallway did not.

Theresa moved inside the stairwell and made the two detectives stand against the wall so she could shut the hallway door, closing off that source of ambient light. The darkness got much darker.

She hadn't thought only four floors in either direction would make that much of a difference, that the remaining emergency lighting would seep from the middle of the stairwell and ruin her vision, but she'd been wrong. The tight turns and landings blotted it out as if she'd been struck blind. Her fingers clenched around the spray nozzle, sending out the glowing liquid just to make certain she could still see it.

She could. The tiny, sharp mark showed up again, along with the drips and drabs of countless guests and staff. Theresa crawled forward, feeling the layers of dust and grit, grateful she had latex gloves and vowing to undress in the utility room immediately upon entering her home. Cleaning the stairwells could not be a high priority. The staff didn't care, and the guests didn't use the creepy, unglamorous places.

Unless they'd just killed someone.

“Don't touch the railing,” she warned the detectives behind her. They said nothing, though one gave an impatient
pfff.
Powell. He flanked her left, because she could smell Neil's aftershave on her right. She could feel their large, warm bodies in the darkness, close to her but not touching. This should have reassured her, but instead their forms felt circling and predatory. Waiting.

She followed the landing, moving away from the hallway door. Another spray, another kaleidoscope of blue-white glows came into view in a variety of shapes and intensities.

But no sharp, curved spot. Where had he gone?

She stopped near the center of the landing and pivoted her body, spraying to her right, toward the ascending flight of steps.

And found the mark again. And again, near the bottom step.

“Are you seeing anything?” Powell demanded. “Still finding that blood?”

She made some sort of affirming sound and placed a paper frame around her spot. It appeared again two steps up, though the rubber coating on the edge of the step made the outline less defined.

“He went
up
?” Neil said.

“He's a guest,” Powell said. “One of these pervo lawyers, just like we thought.”

“Or on the staff,” Neil said.

Theresa let them theorize and concentrated on her trail, but it faded to nothing by the half landing. Then she had the lights turned back on and collected the blood.

Why go up instead of down?

She stored her blood samples and her fingerprint cards while Marcus Dean and his staff tightened the emergency lamps' bulbs and drifted back to their usual duties.

At this point Theresa gave the crime scene another once-over, but she'd done all she could think of to do—despite the always present, unsettling conviction that she had forgotten something, overlooked some vital piece of evidence, or failed to consider a scenario that would return later in the form of her boss, a cop, an attorney, or a judge biting her head off. Probably Dennis Britton, with her luck. But she could not see what else to collect or examine. On a microscopic level, a hotel room might be a churning soup of abandoned trace evidence like fibers or skin cells, but they were all pretty simple in a macroscopic sense. The occupant brought a few things with him. The rest of the place was generic, interchangeable.

Just outside Bruce Raffel's room, her phone rang. Frank.

“I'm coming over there,” he said without preamble. “Meet me in the lobby.”