Plea of Insanity (6 page)

‘Oh shit,’ she heard Brill say to the guys in the kitchen. ‘I did it again.’

‘My kid makes you pay him a dollar if you say a curse word,’ someone said.

‘He must make a fortune off your fucking mouth, Ed,’ joked another.

‘College fund’s paid off.’

Everyone laughed.

‘ “Are you an intern?” You’re a fucking idiot, Brill,’ said Satty.

‘What? I think I have suits older than her.’

‘I could see that,’ someone said. ‘Maybe you should think about getting a piece.’

‘Fuck you, too, Burke,’ said Brill. ‘I ain’t wearing no toupee.’ Then he yelled out, ‘Hey, Julie, sorry about the language.’

‘No problem,’ Julia replied, with a sigh she made sure no one else could hear as she followed Rick up the stairs.

9

She hadn’t even made it to the top step when she saw the large squares conspicuously missing from the beige shag carpeting. It was obvious that Crime Scene wasn’t through yet: plastic evidence markers that looked like tiny white easels with black numbers on them had been placed in the spots where the carpet had been cut out and impounded. A strong chemical smell lingered in the air, but Julia couldn’t quite place it. It smelled kind of like cleaning solution, but not just your ordinary household Mr Clean and Clorox scent. It smelled nursing-home clean, like antiseptic and death.

‘Two sets of bloody footprints were found here,’ Rick said, stopping in the hallway. ‘One looks like it was from the responding uniform who unwittingly stepped in blood and then trailed it into the last room on the left. That’s the little girl’s room. The six-year-old, Emma Louise.’

Julia’s eyes followed the path of phantom footsteps down a pale yellow hall to where they stopped just outside of a closed white door. Family pictures crowded the walls. Someone had scribbled in different colored crayons on the bottom of the door – someone who couldn’t have been more than two or three feet tall.

‘The other set we think is from the father,’ Rick continued. ‘But the scene got pretty chaotic when the officers initially found the bodies; there was a lot of blood and a lot of people. The suspect prints looked smeared somehow, and it doesn’t help that it’s shag carpeting. The long, cut piles don’t hold prints as well as, say, a tightly looped Berber. The warrant let us clean out Marquette’s shoe closet, so we’ll test all of them, even the slippers and flip-flops. If we don’t get anywhere with that, I’d like to do a print and cast impression of his foot, but we’ll need a separate warrant for that.’

‘I wouldn’t think you’d need a warrant to search the victim’s own home,’ Julia said out loud, her eyes moving away from the crayoned door and over the smiling photos. A beaming, sandy-haired Jennifer and a baby. A little girl with no front teeth in front of a Christmas tree and a fake fireplace. A baby boy swaddled in blue. The professional headshot of David Marquette from the morning paper.

‘Think again,’ he said, shooting her a look. ‘A dead body might give you exigent circumstances to get in the house, secure the premises and wait for the ME, but it doesn’t give you the right to do a full search, even if the victim, or in this case, victims, lived there, too. I’ve had even hotshot veteran cops somehow forget they need a warrant when they respond to a homicide. They see “dead body” and that’s all they need.’

Strike three.
If you don’t know something, it’s better just to keep your mouth shut and let people maybe think you’re stupid, than open it up and confirm it
. Another Uncle Jimmyism she should have remembered sooner.

Instead of heading down the hall that led to Emma’s room, Rick instead turned and walked down another hall that T-boned the balcony and staircase. A set of closed double doors waited at the end. And more phantom footsteps. ‘Let’s start in what we believe so far to be the order of the murders. This is the master bedroom,’ he said, slipping on a pair of latex gloves he had pulled from his pocket. He handed her a pair. ‘Even though Crime Scene has been through the upstairs already for prints, if you touch anything, use gloves. I hope you’re not squeamish,’ he said, opening the door. ‘This is where the mother was found.’

Julia swallowed hard and tried to brace herself for something she was suddenly no longer sure she wanted to see. It was one thing to sit around and talk about a crime scene, discuss the position of the bodies, the entry and exit wounds, and the clinical cause of death; it was another to walk among ghosts down bloodstained halls. She had an urge to turn around, just walk quickly down the stairs, out of this creepy, perfect house and back to the car, back to the office, back home. Take her scolding from Charley Rifkin, kiss her budding relationship with Rick Bellido goodbye if she had to, chalk this overwhelming
bad
feeling that was slowly sucking the air out of the room up to inexperience. Just don’t look anymore. Don’t see it. Don’t open the door, Julia.
Don’t make it real again
.

But it was too late for that.

Dark red splashes of blood ran up arctic-white walls, splattering into countless tiny droplets on the ceiling. White evidence tape marked where blood and other body fluids had presumably dripped or pooled onto a dark mahogany wood floor. Above an antique sleigh bed, an elaborately framed wedding portrait of a smiling David and Jennifer looked down upon a stripped, bare mattress, stained, like the walls around it, a rich, darkred. Blood had seeped through the thin pillow-top, leaving a zigzagging level line on the side of the bed that looked a couple of inches deep in places. Julia’s eyes returned to the happy, oblivious picture taken what must have been only a few short years ago. Blood had sprayed up onto the glass, coagulating and then freezing in time as it dripped back down, like drops of paint stuck forever onto a dry wall.

The ghosts were crying tears of blood, the silenced shrieks of the dead playing over and over again in her head, like the violent crescendo of music in a horror film. That’s when Julia realized she’d just walked into the part where everyone starts screaming.

10

‘The body was found, as you can guess, on the bed,’ Rick said, looking around the room. ‘Crime Scene cleaned it up somewhat and the bedding has been impounded. The bloodstain analyst from Metro was here yesterday and again this morning. As you can see, we have spatter on the headboard and on the walls, traveling at a high enough velocity to actually hit an eight-foot ceiling. I don’t know how much you know about bloodstain pattern interpretation, but a hell of a lot of force is needed on impact to generate that type of distal trajectory. The spray pattern starts here and travels up,’ he said, moving over to the bloody mattress and motioning to the wall next to the nightstand, ‘indicating Jennifer Marquette was lying flat when she was first struck. The shower of drops on the ceiling are satellite spatters, most likely the result of an arterial spurt when he hit the aorta or jugular. She was probably sleeping when it happened.’

Probably sleeping
. ‘What was the actual cause of death?’ Julia asked softly, still staring at the mattress. The stain impression was only on one side of the king-size bed, in the general shape of a person. She didn’t need crime-scene photos to see Jennifer Marquette’s beautiful, twisted face, her eyes, open and vacant, staring dully up at the ceiling. Even if they were closed when she took her last breath, Julia already knew many of the macabre secrets death held in store. One of which was once the heart stops beating and the body shuts down, the eyelids involuntarily opened back up, staying that way until a mortician finally superglued them down in the basement of some funeral home.

We’re so sorry.

So very sorry, Julia.

You shouldn’t have to see her this way.

Not you …

She shut her eyes tight against the horror that lay right there in front of her, but even in darkness she could still see the bright yellow rosebuds and delicate pink ribbon that trimmed the nightgown’s sleeve, the pool of glossy red blood that slowly, surely seeped across the floor. And her eyes, those beautiful deep-green eyes, open and forever terrified …

‘Blunt force to the head with an unknown object and multiple stab wounds,’ Rick replied.

‘Thirty-seven in all,’ said a deep voice behind Julia, pulling her thoughts off the bed, and making her jump in her skin for the second time that morning. Julia turned to a scruffy-faced guy in his mid-thirties, a white dress shirt and Tommy Bahama swordfish tie paired with old jeans and new Nikes. With light-blue eyes, dark-blond hair that definitely went past his collar, and well-tanned skin, he looked a little like a surfer who reluctantly had had to get a real job. A gold detective’s badge hung around his neck.

‘Just the man we were looking for,’ Rick said. ‘Julia, Detective John Latarrino, Miami-Dade Homicide. Lat, this is Julia Valenciano. She’s a prosecutor in our office. She’ll be working this with me.’

Latarrino nodded. ‘Nice to meet you.’

‘She’s already met Steve Brill downstairs.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Latarrino replied.

‘I was just showing her the scene. This is our first stop. Anything new?’

‘Just got the preliminary autopsy report back this morning. Speaking of which, what happened to you last night, Bellido?’

‘I had another engagement. One I couldn’t get out of. I called over this morning, but Neilson wasn’t in yet. I talked to Torie. She gave me a brief rundown.’ Rick looked at Julia and explained the players. ‘Joe Neilson’s the Chief Medical Examiner. He did the autopsies late yesterday. Torie’s Neilson’s assistant.’

‘So you know most of it, then,’ Lat said. ‘Blunt trauma to the head probably knocked her unconscious. At least that’s what we’re hoping. Impact on the side of the skull slammed her brain against the other side, resulting in a large hematoma and massive bleeding. Counted thirty-seven stab wounds to the chest and neck. At least three went through to the mattress.’

‘That’s one angry sonofabitch,’ said Rick with a low whistle, running a hand through his hair.

‘Angry is probably an understatement. As you said, one hit the aorta, another the jugular and that was it.’ Latarrino shook his head. ‘Jennifer Marquette celebrated her thirty-second birthday just last week. Boys found a couple of old “Happy Birthday Mom!” balloons in the trash. Pretty lady, too. She was found here, face-up on the bed, wearing just a nightshirt, which was ripped open, and a pair of panties. But no other evidence of sexual assault. Neilson did do a rape kit. It’s not back yet, but the black light picked up what looked like semen.’

‘Oh shit,’ said Rick. ‘Torie didn’t mention that on the phone. Where?’

‘On the shirt. Non-motile. No way to tell how old. We’re doing DNA. Hopefully it’s hubby’s. If not …’ He didn’t bother completing the thought. ‘We think he surprised her here. There was nothing under the fingernails, no sign of a struggle in the room. No evidence the body had been moved. As you said, she was probably sleeping, he came in, hit her upside the head, made it look like a rape attempt and then went at her with a kitchen knife.’

‘Have you found the weapons?’ asked Julia, taking a few steps forward, physically distancing herself from the scene behind her. She didn’t want to turn around again, or look into the mirror that was directly behind Detective Latarrino, mounted above a neat marble-top dresser dotted with more family pictures. The air continued to slowly seep out of the suddenly freezing-cold room, and she struggled not to gasp for more.
Keep it clinical. Stay focused on the words. Stay here, in the room. Don’t let yourself go away again.

‘We did find a baseball bat in a closet in the boy’s room. No blood on it that we can see, but the timeline works that he could’ve cleaned it up. The lab can check for microscopic blood, hair or fiber, if he left any behind.’

‘What about the knife?’ she asked.

‘We think that’ll be the one the docs removed from Marquette’s stomach. We also seized every knife we could find downstairs. Pattern testing can compare Mrs Marquette’s wounds to the knives we seized and see what matches. Neilson says it looks like a straight blade that attacked her and the children because he saw no tears consistent with a jagged edge, but that’s the best he can do at this point. The knife the docs recovered was a Henckels boning knife. Straight blade, seven inches.’

‘You guys can do the pattern testing, right?’ asked Rick. ‘Or do we have to send it out to the Feds?’

‘Nah, we have our own pattern guy at the crime lab. John Holt. Worst case is we use FDLE’s lab in Orlando if we have to. Keep the Fibbies out of this. Although,’ he said, looking around the bedroom, ‘no Fed’s gonna make a name for themselves in here, so it’s not something that would appeal to them, even if they did have jurisdiction. Brill’s taking the traps to see if there’s blood in the drains that Marquette maybe tried to rinse off, although we found bleach under the upstairs and downstairs sinks, so there’s a chance we might not find shit if the guy knew what he was doing with a bottle of Clorax. Rigor had not begun yet, so time of death, based on temperature, lividity and stomach contents was sometime between one and five a.m., when uniforms responded and found her.’

‘That’s the best Neilson can do?’ asked Rick, exasperated.

‘That’s it. You must have pissed him off before with that charming personality of yours, Bellido, because he says to tell you that he’s not a miracle worker, so don’t ask him for the second hand on time of death.’

‘Fuck him,’ Rick grumbled. It was obvious the comment was not made in jest. ‘Excuse me,’ he said to Julia.

‘From what we found out so far, looks like the husband was supposed to be at some American Medical Association conference in Orlando. We have verbal confirmation that Dr David Marquette was booked at the Marriott World Center through today. The front-desk manager got a bit nervous when I said the words “homicide investigation”, so Theresa’s readying subpoenas for the records.’

‘Don’t let them touch that room, Lat!’ barked Rick.

John Latarrino was the same height as Rick Bellido, but somehow looked a lot bigger. He held his hand up. ‘I’ve already done the warrant. You can look it over before Orlando PD takes it to the judge for a signature this afternoon. See, unlike all those other hotshot veteran cops you’ve had to show the ropes to, Bellido, I know when I need to go to the bathroom and when I need a warrant.’ He smiled at Rick and cracked his gum.

An uncomfortable moment passed. ‘That wasn’t directed at you,’ Rick replied.

‘Of course not.’

The tension broke with the ring of a phone. ‘I gotta take this,’ Rick said, unhooking his cell from his belt and moving into the master bathroom.

‘Alright, then,’ Latarrino said with a sigh of impatience, looking at his watch. Julia could tell there was a strained history between the two men, but it was too early to say just whose fault that history was. After waiting about thirty seconds, the detective turned and headed out of the bedroom and back out into the hall. ‘Bellido’s already had his tour, so follow me, Ms Prosecutor, and let’s get this over with,’ he called out behind him. ‘It only gets worse from here on out, so prepare yourself.’