Precious Blood (21 page)

It was a plain room. The powder pink walls seemed the only concession to girlish whimsy: no riding trophies, or photographs of friends, or stuffed animals, or posters of
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movie stars or boy bands. Two portraits of Jesus looked down on the bed from the wall above.

“Okay, Doc, what am I looking for?”

“Vials or packaging are really what we want—anything with a label. The hormone course lasts a few weeks, so she pretty much had to have injected herself at home at some point.”

Rad opened the closet and began to go through the clothes heaped on the shelf. Jenner searched the bulky white chest of drawers; the top drawer had stickers of hearts and rain-bows haphazardly stuck on its front. There was nothing to find in the underwear drawer, just plain undergarments. The middle and lower drawers held simple tops and pants, with a wadded-up stack of love letters pressed into the back of the bottom drawer. They were more than ten years old, probably a crush from Mormon camp or summer school or wherever it was that Latter-Day Saints kids developed their crushes.

Rad was going through the pockets of the coats and jackets in the closet. He called over to Jenner, “Hey, pull the lowest drawer all the way out and see if there’s anything underneath.”

There was; she’d kept her secrets in the well below the bottom drawer.

To Jenner’s eye, the traces of her hidden life seemed more sweet than shaming; he could imagine how exhilarated and terrified of discovery they must have made her. There was a letter on yellowed paper, apparently from high school: a boy named Tom dreamed of undressing her and touching her breasts, and “between your beautiful legs.” There was a half-smoked Marlboro and a ball of lacy black lingerie.

Jenner reached back into the recesses as far as he could, sweeping his arm from side to side in the dust. There was nothing at the back, but as he was pulling his arm out, he felt something cylindrical roll underneath it. His fingers scooped up a small glass vial.

He produced it with a flourish.

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“Rad.”

It was a couple of inches tall, and empty, with a metal cap, the center of which had a punctured gray rubber membrane.

She’d peeled off most of the label: there was no way to confirm the contents, or the prescribing physician, but one torn edge still clung to the glass, and it had a legible logo.

He showed it to Rad. “This look familiar to you? APPDRx?

I could swear I’ve seen it before.”

“Is it the manufacturer?”

Jenner squinted at it. “No, this is the pharmacy’s, I think.”

“Local?”

“I doubt it—she wouldn’t have risked filling it around here.

Besides, drugs like Lupron and Pergonal are pretty special-ized—they don’t carry them in every corner drugstore.”

Rad nodded in agreement. “Particularly out here in May-berry. Okay, we need to get back to the city and go through a phone book. Should be pretty easy to find them. We’ll talk to the pharmacist tomorrow morning—we won’t make it back in time tonight.”

“Will we need a subpoena?”

“Yeah, I guess. He’d probably give up the prescribing physician’s name, but if this thing’s going to stand up and walk in court . . .”

Jenner looked around the room again. It felt small and empty and unlived-in. Solid bed from the 1950s, ugly white dresser onto which she’d stuck heart stickers as a little girl.

He wondered if she’d been punished for that.

How could people choose a life like that, choose a life like that for their children? Did little girls
like
being ascetic? Perhaps she didn’t even realize how bare it was. Perhaps all the LDS girls lived like that. Perhaps she didn’t see the room as cold and plain, but as warm and suffused with God’s love.

He thought of his own loft, which was almost as bare. But his sparse was the stylized, materialist sparse, and the objects he owned, while few, were beautiful and luxurious. He felt vulgarly affluent and shallow.

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Then again, she hadn’t been happy with this. She’d re-belled. Stopped dressing modestly, pierced her ears and tongue, moved to Manhattan, been close enough to a boy that she’d bought sexy lingerie. Or close enough to another girl, maybe.

It sounded as if she’d blossomed in New York, with her tongue piercing and her new name. At least until the old name had caught up with her.

In the living room, Elder Smith sat in the rocking chair, his head in his hands. The former intended, now calm, stood next to him, her pale hand resting limply on his shoulder.

Her attitude was maternal, controlled, and slightly possessive.

Rad and Jenner went into the kitchen. The room faced west, into the open valley. The late-afternoon sun was now rushing across the frozen fields, flooding the room with a nostalgic, golden light, making the linoleum surfaces and aluminum trim glow.

They knew the room from the crime scene photographs, but the photographs couldn’t have shown what was now obvious to them as they stood there: the kitchen had been the heart of the house, this had been where they had
lived
.

With its warm, buttery yellows and whites, it looked like the sort of kitchen where Mom baked pies in a housedress and frilly apron, leaving them to cool by an open window.

The appliances, with the exception of a KitchenAid stand mixer, all looked a good forty or fifty years old. The mixer’s dough hook was attached; Jenner imagined the smell of fresh baked bread drifting from the kitchen, warming and redeeming the rest of the barren house.

That kitchen, he thought, might never smell of warm bread again; murder poisons a house, turns it toxic as a con-taminated well. Mrs. Smith would never bake there again without seeing her little girl sitting on a yellow chair at the yellow table, coloring as she waited for the hot loaves to come out of the oven. He couldn’t understand how President
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and Mrs. Smith, in their gadarene rush to escape, could have been cruel enough to leave their son behind in this charnel house.

Perhaps this was a religious thing; perhaps they really did believe that the girl was in a better place. Perhaps they’d achieved some kind of complete emotional separation from her death. But the boy was a mess, anyone could see it.

Jenner just didn’t understand.

The kid was right about the blood, too. The smell of bleach, intense and corrosive, shimmered from the warming countertops and table and floor, searing his nostrils and catching in his throat. Beneath it, Jenner smelled her blood as a sharp wave of rust, choking and primal.

He thought the room through.

The head had been on the island in front of him; her trunk would have been at his feet. There had been arcs of blood spatter low on the cabinets, arterial spray. He would have plugged the saw or hedge trimmer or whatever he’d used into the socket by the toaster on the counter.

Knife probably his own, probably did her pretty quickly after she took him into the kitchen. She’d probably offered him coffee. She’d have walked in first, he’d have followed her, and
bam!
hit her before she knew what was happening.

Cut her throat, held her as she went down to the floor—if she were over his knee, that would explain the low height of the arterial spatter.

Probably pulled her clothes off her once she’d stopped moving, and then got down to work. Stripping her in that narrow space would have caused the broad smears on the low cabinet by the hallway door.

He walked to the island, then paced back to the hall door.

Five feet, give or take—less than two long strides. God, he must have moved quickly.

There were pencil markings going up both sides of the door frame that he hadn’t noticed in the crime scene photos.

They’d strung for blood spatter! The criminalists—probably
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hicks who’d seen a few too many episodes of
CSI
—had taken the time to figure the angle of each blood droplet, then used lengths of string to determine the point of origin. Amateur hour—even the quickest reading of the scene made the killing sequence obvious.

He knelt in front of the door and looked at the pencil markings. Then he read out loud.

“Kathy, July fourth, 1990. Four feet ten.”

Oh. The marks weren’t from stringing.

He put his finger to markings on the other side of the door frame. “Jim, October seventeenth, 1995, five feet one.”

Her mother had probably stood just where he knelt, telling the giggling little girl to stay still while she ticked her height off on the door frame, her brother waiting for his turn.

“
The child I buried
. . .” There was a poem, he couldn’t remember how it went. “
Rest in sweet peace . . .
” It wasn’t coming back. The mother, measuring her little girl’s growth in the safety of the kitchen; now, Jenner kneeling in the same spot to document her death.

And what of all the years in between? Her achievements, her suffering, her happiness, her life—all the things that meant so much to her? They meant nothing to him.

Her life, other than whatever she’d done, whoever she’d been to attract the killer, couldn’t be important to Jenner.

Her life was an impediment, a warm, sucking thing that held on to him and stopped him from thinking clearly, so he could learn who killed her, so he could stop that man before he found himself kneeling in the kitchen doorway of another dead girl, eyes burning again as he read out loud how tall she was when she was seven.

Jesus. Enough.

He looked up at Rad and said, “I don’t need to see anything more here. Let’s go.”

Rad glanced at him, then looked away quickly and nodded.

Jenner went out to the car while Rad finished with the boy and the girl. He leaned against the hood, waiting, looking out
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over the valley. The snow over the fields sloping away from the Smith house was a billowing, drifting blanket of virgin white, the ground underneath it black, frozen, and dead.

The second he walked through the door into his loft, she threw herself at him, wrapping her arms around him and showering him with kisses. “You took
forever
to get back!”

She pulled his coat off, looked around the room, trying to figure out where it belonged, then shrugged and tossed it onto a chair, saying, “So I did something major this morning, right?”

“What did you do?”

She made a face. “Jenner! I went
outside
! I’ve been cooped up in here forever now; that was my first time going out because I wanted to.”

He nodded; she was working up to something.

“So I made a decision: I want you to take me out tonight.”

He’d never seen her so lively.

“Yes? No? Tell me what you think! Because I really want to go out.”

He sat. “Ana, it’s almost ten p.m. I’m pretty tired. It’s been a long day.”

“What you need is a drink. I’m going to make you a drink.

What do you drink? Wine? Let me fix you something.”

“I don’t need a drink.”

“A glass of wine it is.”

She pulled a bottle from the refrigerator, a Kongsgaard Roussanne viognier.

“Is this any good?” She saw the price tag and whistled.

“Eighty dollars for a bottle of wine? What, did
Jesus
make this or something?”

He stood, but she was already scoring the foil with her knife, forehead furrowed in concentration; she seemed so excited, he didn’t have the heart to interrupt her.

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She peeled the foil, then started twisting the corkscrew into the cap, then jamming it impatiently back and forth. He stopped her before she could do any more damage.

“Slow down!” he said. “Here, let me do it.”

He carefully levered the remaining cork from the bottle and poured two glasses.

“Here.” He handed her the glass and then hastily added,

“No! Wait!” as she began to gulp it. “This isn’t, whatever, Manischewitz or something! Slow down, take the time to taste it.”

She put the glass to her lips, then lowered it a second to add with a smirk, “This better be some damned tasty grape juice . . .”

She sipped, then murmured appreciatively, “Oh, yum!

That really is nice! Thanks, Jenner.”

“My pleasure. I’m glad you like it.”

“Yeah, but no way is it worth eighty bucks, dude!”

She was giggling again, perched on her chair; he scowled at her, then tipped a little more into his glass. He said, “I have to do some work first, but after that, I guess we could go out. What do you want to do?”

She sat next to him, took his hand, and looked him earnestly in the eye. “Listen, Jenner, this is important to me. I think it’s time for me to start trying to be normal again.”

He nodded. “Okay. So what do normal girls do?”

She stood quickly. “I want to go clubbing!”

He was surprised; he’d figured they’d walk a couple of blocks, then come home and fool around.

“Where?”

“In the East Village, in Alphabet City. Wednesday nights, my friend Anthony runs a party called My Favorite Cyborg at Industrial Crisis over on Eighth between C and D. It’s pretty great—totally underground, great DJs playing minimal techno from, like, Berlin and Detroit. It’s kind of an institution—you’re not supposed to talk about it, because within a week the place would be filled with Guidos and
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their big-haired girlfriends fucked up on apple martinis and Ecstasy.”

He felt old.

“C’mon, Jenner! Fair’s fair! You just exposed me to your culture, now it’s my turn.”

“Okay. But I can’t stay out too late.”

She put her arms around him and said, “Awww . . . don’t worry, old man. I’ll make sure you’re back by four a.m.”

“One a.m.”

“We’ll see.” She straightened up and took another sip. “I don’t know how long I’ll last, either.”