Body Double (28 page)

“We’ll need a baseline photo first. Let me set up the tripod. Detective Corso, can you mount the ruler up on that wall right there? It’s luminescent. It’ll give us a frame of reference.”

Maura looked at Rizzoli. “You should go upstairs, Jane. They’re going to start mixing the Luminol. I don’t think you should be exposed to it.”

“I didn’t think it was that toxic.”

“Still, you shouldn’t take the chance. Not with the baby.”

Rizzoli sighed. “Yeah, okay.” Slowly she headed up the steps. “But I hate missing a light show.” The cellar door swung shut behind her.

“Man, shouldn’t she be on maternity leave already?” Yates said.

“She has another six weeks to go,” said Maura.

One of the techs laughed. “Like that woman cop in
Fargo,
huh? How do you chase down a perp when you’re that knocked up?”

Through the closed cellar door, Rizzoli yelled: “Hey, I may be knocked up, but I’m not deaf!”

“She’s also armed,” said Maura.

Detective Corso said, “Can we get started here?”

“There are masks and goggles in that box,” said Pete. “You all might want to pass those around.”

Corso handed a respirator and a pair of goggles to Maura. She slipped them on and watched as Gary began measuring chemicals.

“We’re going with a Weber prep,” he said. “It’s a little more sensitive, and I think it’s safer to use. This stuff is irritating enough on the skin and eyes.”

“Are those stock solutions you’re mixing?” asked Maura, her voice muffled through the mask.

“Yeah, we keep ’em stored in the lab refrigerator. Mix all three together in the field, along with distilled water.” He capped the jar and gave it a vigorous shake. “Anyone here wear contact lenses?”

“I do,” said Yates.

“Then you might want to step out, Detective. You’re gonna be more sensitive, even wearing those goggles.”

“No, I wanna watch.”

“Then stay back when we start spraying.” He gave the bottle one more swirl, then decanted the contents into a spray bottle. “Okay, we’re ready to rock. Let me snap a photo first. Detective, can you move away from that wall?”

Corso stepped to the side and Pete pressed the shutter release cable. The flash went off as the camera captured a baseline image of the wall they were about to spray with Luminol.

“You want the lights off now?” said Maura.

“Let Gary get in position first. Once it’s dark, we’re gonna be stumbling around here. So everyone just pick a spot and stay there, okay? Only Gary moves.”

Gary crossed to the wall and held up the spray bottle containing Luminol. With his goggles and mask, he looked like a pest exterminator, about to squirt some offending roach.

“Hit the lights, Dr. Isles.”

Maura reached out to the flood lamp beside her and switched it off, plunging the cellar into pitch blackness.

“Go ahead, Gary.”

They could hear the hiss of the spray bottle. Flecks of greenish-blue suddenly glowed in the darkness, like stars in the night sky. Now a ghostly circle appeared, seeming to float in the darkness, unattached. The iron ring.

“It may not be blood at all,” said Pete. “Luminol reacts with a lot of things. Rust, metals. Bleach solutions. That iron ring would probably glow anyway, whether there’s blood on it or not. Gary, can you move aside while I get this shot? This is going to be a forty-second exposure, so just stand tight.” When the shutter finally clicked, he said: “Lights, Dr. Isles.”

Maura fumbled in the darkness for the flood lamp switch. When the light came on, she was staring at the stone wall.

“What do you think?” asked Corso.

Pete shrugged. “Not too impressive. There’s going to be a lot of false positives down here. You’ve got soil staining all those rocks. We’ll try the other walls, but unless you see a handprint or a major splatter, it’s not going to be easy to pick up blood against this background.”

Maura noticed Corso glancing at his watch. It had been a long drive for both Maine state detectives, and she could see he was starting to wonder if this was a waste of time.

“Let’s keep going,” she said.

Pete moved the tripod and positioned his camera lens to focus on the next wall. He clicked off a flash photo, then said, “Lights.”

Again, the room went pitch black.

The spray bottle hissed. More blue-green flecks magically appeared like fireflies twinkling in the darkness as the Luminol reacted with oxidized metals in the stone, producing pinpoints of luminescence. Gary sprayed a fresh arc across the wall, and a new swath of stars appeared, eclipsed by his shadowy outline as he moved past. There was a loud thump, and the silhouette suddenly lurched forward.

“Shit.”

“You okay, Gary?” said Yates.

“Hit my shin against something. The stairs, I think. Can’t see a goddamn thing in this . . .” He stopped. Then murmured: “Hey, guys. Look at this.”

As he moved aside, a patch of blue-green floated into view, like a ghostly pool of ectoplasm.

“What the hell is that?” said Corso.

“Light!” called Pete.

Maura turned on the lamp. The blue-green pool vanished. In its place she saw only the wooden staircase leading up to the kitchen.

“It was on that step there,” said Gary. “When I tripped, it caught some of the spray.”

“Let me reposition this camera. Then I want you to move up to the top of those stairs. Think you can feel your way down if we turn off the lights?”

“I don’t know. If I go slowly enough—”

“Spray the steps as you come down.”

“No. No, I think I’m gonna start from the bottom and go up. I don’t like the idea of backing down the stairs in the dark.”

“Whatever you’re comfortable with.” The camera flash went off. “Okay, Gary. I’ve got my baseline. Whenever you’re ready.”

“Yeah. You can hit the light, Doc.”

Maura turned off the lamp.

Once again, they heard the hiss of the spray bottle dispersing its fine mist of Luminol. Near the ground, a splash of blue-green appeared, then above it another splash, like ghostly pools of water. They could hear Gary’s heavy breathing through his mask, and the creak of the steps as he backed up the stairs, spraying the whole time. Step after step lit up, forming an intensely luminous cascade.

A waterfall of blood.

There was nothing else that this could be, she thought. It was smeared across every step, trickles of it streaking down the sides of the staircase.

“Jesus,” murmured Gary. “It’s even brighter up here, on the top step. Looks like it came from the kitchen. Seeped under the door and dripped down the stairs.”

“Everyone stay right where you are. I’m taking the shot. Forty-five seconds.”

“It might be dark enough outside now,” said Corso. “We can start on the rest of the house.”

Rizzoli was waiting for them in the kitchen as they came up the stairs, hauling their equipment. “Sounds like it was quite a light show,” she said.

“I think we’re about to see even more,” said Maura.

“Where do you want to start spraying now?” Pete asked Corso.

“Right here. The floor nearest the cellar door.”

This time, Rizzoli did not leave the room when the lights went off. She backed off and watched from a distance as the mist of Luminol was sprayed across the floor. A geometric pattern suddenly glowed at their feet, a blue-green checkerboard of old blood trapped in the linoleum’s repeating pattern. The checkerboard grew like blue fire spreading across a landscape. Now it streaked up one vertical surface, into broad swipes and smears, into arcs of bright droplets.

“Turn on the lights,” said Yates, and Corso flipped the switch.

The smears vanished. They stared at the kitchen wall, which no longer glowed blue. At worn linoleum with its repeating pattern of black and white squares. They saw no horror here, just a room with yellowed flooring and tired appliances. Yet everywhere they had looked, only a moment ago, they had seen blood screaming at them.

Maura stared at the wall, the image of what she’d seen there still burned in her memory. “That was arterial spray,” she said softly. “This is the room where it happened. This is where they died.”

“But you saw blood in the cellar as well,” said Rizzoli.

“On the steps.”

“Okay. So we know at least one victim is killed in this room, since there’s arterial spray on that wall there.” Rizzoli paced across the kitchen, unruly curls hiding her eyes as she focused on the floor. She stopped. “How do we know there aren’t other victims? How do we know this blood is from the Sadlers?”

“We don’t.”

Rizzoli crossed to the cellar and opened the door. There she stood for a moment, gazing down the dark stairway. She turned and looked at Maura. “That cellar has a dirt floor.”

A moment passed in silence.

Gary said, “We have GPR gear in the van. We used it two days ago, on a farm out in Machias.”

“Bring it into the house,” said Rizzoli. “Let’s take a look at what’s under that dirt.”

TWENTY-TWO

GPR,
OR GROUND-PENETRATING RADAR,
uses electromagnetic waves to probe beneath the ground’s surface. The SIR System-2 machine that the techs unloaded from the van had two antennae, one to send out a pulse of high frequency electromagnetic energy into the ground, the other to measure the echoing waves bounced back by subsurface features. A computer screen would display the data, showing the various strata as a series of horizontal layers. As the techs carried the equipment down the steps, Yates and Corso marked off one-meter intervals on the cellar floor to form a search grid.

“With all this rain,” said Pete, unrolling electrical cable, “the soil’s going to be pretty damp.”

“Does that make a difference?” asked Maura.

“GPR response varies depending on the subsurface water content. You need to adjust the EM frequency to account for it.”

“Two hundred megahertz?” asked Gary.

“It’s where I’d start. You don’t want to go any higher, or we’ll get too much detail.” Pete connected cables to the backpack console and powered up the laptop. “That’s going to be something of a problem out here, especially with all these woods around us.”

“What do the trees have to do with it?” Rizzoli asked.

“This house is built on a wood lot. There’s probably a number of cavities under here, left over from decayed roots. That’s going to confuse the picture.”

Gary said, “Help me get on this backpack.”

“How’s that? You need to adjust the straps?”

“No, they feel fine.” Gary took a breath and looked around the cellar. “I’ll start at that end.”

As Gary moved the GPR across the earthen floor, the subsurface profile appeared on the laptop screen in undulating stripes. Maura’s medical training had made her familiar with ultrasounds and CT scans of the human body, but she had no idea how to interpret these ripples on the screen.

“What are you seeing?” she asked Gary.

“These dark areas here are positive radar echoes. Negative echoes show up as white. We’re looking for anything anomalous. A hyperbolic reflection, for example.”

“What’s that?” said Rizzoli.

“It’ll look like a bulge, pushing up these various layers. Caused by something buried underground, scattering the radar waves in all directions.” He stopped, studying the screen. “Okay, here, see this? We’ve got something about three meters deep that’s giving off a hyperbolic reflection.”

“What do you think?” asked Yates.

“Could be just a tree root. Let’s mark it and keep going.”

Pete tapped a stake into the ground to mark the spot.

Gary moved on, following the grid lines back and forth, as radar echoes rippled across the laptop screen. Every so often he’d stop, call out for another stake to be planted, marking another spot they would recheck on the second walk-through. He had turned and was coming back along the middle of the grid when he suddenly halted.

“Now this is interesting,” he said.

“What do you see?” asked Yates.

“Hold on. Let me try this section again.” Gary backed up, moving the GPR across the section he had just probed. Inched forward again, his gaze fixed on the laptop. Again he stopped. “We’ve got a major anomaly here.”

Yates moved in close. “Show me.”

“It’s less than a meter’s depth. A big pocket right here. See it?” Gary pointed to the screen, where a bulge distorted the radar echoes. Staring down at the ground, he said: “There’s something right here. And it’s not very deep.” He looked at Yates. “What do you want to do?”

“You got shovels in the van?”

“Yeah, we’ve got one. Plus a couple of trowels.”

Yates nodded. “Okay. Let’s bring them down here. And we’re going to need some more lights.”

“There’s another flood lamp in the van. Plus more extension cords.”

Corso started up the stairs. “I’ll get them.”

“I’ll help,” said Maura, and she followed him up the steps to the kitchen.

Outside, the heavy rain had lightened to a drizzle. They rooted through the CSU van, found the spade and extra lighting gear, which Corso carried into the house. Maura closed the van door and was about to follow him with the box of excavation hand tools when she saw headlights glimmering through the trees. She stood in the driveway, watching as a familiar pickup truck came down the road and pulled up next to the van.

Miss Clausen stepped out, an oversize slicker dragging behind her like a cape. “Thought you’d be finished by now. I was wondering why you didn’t bring back my key.”

“We’re going to be here for a while.”

Miss Clausen eyed the vehicles in the driveway. “I thought you just wanted to take another look around. What’s the crime lab doing here?”

“This is going to take us a little longer than I thought. We may be here all night.”

“Why? Your sister’s clothes aren’t even here anymore. I boxed ’em up for you so you can take them home.”

“This isn’t just about my sister, Miss Clausen. The police are here about something else. Something that happened a long time ago.”

“How long ago?”

“It would have been about forty-five years ago. Before you even bought the house.”

“Forty-five years? That’d be back when . . .” The woman paused.

“When what?”