Fallen (11 page)

Charlie glanced back at a portly, dark man whose odd build made the Tyvek suit unflatteringly tight in all the critical areas. The man took a last puff on his cigarette and handed it to one of his co-workers. He introduced himself to Amanda in a clipped, British-sounding accent. “Dr. Wagner, I am Dr. Ahbidi Mittal.”

She indicated Will. “This is Dr. Trent, my associate.”

Will shook the man’s hand, trying not to cringe at the effortless way Amanda rolled out a degree they both knew he’d obtained from a dubious online school.

Mittal offered, “As a courtesy, I’m prepared to show you around the crime scene.”

Amanda gave a cutting glance to Charlie, as if he had any say in the matter.

“Thank you,” Will said, because he knew no one else would.

Mittal handed them each a pair of white booties for their shoes. Amanda grabbed Will’s arm to steady herself as she slipped off her heels and covered her stocking feet. Will was left to hop around on his own. Even without his shoes, his feet were too big, and he ended up looking like Mrs. Levy with her heels hanging off the back of her slippers.

“Shall we start in here?” Mittal didn’t wait for them to acknowledge his invitation. He led them around the back of the Malibu and into the house through the open kitchen door. Instinctively, Will ducked his head as he walked into the low-ceilinged room. Charlie bumped into him and mumbled an apology. The kitchen was small for four people, horseshoe shaped, with the open end facing the laundry room. Will caught the distinct odor of rusty iron that blood gave off when it congealed.

Faith was right—the intruders had been looking for something. The house was a mess. Silverware was scattered on the floor. Drawers had been thrown around. Holes were knocked in the walls. A cell phone and an older-looking BlackBerry were crushed on the floor. The wall phone had been smashed off the hook. Except for the black
fingerprint powder and the yellow plastic markers the forensics team had used, nothing had been altered from what Faith said she’d first seen when she entered the house. Even the dead body was still in the laundry room. Faith must have been terrified, not knowing what was coming around the corner, terrified that her mother was injured—or worse.

Will should have been here. He should’ve been the kind of partner Faith knew she could call no matter what.

Mittal said, “I’ve yet to write my report, but I am prepared to share my working theory.”

Amanda rolled her hand in a circle to move things along. “Tell me what you’ve got.”

Mittal’s lips pursed at the commanding tone. “I assume that Captain Mitchell was preparing lunch when the crime commenced.” There were bags of cold cuts on the counter beside a knife and cutting board where Evelyn had obviously been slicing tomatoes. An empty Wonder bread sleeve was wadded up in the sink. The toaster had popped up long ago. Four slices of bread. Evelyn had probably known Faith would need lunch when she got home.

It was a normal enough scene, even pleasant, but for the fact that every item on the counter was spattered or smeared with blood. The toaster, the bread, the cutting board. More blood had dripped down to the floor and pooled onto the tiles. Two sets of red shoe prints crisscrossed the white porcelain, one small, one large; there had been a struggle.

Mittal continued, “Captain Mitchell was startled by a noise, possibly the sliding glass door breaking, which likely made her cut her finger with the knife she was using to slice the tomatoes.”

Amanda noted, “That’s a lot of blood for a kitchen accident.”

Mittal obviously didn’t want any editorial comments. He paused again before continuing, “The infant, Emma, would’ve been here.” He pointed to the counter space beside the fridge, opposite the area where Evelyn had been preparing lunch. “We found a small drop of blood on the counter here.” He pointed to the spot beside an older-model
CD player. “There’s a blood trail to and from the shed, so Captain Mitchell was most likely bleeding when she left the kitchen. Her handprint on the door supports this.”

Amanda nodded. “She hears a noise, so she hides the baby to keep her safe, then comes back in with her S&W.”

Charlie’s words came out in a rush, as if he could no longer hold his tongue. “She must’ve wrapped a paper towel around the cut, but it bled through quickly. There’s blood on the kitchen door and the wooden handle of the S&W.”

Will asked, “What about the car seat?”

“It’s clean. She must’ve carried it with her uninjured hand. We’ve got a blood trail back and forth across the carport where she carried Emma to the shed. It’s Evelyn’s blood. Ahbidi’s people already typed it, so we can kinda puzzle it out from that.” He glanced up at Mittal. “Sorry, Ahbi. I hope I’m not stepping on your toes.”

Mittal made an expansive gesture with his hands, indicating Charlie should continue.

Will knew that this was Charlie’s favorite part of the job. There was a swagger to his walk as he went to the open doorway and clasped his hands together near his face as if he held a gun. “Evelyn comes back into the house. Pivots, sees bad guy number one waiting in the laundry room and shoots him in the head. The force spun him around like a pinwheel. That’s the exit wound you see at the back of his head.” Charlie turned back around, hands raised again in a classic Charlie’s Angel pose, which was the best way to make sure you got shot in the chest. “Then bad guy number two comes, probably from over there.” He pointed to the pass-through between the kitchen and dining room. “There’s a struggle. Evelyn loses her gun. See there?”

Will followed his pointing finger to a plastic marker on the floor. Now that Charlie had put the suggestion in his head, he could see the faint, bloody outline of a handgun.

“Evelyn grabs the knife off the counter. Her blood is on the handle, but it’s not on the blade.”

Amanda interrupted, “It’s not just her blood on the knife?”

“No. According to her personnel file, Evelyn is typed as O-positive. We’ve got B-negative coating the blade and here by the fridge.”

They all looked down at a dozen large, round drops of blood on the floor.

Mittal provided, “It’s a passive spatter. No arteries were compromised or there would be a spray pattern. All the samples were sent to the lab for DNA analysis. I imagine we’re looking at a week for results.”

A smile played at Amanda’s lips as she stared at the blood. “Good girl, Ev.” There was a sound of triumph in her voice. “Any of the dead guys B-negative?”

Charlie glanced at Mittal again. The man nodded his acquiescence. “The Asian in the ugly shirt was O-positive, which is a fairly common type across races. It’s Evelyn’s type. It’s my type. The other, the guy we’re calling Ricardo because of his tattoo, was B-negative, but here’s the kicker: he doesn’t have any stab wounds. I mean, he bled at some point. He was obviously tortured. But the blood we’re looking at here is a larger volume than anything—”

Amanda interrupted, “So, we’ve got someone out there with a stab wound whose blood type is B-negative. Is that rare?”

“Less than two percent of the U.S. Caucasian population is B-negative,” Charlie told them. “It’s a quarter of that for Asians, and around one percent for Hispanics. Bottom line, it’s a very rare blood type, which makes it probable that our dead B-negative Ricardo is genetically related to our missing and wounded B-negative.”

“So, we’ve got a wounded man out there, blood type B-negative.”

Charlie was ahead of her for once. “I already put a be-on-the-lookout at all hospitals within a hundred miles for a stab wound of any kind—male, female, white, black, orange. We’ve already had three rule-outs from domestics just in the last half hour. More people get stabbed than I’d realized.”

Mittal made sure Charlie was finished, then pointed to the blood smeared across the floor. “These shoe prints are conducive to a struggle
between a small woman and a medium-sized man, probably around seventy kilos. We can tell from the variation of light to dark in the print that there is a medial roll to the foot, or supination.”

Amanda stopped the lesson. “Take me back to the stab wound. Are we talking fatal?”

Mittal shrugged. “The medical examiner’s office would have to give you their opinion. As was stated earlier, there’s no blood spray on the walls or ceiling, from which we can posit that none of the arteries were damaged. This spatter, then, could perhaps be the result of a head wound, where one would find a fair amount of blood with minimal damage.” He looked at Charlie. “Do you concur?”

Charlie nodded, but added, “A gut wound might bleed like this. I’m not sure how long you could last with that. If you trust the movies, not long. If a lung was punctured, then he’d have an hour, tops, before he suffocated. There’s absolutely no arterial spray, so it’s a seeping wound. I don’t disagree with Dr. Mittal about the possibility of a head wound.…” He shrugged, then disagreed anyway. “The blade was coated tip to hilt, which might indicate that the knife plunged into the body.” He saw the frown on Mittal’s face and backpedaled. “Then again, it could be that the victim grabbed the knife, which cut his hand and coated the blade through transfer.” He showed his hand, palm up. “In which case we’d have a B-negative out there with a wounded hand as well.”

Amanda had never embraced the equivocations of crime scene science. She tried to sum it up in absolutes. “So, bad guy B-negative struggles with Evelyn. Then I suppose we bring in the second man, the Asian in the Hawaiian shirt, who later ended up dead in the bedroom. They managed to subdue Evelyn and take away her gun. And then there’s a third man, Ricardo, who was a hostage at one point, and then became a shooter, and then, thanks to Agent Mitchell’s quick action, became dead before he could injure anyone.” She turned to Will. “My money is on Ricardo being hooked up in all of this, torture or not. He pretended to be a hostage to try to leverage Faith.”

Mittal looked uncomfortable with the finality in her tone. “That is an interpretation.”

Charlie tried to smooth things over. “There’s always the chance that—”

There was a sound similar to the rush of a tropical waterfall. Mittal unzipped his clean suit and felt around in his pants pockets. He pulled out his cell phone and said, “If you will excuse me,” before heading back into the garage.

Amanda turned to Charlie. “Brass tacks?”

“They’re not giving me full access, but there’s no reason for me to disagree with what Ahbi’s said so far.”

“And?”

“I don’t want to sound racist,” Charlie began, “but you don’t often see Mexicans and Asians working together. Especially Los Texicanos.”

“Younger kids aren’t as hung up on that sort of thing,” Will offered, wondering if that could be called progress.

Amanda didn’t acknowledge either comment. “What else?”

“The list by the phone.” Charlie pointed to a piece of yellow paper with a bunch of numbers and names. “I took the liberty to call the number for Zeke. I left a message for him to get in touch with you.”

Amanda looked at her watch. “What about the rest of the house? Did forensics find anything?”

“Not that they’ve told me. Ahbi’s not being overtly rude, but he’s not going out of his way to volunteer anything, either.” Charlie paused before adding, “It seems obvious whatever the bad guys were looking for wasn’t found, otherwise they would’ve cleared out the minute Faith pulled up.”

“And we’d be planning Evelyn’s funeral.” Amanda didn’t dwell on the fact. “Whatever they were searching for—what would you guess the size of this mysterious item to be?”

“No telling,” Charlie admitted. “Obviously, they were looking
everywhere—drawers, closets, cushions. I think they got angrier as they went through the house and started destroying on top of searching. They ripped open the beds, broke the baby’s toys. There’s a lot of fury in there.”

“How many searchers?”

“I’m sorry, Dr. Wagner.” Mittal was back. He tucked his phone into his pocket but left his white suit gaping open. “That was the ME. He’s been delayed by the discovery of another body at the apartment fire. What was your question?”

Charlie answered for her, perhaps sensing that Amanda’s tone might get them thrown out of the house. “She was asking how many searchers you thought there were.”

Mittal nodded. “An educated guess would be three to four men.”

Will saw the disgusted look on Amanda’s face. It had to be more than three, otherwise all the suspects were dead and Evelyn Mitchell had kidnapped herself.

Mittal continued, “They did not wear gloves. Perhaps they thought Captain Mitchell would relent without a struggle.” Amanda snorted a laugh and Mittal gave another one of his patented pauses. “There are fingerprints on most surfaces, which of course we will share with the GBI.”

Charlie said, “I’ve already called the lab. We’ve got two techs coming in to digitize them and put them in the database. From there it’s only a matter of time before we know if they’re in the system.”

Amanda indicated the kitchen. “Once Evelyn was neutralized, they would’ve started their search in here. They were looking through drawers, so it’s something that would fit in a drawer.” She looked up at Charlie, then Mittal. “Any tire tracks? Footprints?”

“Nothing of consequence.” Mittal walked her over to the kitchen window and started pointing out things in the backyard that had been checked. Will studied the broken CDs on the floor. Beatles. Sinatra. No AC/DC. The player was white plastic, smudged with black fingerprint powder. Will used his thumbnail to press the eject button. The tray was empty.

Amanda’s voice came back to him. “Where did they keep Evelyn while they were tearing up the house?”

Mittal started toward the living room. Will took up the rear as Charlie and Amanda followed the doctor through the path of debris. The setup was similar to Mrs. Levy’s house, minus the sunken aspect of the living room. Opposite the couch and a wingback chair were a wall of bookshelves and a small plasma-screen television with a foot-sized crack in the center. Most of the books were strewn across the floor. The couch and chairs had been gutted, their frames broken. There was a stereo on the shelf by the TV, the old record-playing kind, but the speakers were busted and the arm had been wrenched off the turntable. A small pile of vinyl records had obviously met the hard edge of someone’s heel.