‘Did you listen to the nine-eleven tape yet?’ Latarrino asked once they were out in the hall.
‘No,’ said Julia, shaking her head as she caught up with him. ‘I only know that units responded to a nine-one-one, but I don’t know the contents of the call.’
‘Okay, then, let me fill you in. Coral Gables PD received a call on their emergency line at 4:47 a.m. from what sounded like a child. We assume it was six-year-old Emma, although she never gave a name. She asked for help, told the operator that someone was coming. The line went dead before the conversation ended. But there was some muffling on the final seconds of tape. Digital enhancement of that audio and we can hear a man’s voice calling out the name Emma, followed by our crying caller saying, “No, Daddy!” Based on the timing of that call, we believe that the father had already killed the wife, left the master bedroom, and then walked down this hall here, probably making some of the prints we took up on the way. We’ll know more about whose blood is whose and whose blood is where when the DNA’s back. Right now the sequence of events is pretty much just theory. Then we figure he entered either the infant’s room or the little boy’s room. At some point Emma was awakened, probably saw what happened or what was happening to her brother or sister, took the cordless from the charger in the hall and went back into her own room, where she hid and placed the call to nine-eleven. That’s when the dad came in and found her, calling out her name because she wasn’t in bed like she was supposed to be. When he finds her, she calls out, “No, Daddy!” and he hangs up the line.’
Latarrino stopped at the first closed door off the main hallway. He frowned and rubbed his eyes. ‘Like Jennifer, Danny was found in his bed. God willing, the little guy never knew what hit him. Just went to sleep with a kiss from Mommy and never woke up,’ he said as he pushed open the door.
Julia held her breath again. Racecars zoomed across blue and red striped wallpaper; tiny Matchbox cars lined white shelves. Set up off to the side of the room on the wood floor was a loop-de-loop Hot Wheels racetrack with a long line of cars and trucks backed up on plastic yellow connecting tracks. A toddler bed in the shape of a red racecar was pushed up against a far wall. The bedding was gone – long since stripped and bagged.
‘This looks clean,’ she said right away, her eyes fixated on the tiny bed. ‘Cleaner than the other bedroom.’
‘We had spatter, but because of the red wallpaper and the fact that Crime Scene actually did clean up in here, it’s definitely nowhere near the scene we had in the master. Cause of death was blunt trauma to the head. Several stab wounds to the torso, but not much bleeding into surrounding tissue, so Neilson says they were made post-mortem, which is another reason it wasn’t as bloody. No spurting or gushing because the heart wasn’t pumping anymore. My take? This guy wasn’t as angry with junior as he was with his wife. He showed restraint, if that makes any sense.’
‘It does,’ she said softly.
‘It also makes him out to be more of a monster in my mind. Bastard pulled the covers back up and tucked the kid in again before he tiptoed out to find his daughter,’ Latarrino said as he walked back toward the doorway.
‘Why isn’t the mattress stained, like the mother’s?’ she asked, following him out into the hall.
‘You’re pretty observant. For a lawyer,’ he said with a smile that was hard to read as he closed the door quietly behind them. ‘Rubber sheets. The little guy was still in training.’
God, she needed to get the hell out of here. Even for just a few minutes, even just to step outside and suck in some fresh air, instead of this stale, heavy, cold substance that now filled every room. There’s even a taste peculiar to each crime scene. And she could taste it – heavy and acidic and bitter on her tongue. A taste your throat never forgets; a smell you simply file away into some dark alcove of your brain until something makes you remember it all over again. But Julia knew that even a request for a quickbathroom break at this point would be interpreted as a sign of weakness, especially by this detective and definitely by the crew downstairs, so she said nothing as she followed Latarrino to the door at the far end of the hall – the one with all the crayon scribbles. He stood there with his hand on the knob, long enough for her to realize he really didn’t want to open it.
‘This is Emma’s room,’ he said, finally, pushing open the door. ‘We found her in the corner, behind a storage box of Barbie dolls and a Hello Kitty chair.’
Even though her Barbies had been seized and the Hello Kitty chair impounded, Julia immediately knew what corner it was little Emma had run and hid from her daddy in. Her blood matted the pink carpet and splattered the lilac walls, painting an eerie final picture. The story she had so desperately begun to tell to a stranger on the telephone, its ending now left to be translated into words by a specialist in bloodstain pattern analysis.
Julia could no longer maintain the cool, distant persona of a prosecutor. She sucked in a breath as her imagination took over, placing the tiny, frightened figure in the scene. The dead were screaming once more in her head, and she could feel the jolt of adrenaline in her own body, the terror that seized Emma’s heart when her father finally found her hiding spot. And then, the sinking, shocking feeling of betrayal when she saw the knife in his hand, knowing exactly what he was going to do with it before it came down on her, but still not believing it as it did. Still loving him even then. She covered her ears with her latex-gloved hands and turned away from the sight.
Latarrino looked taken aback by her reaction. ‘God, this job sucks,’ he said quietly. He drifted over to the bare picture window that looked out upon the backyard. Glassy-eyed stuffed doggies and bears sat on a custom-made pink checkered window cushion. ‘It really does, ya know? Nothing ever preps you for this. No matter how many scenes you’ve been to or stories you’ve heard.’ He paused. Outside, uniforms chatted and laughed in the sunshine out by the pool. The soft sound of their voices drifted up and into the room, filling the void of strained, reflective silence. ‘You never want to get this call,’ he said finally, exhaling a deep breath. Then he turned back to face her, immediately frowning. ‘Enough, let’s get you out of here. You don’t look so good.’
The truth was, she didn’t feel so good either. She fought down a wave of nausea. ‘There’s still the baby’s room,’ she said weakly, wiping away the sweat that had gathered on her upper lip with the back of her hand. The latex from the glove pulled on her skin, and she could taste its chalky bitterness on her lips. She felt incredibly lightheaded, and could only hope that if she did go down, she’d at least stay unconscious long enough for the ambulance to pull out of the driveway.
‘Ain’t nothing you need to see in there, Ms Prosecutor. Just a pretty nursery,’ Latarrino said softly, taking her gently by the elbow and leading her back to the hallway. ‘He only suffocated that one.’