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.