NANA WAS WIDE awake and off the ventilator by noon the following day. Her heart was enlarged and she was too weak to leave intensive care, but there was good reason to believe she’d be coming home again. I celebrated by sneaking the kids into the room for the quickest, quietest Cross family party ever.
The other hopeful news was on the work front. An FBI lawyer named Lynda Cole had established probable cause and gotten the Bureau back onto the property out in Virginia. By the time I reached Ned Mahoney on his cell, the FBI had a full Evidence Response Team on site.
Bree spelled me at the hospital—Aunt Tia would spell Bree later—and I drove out to Virginia in the afternoon to have another look around Blacksmith Farms.
Ned met me out front so he could walk me through with his creds. The primary area of interest was a small apartment out back. The access was an interior staircase from a three-bay parking garage underneath.
Inside, the place looked like a suite at the Hay-Adams. The furniture was all soft linens and upholstery, mostly in lighter tones. There was a decorative dropped ceiling over the dining area, and a highly polished walnut-manteled fireplace.
If you subtracted the techs in their tan cargos and blue ERT polo shirts, the place was pristine.
“It’s the bedroom that’s the puzzle,” Ned said. I followed him in through a set of curtained French doors. “No carpet, no knickknacks, no bedding, nothing,” he said, stating the obvious. Other than a bare bed, dresser, and two nightstands, it looked like someone had recently moved out.
“Prints and fibers came up with nothing. So we went to luminol.”
That explained the portable UV lamps set up in the room. Mahoney turned off the ceiling light and closed the door. “Go ahead, guys.”
Once they powered up, the whole room seemed to go radioactive. The walls, the floor, the furniture, all fluoresced bright blue. It was one of those occasions when my life actually did feel like an episode of CSI.
“Someone cleaned in here professionally,” Mahoney said. “And I don’t mean Merry Maids of Washington.”
One of the limitations with luminol is that although it can bring out traces of blood, it also responds to some of the things people use to get rid of blood, like household bleach. That’s what we were looking at. It was as if the room had been painted with Clorox.
This looked like a crime scene for sure. And maybe a murder scene.