Every Kind of Wicked (A Gardiner and Renner Novel Book 6)
Every Kind of Wicked: Chapter 20

Monday, 10:15 a.m.

“What is it?” Maggie asked Carol, a maelstrom of foreboding welling up in her heart. The fact that Carol sat down as well, as if this would be a long conversation, did nothing to calm it.

“I tested the blood from the scene, the spot where you say Rick’s fingerprint was—”

“The victim’s blood.”

“Not the victim’s.” The older woman took a deep breath. “It’s Rick’s.”

Maggie heard the words. She waited for them to rearrange themselves in some order that would make sense. “Rick’s.”

Carol carefully enunciated each word. “Yes. The blood on those swabs belongs to Rick.”

Maggie gave herself a minute to think over the scene, visualize each relevant factor in her mind. Jennifer Toner had no blood on her hands, so she had not drawn any from Rick if they had, for whatever unknown reason, struggled. Unless she had struck him with some object, which he then took away with him. But most likely—“It’s what I’ve been saying. He interrupted her murder, and the killer attacked him.”

“Sure,” Carol said. “But then, where is he now?”

The foreboding turned to dread, and panic threaded through her veins in a warm rush. “I don’t know, but wherever he is, he’s bleeding.”

“Not much,” Carol comforted with determinedly cool reason. “You only found that one smear.”

“We have to tell Denny, and he has to tell Jack and his chief,” Maggie said, getting to her feet. It seemed to require more effort than it should. “Wait . . . Carol . . . how did you have Rick’s DNA profile in the first place?”

“The positive controls.”

“Ah.”

All scientific assays, especially biological tests, were run with both positive and negative controls. A negative control would be a sterile, unused swab of the same type so that if there were some contaminant or material in the fresh-from-the-factory item, it would show up in the results. A known sample, something that was definitely blood or definitely semen, would be used to make sure the test and its reagents were working properly. If the results showed no DNA present on the crime scene sample but the expected profile from the control, they would know the test had worked properly and there was, indeed, no DNA at the scene. For most labs, a secure, known, consistent, unlimited and best of all free source of positive control material came from their own staff. Employees could spill their blood, swab their mouths, and daub their nether regions without even waiting for a purchase order. When they had still been married, Maggie had contributed “mixed” samples of semen and epithelial cells, and so Rick’s profile remained on file. Rick had been caught between feeling proud of his prowess and slightly skeeved at the whole idea, but more than willing to do his part for the cause of forensic science.

Maybe, she thought, it would end up saving his life.

She hoped so, with a fervor that caught her by surprise and turned her voice harsh as she marched into Denny’s office and demanded to return to the crime scene. “Tell the chief we have to go there now.”

Denny gaped. His mouth opened and closed, but he began dialing the phone before he could even form words. Technically he did not have the authority to tell the homicide unit to do anything, but this revelation involved injury to one of their own and the man would hardly object.

“What do you expect to find?” he asked Maggie while the phone rang on the other end.

“I don’t know. But it’s where I have to start.”

“Where we have to start,” Denny said.

* * *

Twenty minutes later Maggie and Denny stepped out of the city station wagon and stared up at the second floor of the small building. Weekday mode on the street, with the tea shop brewing up a menu of smells, the hair salon busy coloring and pinning. Three men worked on the roof, which seemed like a dangerous place to be this time of year when ice coated everything and a biting wind gusted off the lake. The roof barely peaked, but still, any incline could be treacherous.

Denny’s gaze followed hers. “That’s got to be a damned miserable job.”

“They probably say the same about ours,” she said, trying hard—and failing—to act as if this were just another crime scene.

He held the door for her. “Not today, I’ll bet they don’t.” That remained to be seen.

They toted all the equipment they could carry in two hands each, a phenolphthalein kit, an alternate light source, a jug of water and the mix to make Bluestar, a reagent that would make blood glow, and Amido Black, a dye stain that turned even the faintest of blood prints to a deep purply black.

The second-floor hallway seemed as innocuous as ever, tidy, all the doors shut except for one at the far end where a woman of some advanced age watched them. Her apartment faced the road and she had probably seen them pull up. Maggie gave her a little wave, which garnered no response whatsoever, and made a mental note to tell—suggest—to the homicide cops that they interview the woman to see if she saw anything. Even though that had most likely been done the same night they found Jennifer Toner.

They reached the victim’s doorway and stopped. No keys, of course, and no one from homicide had arrived yet. As Denny piled their equipment along the wall Maggie examined the hallway for signs of blood, a struggle, a weapon, anything. She had only been there in the dark, and even with all the lights turned on that was never the same as seeing a place in daylight . . . especially today’s daylight, blessed with a rare spot of winter sunshine that reflected off the snow-covered surfaces and poured through the windows at each end of the hall with the brilliance of a nuclear blast. She couldn’t wait to see the apartment under these circumstances, but contented herself with the hallway before it became overstuffed with cops.

The carpeting had been there for a while, thin indoor-outdoor stuff that had worn its floral pattern nearly bare in spots. It had plenty of stains, most unnoticeable and lost in the color scheme until she really looked, but nothing appeared to be recent blood. No fresh rips. No new-looking scuff marks along the walls.

She traced the path from Jennifer’s apartment to the stairwell, and then from the apartment to the elevator. No blood, at least none she could see. Depending on what she found inside, they might have to spray the Bluestar up the hallway, and blocking out the light from those two windows would not be a picnic. Her mind raced, bouncing from possibility to possibility like a top bouncing off random barriers without losing speed. They might wait until nighttime for that. And it would probably annoy, greatly, the woman at the end of the hall.

There were a few dark stains that could be blood, though she doubted it. After all her years in forensics Maggie still couldn’t identify a car or a gun or a shoe brand with one look, but she could tell blood from tomato sauce or paint or rust or cough syrup under nearly any circumstance.

Still, a phenolphthalein test couldn’t hurt and would give her something to do until the cops showed up. She unsnapped her kit, but then the stairwell door opened and the cops showed up.

Jack, followed by Riley, followed by Will, followed by two other patrol officers Maggie knew by sight only. The area instantly became very crowded. Jack, to her surprise, approached her immediately. “You all right?”

“Of course,” she said. There was nothing the matter with her. But he was trying to be empathetic to her conflicted emotions, and she briefly touched his arm before elbowing her way to the front of the line as Riley unlocked the door. No one would go inside until she had photographed the area. Yes, she had already photographed the area, but circumstances had changed. She would approach this crime scene as if she had never been there . . . even if that didn’t make a lot of sense.

She felt Jack’s hand on her shoulder. “No. Her brother is the main suspect, and he could easily have a key to the place. You have to let us clear it.”

She opened her mouth to protest, then shut it. He was right. She shouldn’t even be standing there—Marlon Toner would hear the commotion in the hallway and, if armed, could shoot through the door. She stood aside, moved to a spot well behind the officers. Denny did the same.

The cops formed a phalanx outside the apartment door, the patrol officers in the front.

A sudden thump made Maggie start, until she realized it came from above them all. The roofers, moving over the planks or tar paper or whatever covered the building. She hoped they wouldn’t fall through a weak spot and collapse it into her crime scene.

Jennifer Toner’s apartment, however, remained exactly as she’d left it on Friday. The items she and the detectives had moved in their search were where they’d placed them, the deep bloodstains on the floor having hardened and filled the air with the faint but unpleasant smell of rotting garbage. No one hid in the closets or under the bed or behind the shower curtain, to the disappointment of the two patrol officers who had entered with guns drawn and a wild excitement in their eyes. They now withdrew to the hallway to stand a sort of loose guard, await further requests from the detectives, and decide where to eat lunch.

Maggie made a beeline for the credenza, this time determined to cut a chunk from it if not seize the entire item. The bright illumination streaming through Jennifer’s filmy window treatments lit its surface with much more clarity. After close exam she realized, with both relief and disappointment, that she hadn’t missed anything on Friday night. That one blood smear with the fingerprint truly was all there was to see. Ditto for the floor, the doorway, the rest of the apartment. She could find no additional clues to say that Rick had ever been there, what had happened to him, or where he might be now.

Well, perhaps one. Under the credenza, near the end by the bloodstain, she saw a scrap no more than half an inch long and a few millimeters wide. She pulled it out, found it to be rubber-band flexible—it seemed to be a scrap of latex, a little dusty but otherwise unstained. A piece of glove, or unused condom? It could even be something she’d left herself, except she didn’t recall ripping any gloves on Friday night and her department didn’t stock ones that color of aqua. The cops, she knew, used black ones. She had seen purple and a sky blue on the ME staff, nothing quite like this. It could easily have been there on Friday and she’d missed it in the dim lighting. She dropped it into an envelope but planned to check Jennifer’s cabinets, expecting to find a match to the victim’s cleaning supplies.

Then she saw what else she had missed on Friday night.

The area rug in the living room left about three feet of hardwood floor showing all the way around between this rug and the walls. A more functional welcome mat took up the space inside the doorway to catch the melted slush of winter shoes, and a second mat behind the door gave those shoes a place to stay. From where she knelt in front of the credenza, Maggie saw a long, straight disturbance in the fibers of the doorway mat like the furrow of a tire through fresh grass. It had been broken up and loosened by their trampling but retained enough shape to seem recent. Maggie tried to think if she and Denny had brought in any piece of equipment large enough to have a roller on the bottom, but they hadn’t. Nor had she brought anything of that sort on Friday night. The body snatchers had left the gurney in the hallway instead of making the tight turn into the apartment, so they hadn’t left the tracks. Jennifer Toner might use a roller case or briefcase for work or have one of those fold-up canvas shopping bags with two wheels. She might have dragged a can out to the garbage, who knew.

But Maggie followed it.

Tracks like that were all about angle and light. Tire tracks through a field might be invisible when viewed from the south but clear as a typewritten word from the west, and so on. She knelt by the door and ducked her head so her view could skim the surface, looking something like a jaguar scouting a tapir through the reeds. The two patrol officers must be staring down at her as if she’d lost her mind, their conversation awkwardly truncated. She saw nothing. But when she reversed the viewpoint, from the spot where Jennifer had been to the door, she could see the mark. It began near the credenza’s end.

From a child’s pose in the doorway she gazed up and down the hallway. The peculiar mark ran definite and straight to the left of the apartment door. Now there seemed to be two of them, roughly parallel.

It’s probably a vacuum cleaner, she thought, and I’m wasting time with it. But since she had no better ideas, she kept wasting. She moved up the hallway and crouched again, thinking that if it had been a vacuum cleaner, she wished it had done a better job, because getting her face close to the average apartment building’s public hallway carpeting was not how she preferred to spend her days.

A wheeled case, someone dragging something—they should head toward the stairwell, right? Apparently not interested in the elevator, which sat at the opposite end of the hallway, to the right from the doorway and down by the nosy neighbor. But the tracks didn’t veer toward the stairwell door, only continued straight past it.

The boots overhead had been stomping back and forth as if the cold and unhappy workers outside wanted to make sure everyone knew of and felt guilt over their presence. But she heard one set come to an abrupt halt at the edge, nearly over Maggie’s head.

A shout erupted as one called to the other; even though the words were unintelligible, it had a sense of urgency that made the hairs on her arms quiver. The men had been shouting to each other all morning, but suddenly the tone became very different.

And suddenly she knew, with absolute certainty, what had caused the marks on the rugs.

From her spot on the floor she looked up at the window, bare and blazing with light. Then without thinking she stood, moved to it, and undid the latch. She touched only the edge of the slide and pulled the handle up with two fingers, a decade in crime scene work keeping her hands from any surface large and smooth enough to retain prints. It slid upward easily and had no screen.

An icy blast pushed in as if it had been waiting for this chance, and cut through the fibers of her uniform shirt. She barely noticed. She braced her hands against the wall on either side to avoid touching the sill, and leaned far out, knowing what she would see.

The dumpster below had been positioned to catch the rotten shingles and wooden slats of the old roof, but either the workers or some tenants found it a handy catchall since plastic bags, some articles of clothing, and an old bicycle tire had also found their way inside. A thin layer of snow had partially obscured these, but she could make out their outlines interspersed with bare spots of color, fabric, even . . . skin. sᴇaʀᴄh thᴇ (ꜰind)ɴʘvel.nᴇt website on Gøøglᴇ to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.

And there, where the flakes had not perfectly covered him, lay the body of her ex-husband.

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