The Stranger You Seek - By Amanda Kyle Williams Page 0,36
any glasses, and stood there thinking about that for a moment. The crime scene specialist followed my eyes to the bed table.
“Two rings and only one glass,” Lang said, and continued his work. “It’s over here on the rug next to the bed. Looks like the victim might have dropped it.”
One missing glass? The killer took a glass away from the scene? Why? A souvenir, something for his trophy collection? Or was it just for safety and speed? Never know when you might leave behind a bit of saliva, a partial print, an eyelash, some tiny piece of DNA evidence in the rush to leave a scene.
I looked down at the corpse on the bed. David Brooks was white, the pale blue dress shirt was pushed up on his lower back, exposing a perfect set of bite marks. One arm hung off the bed, one arm was raised above his shoulder. He’d been muscled and fit.
“I know you must be the reason I’m here,” Jo Phillips said from behind me, then lowered her voice so no one else could hear. “Most of the time APD just uses their own people and they’re pretty good, but this is my thing. Spatter is all I do. Three years, I’ve been telling ’em bloodstains are the physical manifestation of the inside of a perp’s head, that it’s physical and behavioral evidence and it deserves an expert.” She laughed a soft, frustrated laugh, then shook her head. “All I get is it’s not in the budget. Man, you must have some pull, Keye.”
“Pull? With Rauser? He’s desperate,” I answered.
“I think I’m going to like working with you,” she said, and gave me a good, long look, then brushed against my arm, stepped in front of me, and leaned over the body. She pressed a cotton swab into the sheet where blood had first pooled, then became absorbed into the sheets and mattress. I watched as the swab in her hand slowly turned dark. She allowed it to air-dry before placing it into a sterile test tube. She looked up at me and smiled again. It crossed my mind that she might have been flirting with me, but this was work, a death scene, and that would have been, well, creepy.
She stooped to look at the headboard and the bed table. “Cast-off here,” she said, and scraped a few samples off each piece of furniture and dropped them into a test tube, then filled out labels for each sample. She took pictures from several angles. In the next couple of hours, Jo Phillips would have what she needed to set up an elaborate system using string to help fashion a three-dimensional point-of-origin determination, precisely measuring distance of blood drops from the body, the distance of the stains from one another, on the victim’s clothes, the sheets, the headboard and walls. She would identify each type of stain—spatter saturation stain, drops, arterial spray, or cast-off from a bloody weapon and the associated edge characteristics. By drawing a line through the long axis of a group of bloodstains, the point of origin could be determined. So could trajectory and impact angle. Back at the lab, she’d use a computer to make the calculations that would finish telling the terrifying story of victim and offender interaction. Analysts like Phillips played a huge part in a thorough reconstruction. And bloodstain patterns were nearly indisputable in court. I stepped back to give her room to work. She was methodical, careful—everything you wanted in a spatter analyst. God! If she’d been any more perfect I think I would have gagged. Already I felt a rash coming on.
“What do you make of the sheet?” Rauser asked from the bedroom door. “We clearly got wounds under there, so why cover him up?”
I had no idea how long he’d been standing there. Rauser was one of those guys who could memorize the scene, close his eyes, and envision it later inch by inch. Scenes made sense to him. He was a natural and instinctive investigator.
“He was protecting the victim. Trying to minimize his humiliation by not exposing him,” I answered. “That could indicate a prior relationship. Or the victim may symbolize someone significant to the killer—a parent, a spouse, a brother, someone thought of with genuine affection. It’s a protective and loving gesture.”
“Hell of a way of showing love,” Rauser muttered. “Even I could do better than that.”
“So you say,” Jo Phillips answered without looking up from her work.