A small shelf is mounted to the wall above the computer, a shelf that holds but two items: one is a photo album in black, the other is an identical album but in white. Retrieving the black album, I flip it open toward the back. I try not to look at the other images as I find the next empty space. A couple strokes of a glue stick and the image is set on the page. I close the album and return it to the shelf.
I’ll need to buy another black album soon, probably within the next two months. The white album’s probably good for a few more years. I never look at the pictures in the black album, not intentionally. The white album’s different. I like those pictures. They smile back at me; happy, relieved faces. Mother faces, child faces, husband, wife, and sister faces. Sometimes they’re waving, eyes beaming and so alive.
I don’t look at the black book.
*
The Gulfstream G100—we call her Betsy—is a dream on wings, and one of the perks of the job that I really enjoy. Forests may make me quiver, but put me in the air and I’m in heaven. Les and Marty, our pilot and copilot, have banned me from the cockpit. Apparently I ask too many questions and touch buttons I’m not supposed to.
They were nice about it, though, and fortunately the G100 only seats four passengers, so there wasn’t an air marshal on board to tase me. That wouldn’t be fun. I went through training three years ago so I could carry a Taser, thinking it would be cool to have one if I ever needed it. No one told me that to complete the course I had to get shot by a Taser.
When they asked me if I wanted firearms training I said, “Hell, no!”
The King County prosecutor has me scheduled for three-thirty—last witness of the day. It should be interesting. I rarely have to go to court, which is good, since I get nervous with the whole process. Not from being in court, in front of people. That’s easy. My testimony is what gives me fits and starts. It’s too close to a lie, not that I’d lie in court, I just don’t tell the whole story … and I have a guilty conscience, which eats at me. The jury hears about shoe size, trekking poles, stride length, shine, toe digs, and directionality.
But I’m not a man-tracker.
I don’t need a good trail. I don’t need a fresh trail.
All I need is essence and texture … which I can’t talk about in court.
Most suspects fall apart in the early stages of the investigation, usually right after I find the body. They give a full confession long before it ever gets to court; it’s pretty hard not to, when someone can tell you everything you did, where you walked, and what you touched. Most know when they’re caught and are smart enough to work out a plea.
All but the sociopaths and the psychos … the Jonathan Quillans of the world.
Eighteen months ago, in a meth-induced journey into paranoia, Quillan killed his doper girlfriend’s eight-month-old baby boy in a butcher-fest that gave me nightmares and day tremors for months. After a nine-day meth binge, his mind had descended into a wicked hell of frightening-awful hallucinations: snakes dripping from trees, spiders nesting in his ears, voices whispering in the walls, bugs under his skin that he had to pick at, and pick at, and pick at, but they’d never go away. There were terrible whispering voices that he wanted to block out but couldn’t because he was afraid of the spiders in his ears.
The report reads like a modern-day horror story.
The cops are watching, the voices whispered. There’s a camera in the baby’s belly. He couldn’t see the camera. Squeezing, pinching—the baby screaming—poking. It had to be deep.
Deep, said the voices.
When his girlfriend Nancy woke, the sound was no doubt still in her ears, a sound that she couldn’t quite understand or place. The same sound had invaded her sleep and bullied her dreams, forcing itself upon her, screaming at her.
Screaming.
Pushing the empty Bacardi bottle off the bed, she stumbled to the bedroom door, holding the wall a moment with her right hand as the world righted itself. I remember staring at her handprint on the wall for the longest time: ivory essence with a sandy texture. When she stumbled into the living room, Quillan was bloody to the elbows, digging, digging, digging.
He killed her, too; poor, wretched, ignorant girl.
Like unzipping a zipper, he opened her throat from side to side in the kitchen as she tried to arm herself with a carving knife.
The voices told him to.
When they found Quillan the next afternoon, he was sleeping like a baby on the couch. Nancy’s sister pounded on the front door for ten minutes without response, growing ever more frantic as her eyes fixated on the thin trail of blood leading across the porch and down the steps. When the police arrived and booted the door, they detained Quillan and did a cursory examination of the bedrooms, the bathroom, and the kitchen, finding nothing. There was no sign of foul play, only the telltale sliver of red trailing across the porch, but even this disappeared by the bottom step.
Quillan did his work well.
But the frantic scrubbing and washing of a tweaker nine days gone is no match for solid forensics … in this case chemiluminescence. That’s the use of chemical agents, usually luminol, to illuminate trace elements of blood. It’s a favorite among crime scene investigators because it reacts with the iron in blood to create a temporary blue glow. You can wash, scrub, and scour to your heart’s content, but it’s nearly impossible to fool the luminol.
They found a dead pool in the kitchen, a nasty patch of neon-blue where a river of blood had emptied onto the tile, splashing upon the cabinet facings, the fridge, the stainless-steel dishwasher, like so much water over a fall: too much blood to survive the loss. What had been a white and yellow kitchen and dining room now shimmered blue; every swipe of the cleaning rags was revealed, every attempt to destroy blood evidence was placed on display.
But no bodies.
That’s where I came in.