STAY SAFE, ASSHOLES.
Above and behind the sink, bolted to the wall, is a horizontal rack hung with three knives. All of them are stained with blood, up and down, freckled from hilt and blade. A clot of dread and excitement forms in the base of my gut and floats like a bubble up into my throat. I swing around, moving quickly now, heartbeat thrumming, back through the muster room and out into the hallway, and now the sun is all the way up outside, casting a muted ochre glow through the glass door and I can see the floor clearly, see where the trail of blood runs down the hallway. Discrete spots, leading plain as bread crumbs from the kitchenette sink through the muster room, pass the dry-erase board and the flagpole, all the way down the hall to the front door of the station.
My mentor Detective Culverson, my mentor and my friend, he called it walking the blood. Walking the blood means walking with the escaping suspect or the fleeing victim, it means “you find the trail and see what songs it wants to sing you.” I shake my head, remembering him saying that, most of the way joking, purposefully hokey, but Detective Culverson could turn a phrase, he really could.
I walk the blood. I follow the steady line of drops, which appear on the tile at six-to eight-inch intervals all the way down the hallway and out the glass door, where the trail disappears in the thick mud just outside the building. I stand up in the gloomy daylight. It’s raining, a sputtering indecisive drizzle. It’s been raining for days. When Cortez and I got here late last night it was squalling hard enough that we were biking with our jackets tugged up over our necks and the backs of our heads, like snails, a blue tarp tied tautly over all our stuff in the Red Ryder wagon trailing behind. Wherever the bleeding person went from here, there is no trail left to sing about it.
Back at the bloody sink in the break room, I open my small blue notebook to one of its last fresh pages and draw a rough annotated illustration of the knives behind the sink. Butcher’s knife, twelve inches; cleaver, six inches with a tapered spine; paring knife, three and a half inches, with the brand initials W.G. inlaid on the handle, between the rivets. I sketch the blood pattern on the knives and in the basin of the sink. I get down on all fours and walk the blood again, and this time I note that each of these drops is oblong, less a perfect circle and more an oval with a pointy end. I go again, third time, nice and slow, running my big Sherlock Holmes magnifying glass along the trail and now I’m seeing that they alternate: an oblong droplet pointing this way, and then one pointing that way, one eastward droplet, one westward, all the way down the hall.
I was a detective for only three months, promoted out of nowhere and dismissed just as abruptly when the CPD was absorbed by the Department of Justice, and so I never received the higher-level training I would have in the normal run of a career. I am not as versed as I might wish in the finer points of crime-scene forensics, I cannot be as sure as I would like. Still, though. Nevertheless. What I’ve got here is actually not one trail but two; what the alternating droplets record are two separate instances that someone passed along this corridor either bleeding or carrying a blood-stained object. Two journeys in opposite directions.
I go back to the kitchenette and stare once more into the red mess in the sink. There is a fresh jitteriness in my gut, a new chaos in my veins. Too much coffee. Not enough sleep. New information. I don’t know if Nico’s here, if she was ever here. But something happened. Something.
*