I’ve recently learned that in the ambulance that night, I kept asking to return to my house. I don’t remember this desire, and the idea terrifies me. But now I see: I thought that if I could just get back there, I could regain what I had lost. Like walking back into a room to retrieve something you’ve forgotten.
Handley had “turned the kitchen black” with fingerprint powder, and all he had found was one palm print and five fingertip prints on the glass of the kitchen door—my last mark upon the place, the mark that had matched my inked hands in Texas. This was one of the many moments during the trial when an expert witness stressed how clean our house was—nearly every house carries countless fingerprints of those who live there. Handley said the dearth of prints in our house was “extremely rare” and admitted that Mom’s cleanliness was “very frustrating” for an investigator—she may have been so thorough that cleaning solution lingered on the countertops, dissolving marks as they were made. “The house from one end to the other was in impeccable order,” Handley said. “It was extremely clean, cleaned from one end to the other.” Cleanliness being next to godliness, this was an excellent way to imply that Mom would have had nothing to do with Hutchinson.
Handley also pointed out that sometimes people who work with abrasive materials and chemicals wear their fingers so smooth that they leave no prints upon what they touch, their hands turned ghostly by work. Examples of such people, he said, include dishwashers, bricklayers, and masons. Although he was not technically able to say it, it was easy to hear the rest of his sentence in our heads: “masons, like Michael Hutchinson.”
Now, years after the trial, I pull out Handley’s original typewritten catalog of items in the house. It is heartbreaking in its precision. I know that it’s his job to be detailed and thorough, but still I feel a strange affection for him: without his careful attention, I would have lost these details forever. On the coffee table, next to a couple of round drops of blood, was a stack of magazines. The top one was Better Homes and Gardens. He notes that there were two stuffed animals on the floor next to the couch: a cat and a mouse. On the accompanying diagram, about an inch from the outline of Mom’s body, they are represented by two irregular circles, one slightly larger than the other. Handley took the time to add tails: a long line for the cat, a squiggle for the mouse.
* * *
The trial lasted a total of six days: the rest of that week and the following Monday, dozens of hours of intimate facts interspersed with forensic details. Most were distressing, but some offered unexpected comfort. There was a solace in the mortal wound: a major vein and artery had been cut, very near her heart. There was nothing I could have done, no door I could have reached fast enough to save her.
As the days passed, the invisible was made visible. One expert described the use of orthotolidine, a spray that reveals traces of blood that the naked eye can’t see. Normally, we see only red blood cells; orthotolidine reveals hemoglobin. I had seen the substance in the photos of the crime scene, particularly in the kitchen: a dirty blue-black in the shape of additional smears and splatters, and, most important, boot prints. Because orthotolidine is so reactive, it’s usually the last thing done in crime scene processing—in order to see the hidden, you risk destroying all that can be seen.
This idea of undetectable blood haunted me. Before the trial, I would never have thought that blood could hide—that it could sit on an otherwise harmless-looking surface, a tiny web of stray molecules. Although I’d tried to step on only clean floor that night, the investigators found my small, faint barefoot prints. And treading on her blood seemed like a desecration.
But orthotolidine was interesting to me—blood as invisible ink. That evening, I called a friend down south and told her about it. I was in a good mood, sharing something I’d learned—a small, weird benefit of the trial.
My friend said, “Oh, yeah. I know about orthotolidine.”
“Um, what?” I couldn’t imagine why she would have heard of it.
“Y’know. From CSI.”
“Oh,” I said, and felt absurdly silly. It was an uncool, last-to-know kind of feeling. I didn’t say anything more about it, because I didn’t want to have to explain. I knew about orthotolidine because I had to, but I wanted my friends to be safe harbors. And I felt nauseated, knowing that my friend sought out this kind of information for casual weeknight entertainment, and that it hadn’t occurred to her that I’d be disturbed by that. After all this time, I still felt so distant from other people, and the distance was increasingly exhausting.
In the coming days, I would also learn about bloodstain pattern analysis: the difference between passive and active blood spatter, droplets and directional castoff, a whole system of codifying the intersection between physics and common sense, illustrated by abundant blood that was perfectly visible without the help of special chemicals. There were some droplets in the house that especially bothered me. They went beyond scientific interest, were scary in a way that was different from the horror-movie splash of directional castoff. Droplets are round, undistorted by lateral movement: they indicate blood that fell from directly above, dripping from a stationary or slow-moving source. The crime scene processors had noticed droplets in the scene, and found that they belonged not to Crystal but to her attacker, the same person who left the semen found by investigators and the medical examiner. The droplets went from the body to the kitchen counter, where it seemed the person had pulled off a paper towel from the roll mounted under the cabinet. They also dotted Crystal’s legs, and there were orthotolidine boot prints straddling one of her calves, indicating a person standing still and bleeding on her. Just standing there. Minutes before—or minutes after—I’d stood in just the same place.
As opposed to a droplet, a swipe is blood transferred onto an object by a combination of contact and motion. There was a swipe on the dimmer switch in the kitchen that I became fixated on. It suggested that after killing my mother, Michael had turned off the light. If he hadn’t, I would have seen every gory detail, fully lit, rather than the softer outlines afforded by the lenient darkness. I can’t help but feel an isolated, bizarre gratitude toward him for that one act.
* * *