Victor brews a pot of coffee and I make my favorite dessert, a vanilla ice cream and orange juice float. Then Victor busies himself by organizing the contents of his briefcase. He sets out a bag of disposable rubber gloves and a fingerprint kit. I place my crime-scene kit on the table next to his. I, too, have gloves, a fingerprint brush, lifting tape, and cards. I click the switch and shine my ultraviolet penlight at him.
“Where’d you get all of that stuff?” he asks.
“The Internet … or just around the house.”
Victor holds a small spray bottle between his thumb and index finger. “Bet you don’t have any of this.” He spins it so I can read the label.
“Luminol!” I’ve wanted to play with this stuff forever.
“I’ll show you how it works.” He grabs a clean wooden skewer and pokes his finger, drawing a small spot of blood.
I cringe. “Dude, no.”
He scans the kitchen for something to wipe it on. Finally, he kneels down next to a strip of tile by the door and squeezes his finger. A couple fat drops of blood roll out and splatter on the floor. “I’ll clean this up with water and show you what happens.”
He scrubs the spot with a wet paper towel. “It looks clean, right?” But then he spritzes luminol onto a swab and runs it over the area. The tip of the white cotton turns bright blue. “Bam! Blood evidence.”
I jump out of my chair and do a little flailing-arms dance. “I’m not going to lie, that was impressive.”
“It’s very sensitive, too,” Victor explains, tucking the luminol back into his briefcase.
“You have to promise me that you’ll do that again for Spam and Lysa and Journey. Pleeeease?”
Victor chuckles. “No problem.”
While he finishes organizing his stuff, I run upstairs and get my laptop, checking again for Journey, but he’s still not online.
At the thirty-minute mark, Victor points out some early bands forming in the gel. They look like ragged slashes of dark color across the clear gel.
Wow. It’s really working.
“When this is done, I’ll stain it with a blue solution and the bands will show up even better.” He keeps an eye on the process while skimming through my notebook. He zeros in on my notes about the footprint in my bedroom. “I’m impressed that you took the initiative to go to a shoe store to find the style and size of shoe that matched the print you found in your room. That’s some excellent detective work.”
“It didn’t lead to anything, though.”
“That doesn’t mean it won’t at some point. You have to follow up on everything, and you did.”
“What do you do when you can’t figure out how something fits in?”
Victor shrugs. “Some things never drop into place, so at the end of the day you have to accept that they don’t count. That they were scene, not crime. You just hope that you get enough clues that do count.”
It’s been about forty-five minutes since we started running the gel. Victor turns to the page with Miss Peters’s DNA results in my notebook and arranges it next to the chamber. Then, it’s as if he sees something he hadn’t seen before. He places his hands on either side of the chamber and notebook and leans in, studying them both.
I sit up. “What is it?”
Victor’s reaction is small, but I pick up the signs anyway. He rolls his lips together and tightens his jaw. His coffee refill is forgotten. He stares at the process for a long time. After a while he lifts the notebook and studies it by itself.
I stare at the chamber from across the table, but of course it just looks like a big blob to me. I stay quiet for as long as I can. Finally, I’m about to burst. “Did we get a match?”
Victor is distracted. He disconnects the chamber from the batteries and slides the gel out onto a plate. He takes it to the sink and runs water over it.
“The swabs from you and Journey match,” he says. “So you were right about them. And it looks like we were right about Miss Peters, too.”
“What about Chief Culson?”
Victor brings the plate back to the table and retrieves a small, dark blue bottle from his briefcase. He squirts a few drops of that over the wet gel. “No match to Chuck.”
There’s something edgy in Victor’s manner. “You’re not lying to me, are you?”
He gives me a straight-on look but doesn’t deny anything.
I’m not sure he’s lying, but I’m 100 percent positive he’s not telling me the whole truth.
Victor pulls a small ultraviolet flashlight from his briefcase and shines it over the gel. Then he stuffs everything back into his briefcase and carries it to the closet. He grabs his jacket. “I’m going out for about an hour.”
I reach for my jacket, too. “I’ll go with you.”
“You should stay here.”
“Why?” My voice is high-pitched and worried.
Victor gives my shoulder a gentle squeeze. “Erin. Trust me. Everything’s fine. I just want to run over to the station to check on a couple of things.”
“But … what about our tests and everything?”
Victor takes the entire floral foam holder with the samples and sticks it into the freezer. “Just leave everything on the table; it’ll be fine.”
“This stuff can’t be here when Rachel gets home. She’ll flip.”
“Don’t worry.” Victor pauses at the back door. “I’ll be back before Rachel gets home. They’re going to be late, remember?”