*
“Scorcher,” Larry said happily, bouncing over from the kitchen windows, when he saw us in the doorway. “The very man I was thinking of. Come here, you, and bring that young fella with you. You’re going to be very, very happy with me.”
“I could do with being very happy with something right now. What’ve you got?”
“What would make your day?”
“Don’t be a tease, Lar. I don’t have the energy. What have you magicked up?”
“No magic about it. This was good old-fashioned luck. You know how your uniforms went charging through here like a herd of buffalo in mating season?”
I wagged a finger at him. “They’re not my uniforms, my friend. If I had uniforms, they’d sneak through scenes on their tippy toes. You’d never even know they’d been there.”
“Well, I knew this lot had been here, all right. Obviously they had to save the living victim, but honest to God, I think they lay down on the floor and wallowed, or something. Anyway. I thought we’d need a miracle to get anything that didn’t come from a great big clodhopping welly, but somehow, believe it or not, they managed not to wreck the entire scene. My lovely lads found handprints. Three of them. In blood.”
“You gems,” I said. A couple of the techs nodded to me. Their rhythm was starting to slow: they were getting near the end, gearing down to make sure they missed nothing. All of them looked tired.
“Keep your powder dry,” Larry told me. “That’s not the good bit. I hate to break it to you, but your fella wore gloves.”
“Shit,” I said. Even the most moronic criminal knows to wear gloves, these days, but you always pray for the exception, the one so carried away on his surge of desire that everything else gets washed out of his mind.
“Don’t be complaining, you. At least we’ve found you proof that someone else was in this house last night. Here was me thinking that counted for something.”
“It counts for a lot.” The memory of me upstairs in Pat’s bedroom, blithely dumping everything on his shoulders, slapped me with a rush of disgust. “We won’t hold the gloves against you, Lar. I’m sticking to my story: you’re a gem.”
“Well, of course I am. Come here and have a look.”
The first handprint was a palm and five fingertips, at shoulder-height on one of the plate-glass windows looking out over the back garden. Larry said, “See the texture to it, those little dots? Leather. Big hands, too. This wasn’t some little runt of a guy.”
The second print was wrapped around the top edge of the children’s bookcase, like our man had grabbed hold of it to keep his balance. The third one was flat on the yellow paint of the computer desk, next to the faint outline where the computer had stood, like he had rested a hand on there while he took his time reading what was on the screen.
I said, “And that’s what we came down to ask you about. That computer: did you pull any prints off it, before you sent it back to the lab?”
“We tried. You’d think a keyboard would be the dream surface, wouldn’t you? You’d be so wrong. People don’t use a whole fingertip to hit the key, just a tiny fraction of the surface, and then it gets hit over and over at slightly different angles . . . It’s like taking a piece of paper and printing a hundred different words on it, one on top of the other, and then expecting us to work out the sentence they came from. Your best bet is the mouse—we got a couple of partials that might be almost usable. Apart from that, nothing big enough or clear enough to hold up in court.”
“What about blood? On the keyboard or the mouse, specifically?”
Larry shook his head. “There was some spatter on the monitor, a couple of drops on the side of the keyboard. No smudges on the keys or the mouse, though. No one used them with blood on his fingers, if that’s what you’re asking.”
I said, “So it looks like the computer came before the murders—before the adults, anyway. That’s some nerve he’s got, if he sat here playing with their internet history while they were asleep upstairs.”
“The computer didn’t have to come first,” Richie said. “Those gloves—they were leather, they’d have been stiff, specially if they were all bloody. Maybe he couldn’t type in them, took them off; they’d kept the blood off his fingers . . .”
Most rookies on their first outings keep their mouths shut and nod at whatever I say. Usually this is the right call, but every once in a while, watching other partners argue and bat theories back and forth and call each other every shade of stupid gives me a flash of something that could be loneliness. It was starting to feel good, working with Richie. “Then he sat there playing with Pat and Jenny’s internet history while they were bleeding out four feet from him,” I said. “Some nerve, either way.”
“Hello?” Larry inquired, waving at us. “Remember me? Remember how I told you the handprints weren’t the good bit?”
“I like saving my dessert for last,” I said. “Whenever you’re ready, Larry, we would love the good bit.”
He got each of us by an elbow and turned us towards the sweep of congealing blood. “Here’s where the male victim was, amn’t I right? Face down, head towards the hall door, feet towards the window. According to your buffaloes, the female was to his left, lying on her left side facing him, propped against his body, with her head on his upper arm. And here, just about eighteen inches from where her back would have been, we have this.”
He pointed to the floor, to the Jackson Pollock gibber of blood that radiated out around the puddle. I said, “A shoeprint?”
“Actually, a couple of hundred shoeprints, God help us. But take a look at this one here.”
Richie and I bent closer. The print was so faint I could barely see it against the marbled pattern of the tiles, but Larry and his boys see things the rest of us don’t.
“This one,” Larry said, “is special. It’s a print from a man’s left runner, size ten or eleven, made in blood. And get this: it doesn’t belong to either of the uniforms, it doesn’t belong to either of the paramedics—some people have the brains to wear their shoe covers—and it doesn’t belong to either of your victims.”
The swell of satisfaction practically burst his boiler suit. He had every right to be pleased. “Larry,” I said, “I think I love you.”
“Take a number. I don’t want to get your hopes up too high, though. For one thing, it’s only half a print—one of your buffaloes obliterated the other half—and for another, unless your fella’s a total eejit, that shoe’s at the bottom of the Irish Sea by now. But if you should somehow get your hands on it, here’s where the luck comes in: this print is perfect. I couldn’t take a better one myself. When we get the pics back to the lab, we’ll be able to tell you the size and, if you give us enough time, very possibly the make and model. Find me the actual shoe, and I’ll have it matched for you inside a minute.”
I said, “Thanks, Larry. You were right, as always: that’s a good bit.”
I had caught Richie’s eye and started moving towards the door, but Larry batted me on the arm. “Did I say I was done? Now this is preliminary, Scorch, you know the drill, don’t quote me on any of this or I may have to divorce you. But you said you wanted anything we could give you about what the struggle could have looked like.”
“Don’t I always? All contributions gratefully accepted.”
“It’s looking like the fight was confined to this room, just like you thought. In here, though, it was full-on. It went the whole width of the room—well, you can tell that yourselves from the way the place is wrecked, but I mean the part after the stabbing started. We’ve got a beanbag right over there at the far side that’s been slashed open by a bloody knife, we’ve got a big spray of blood spatter on the wall on this side, above the table, and we’ve counted at least nine separate sprays in between.” Larry pointed and the sprays leapt out from the wall at me, suddenly vivid as paint. “Some of those probably come from the male vic’s arm—you heard Cooper, it was bleeding all over the place; if he swings his arm to defend himself, he’s going to throw off blood—and some of them probably come from your boy swinging his weapon. Between the two of them, anyway, an awful lot of swinging went on. And the sprays are at different levels, different angles: your boy was stabbing while the vics were fighting back, while they were on the ground . . .”