Rabid

by T K Kenyon

  Bev’s heart clenched around its own supply of blood.

  “Please describe the patterns of blood in the apartment, using this diagram of the kitchen to explain.” The line-drawing kitchen diagram was two feet high by three feet long, and it looked like the designers’ perspective illustrations when Bev had had the kitchen remodeled two years ago.

  She wished for that fifteen thousand dollars back. That was a year and a half’s tuition at OLPH for the girls.

  The technician cleared her slim throat and glanced at Bev again. The girl was wearing blue glitter mascara. The tech ducked her head and said, “The small blood pool in the center of the kitchen floor where the deceased’s body was found, measuring twenty centimeters in diameter, was the source for the majority of the blood swipes, wipes, and splashes in the kitchen.” The girl clicked a laser pointer, and a glowing red dot whirled in the center of the schematic.

  A blood pool, Bev hated the idea that Conroy had been laying in a pool of his own blood.

  He had gasped, while he was lying on the white linoleum floor, trying to say something, while the knife in his chest quivered with his heartbeat.

  Was she remembering that or illustrating the girl’s comments in her mind?

  Bev wasn’t sure. She stared at the yellow notepad, willing her mind to reach back.

  A tear fell out of Bev’s eye and splashed on the yellow paper.

  “Please continue.” Georgina crossed her arms and pointed her sharp nose at the diagram.

  “This blood pool was predominantly composed of blood from the victim. A splatter of the victim’s blood on the upper kitchen cabinets suggests a small spray of blood, perhaps from the initial blade entrance, occurred while he was standing, before he fell.” The red dot from her pointer swung over to the upper cabinets and jiggled.

  “How can you tell that he was standing when this spray occurred?”

  “The blood was a fine spray, perhaps even an aspiration, about six feet above the ground and tightly grouped. Like with a water pistol, if you’re standing close to a water pistol, the droplets are close together.”

  A fine red mist hung in the air and flew past her left eye, and Bev’s fingernails scratched the courthouse table. Her left arm was paler than her right and sore in the joints.

  Mercedes continued, “A struggle flings blood everywhere, on the walls, on the ceiling, sometimes a hundred feet away. There was no indication of that. Other than the one spray on the countertops, the rest of Conroy Sloan’s blood was transferred, probably originating from the pool.”

  “Transferred?” Georgina looked interested.

  “Blood can be picked up by other people, on their hands, shoes, or clothing, and moved to a new place.” The Mercedes girl sounded like the smartest kid in class.

  “And can you tell that blood was transferred?”

  “Yes. Instead of drops, droplets, or sprays, transferred blood is a blot, a swipe, a wipe, a smear, or a print.”

  Georgina cocked her head to the side. “And were there any of those in the apartment?”

  “Lots,” the girl said. “One of the paramedics walked through the blood pool and tracked it through the living room and out the front door. The sole of his running shoe matched the print.”

  Bev smeared the tears on her cheeks and wiped them on her black skirt. That was Conroy’s blood they were talking about. The paramedic had stepped in Conroy’s blood and tracked it across the living room carpet, leaving umber footprints burned into the beige carpet.

  Was that another memory?

  “Ah. That’s interesting,” Georgina said. “Could you tell if Beverly Sloan transferred blood anywhere in the apartment?”

  The red dot scribbled on the wall telephone in the kitchen perspective drawing. “A bloody palm print on the telephone matched Beverly Sloan’s right palm. The fingerprint technician made the palm print identification. Beverly Sloan had blood on her right hand when she picked up the phone receiver.”

  But the kitchen phone hadn’t been hooked up yet. Bev had called the paramedics on her cell phone. The stupid buttons had been so tiny, and her left hand was useless and so heavy that it felt like she was holding a gallon of milk.

  “Did Beverly Sloan leave other bloody fingerprints or palm prints in the kitchen?”

  “Yes. Here,” the laser scratched the black and white kitchen drawing, “on the counter in several places, and on the floor beside where the victim lay.”

  When Bev had crouched on the floor beside Conroy, blood leaked down his side from the protruding knife and stained his shirt. Her hand squished on the floor.

  Memory or imagination?

  “Were there other bloody fingerprints or palm prints in the kitchen?”

  “We found handprints and fingerprints matching Beverly Sloan, both the paramedics, Leila Faris, and Father Dante Petrocchi-Bianchi.”

  “What does that tell you?”

  “That all of them were in the kitchen some time after the victim was stabbed, and they all touched him while he was bleeding or they touched the blood on the floor.”

  “Did you find blood anywhere else in the apartment?”

  “More blood was found on the doorknob. Partials matched everyone in the apartment.”

  “Was anyone else’s blood found in the apartment?”

  “Drops and droplets of Beverly Sloan’s blood were found on the kitchen counters, near the spray on the cabinets,” the laser pointer touched the diagram again, “and a smear of Beverly Sloan’s blood was found on the deceased’s hand.”

  “Is that amount of blood consistent with the wounds that her doctor testified that she had sustained on her right wrist and hand?”

  “Yes.”

  In the kitchen of the apartment, under the glare of the fluorescent bulbs, greasy drops of her blood slid off her wrist and dripped on the green veneer counter. She had been sitting on the counter, something poking her back. Her left hand held a knife.

  She had cut cold, superficial slices into the accordion folds of her right wrist and palm.

  Georgina the prosecutor prompted Mercedes Gonzalez through all the blood evidence. From the way she described it, blood had washed over the apartment in a huge crimson tsunami.

  Heath stood and adjusted his suit. He reviewed his notes, flipping the pages on the yellow pad. He began his cross-examination with, “When did you sample the blood in the apartment?”

  “Sunday, February fourteenth.”

  “Was that the day you Luminoled the apartment?”

  “No, we took samples of visible blood on Sunday, and then we used the Luminol on Monday the fifteenth.”

  In his cross examination, Heath led the girl back through her testimony, paying particular attention to blood sprays, splatters, droplets, and drops. “You said, Ms. Gonzalez, that the blood on the counter you attribute to Mrs. Sloan was,” he consulted his notes, “drops and droplets.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you find Beverly Sloan’s blood anywhere else?”

  “On Conroy Sloan’s hand and on the knife.”

  “Well,” Heath strutted around the courtroom. “How did her blood get on his hand?”

  “He must have been nearby when she sustained the wound.” The girl enunciated every consonant in the last three words.

  Heath asked, “And how did Mrs. Sloan’s blood get on the knife?”

  “The wounds on Beverly Sloan’s right wrist are consistent with the type of knife analyzed.” Again, Mercedes’s statement was very carefully worded.

  “The knife in Conroy Sloan’s chest.”

  “Yes.”

  “So he cut her hand?”

  “That conjecture is beyond the scope of the forensic testing.”

  “Was her hand cut with that knife, the one that ended up in his chest?”

  “That conjecture is beyond the scope of the forensic testing,” she repeated.

  “Did any of the other knives in the block have blood on them? Anyone’s blood?”

  “We tested all the
knives remaining in the block. All were negative for blood.”

  “Not even blood from a steak?”

  “The knives appeared to be brand new.”

  “Well, let’s stop a minute.” Heath walked over to the drawing of the kitchen. “If Beverly Sloan was bleeding from her hand here,” he took a red permanent marker out of his pocket and drew red spots on the countertop while the prosecution attorneys muttered about him messing up their drawing, “and Conroy Sloan had her blood on his hand and on the knife, and we know that he was standing here when that fine spray of blood hit the cabinets here,” he scribbled red jagged lines on the cabinets, “which is practically just above the drops of Beverly Sloan’s blood.”

  “Drops and droplets,” the girl said.

  “Then Conroy Sloan was standing over her, holding the knife with her blood on it just before he stabbed himself, wasn’t he? So he cut her first, didn’t he?”

  The girl blinked her blue, glittering eyelashes. “That conjecture is beyond the scope of the forensic testing.”

  Bev listened for three more days to the tales of blood and gore and force of the knife (“enough to slice off a chunk off a tough steer steak,” said the gruff medical examiner, and pressed his Texan mustache around his lips, and that the deceased had bruises in various stages of healing on the wrist, arm, and left eye, which was consistent with ongoing abuse) and repetitive analysis over four days by the psychiatrist and the police 9-1-1 operator and yet another forensic technician for the 9-1-1 tape (two minutes of her own coarse voice grabbling, “I think it’s his heart. I think it’s his heart,” and “fifty-one Vita Place, the townhouses by the hospital, number fifty-one, Vita Place,”) and the horror of it filled her mind with scarlet and shining steel until she understood why God hated her, because a gentle and loving God could not gaze upon such atrocity and barbarism (the slitting of wrists, the breaking of arms, the stabbing of hearts) without turning away in revulsion from everyone who committed such sins, who was even capable of committing such sin.

  When Bev had found those pink, terrible, pink, horrible pink silk panties, her soul had devoured itself, and she had changed into an evil, damned creature. That was it. That was why she was forsaken.

  Bev endured when that faded auburn-haired Peggy Anne Strum swore to tell the truth on the Bible and then she sat up there on the stand and lied and lied and lied.

  ~~~~~

  In the church’s library, Dante sat beside Bev in the counseling chair that he used to think of as Sloan’s but now was the other chair and held Bev’s hands while she sobbed.

  The damp tissue in her hand was streaked with pink and black makeup, and he handed her a clean one. She drew in a shuddering breath and pressed the tissue to her mouth. “That horrible woman.”

  “The lawyers have to present their story and ask the witnesses questions in ways that their story is supported.”

  “But she lied!” Bev’s back bowed.

  “Of course she did,” Dante said, feeling like he was humoring an angry child.

  “I can’t believe she lied.” Her caramel hair swam on her back, loose.

  “Or Sloan may have lied to her.”

  “No, Conroy wouldn’t have done that. Conroy wouldn’t have told her that.”

  The lying bastard might very well have told the other women just that. “So she lied, eh?”

  “Conroy would never have set a date to marry her, February fourteenth of next year, assuming the divorce was final. He wouldn’t do that!”

  “She made it up,” Dante said.

  “He was married.”

  “Yes.”

  “To me.”

  “Yes.”

  “That horrible, horrible woman. What kind of a name is Peggy, anyway? And she came to his funeral. And she talked to me.”

  “Yes.” He patted her hand.

  “She was the one. She left the underwear in his suitcase. Her butt was huge.”

  He chuckled at this, thinking she was insulting the Peggy woman.

  Bev whipped around and glared at him over their hands, still twined on the arms of the chairs between them. A streak of mascara delineated a path from the corner of her eye to her hairline. “And she’s testifying more tomorrow.”

  “Your lawyer will rip her apart. Make her look like a troia.”

  Bev sniffed and touched her eye with the tissue. “What’s that?”

  “A prostitute. Literally, it is a female pig.”

  Bev smiled a little, a relief of those grief-stricken muscles. “A sow.”

  “It is funny in the Italian.”

  “It’s funny.”

  “Are you going to be all right?”

  “I suppose. I hate hearing all of that.” Her hand, under his, stretched and reformed a snug grip around his fingers. “I wish I didn’t have to be there. It’s just one thing after another. And as soon as that troika finishes testifying.”

  “Troia.”

  “—troia, then Leila Faris starts. I can’t stand this. I can’t stand this.” Her delicate fingers trembled like a grasped bird in his hands.

  It had been two days since their hypnosis session. He asked, “Have you tried praying in the church yet? To see if anything has changed since I hypnotized you?”

  Her head dropped forward one defeated notch. “It didn’t work. I still can’t feel anything.”

  He had hoped that the hypnosis would convince her to start feeling whatever it was that she was calling grace again. “It could be subtle at first.”

  She wiped her tears on the backs of her hands. “I must have killed Conroy.”

  “Bev, if you don’t remember, then you don’t know.”

  “I don’t know if I remember.” Tears, tinged with smoky makeup, fell onto her cheeks, and she wiped them on the cuffs of her pink shirt. “All those horrible pictures of the blood and the drops and smears and the knife, and the diagrams of his ribs and his heart and where the knife cut open his heart, I can’t get them out of my head. Sometimes I think I might remember something but then it seems like I’m thinking about what they’re describing.”

  The trial was preying on his mind, too. “So you don’t remember.”

  She fanned herself with open fingers and tapped her chest, as if she could air-dry the tears that she couldn’t wipe away fast enough. “And Leila Faris testifies next. I don’t know what she’s going to say. She seems to know everything. Leila told me that Conroy was seeing Valerie Lindh, too.”

  Dante nearly stood up. “Leila told you? You talked to Leila?”

  “She knows about all his other women, who they were, how many there were.” Bev dropped the tissue and her fingers crept into her hairline. “She knows about us, too.”

  Dante was aghast and yet it all made sense. “Did you say Leila told you?”

  “I went to Conroy’s lab a few months ago. She was there. I think she knew about us, or figured it out from something I said. She’ll probably tell the jury.”

  “Months?” Dante asked. “Two months ago?”

  “Maybe. I think so.”

  A cramp drove breath out of him. Leila had been dodging him since about then.

  Bev touched her eye with the tissue, and the white tissue sopped up pink, lavender, and black as if the color was draining out of her. Soon she would be monochrome, the reverse process of those tinted portraits from his mother’s living room that were now in his sister’s attic, shell-pink lips and cherubic golden skin.

  Bev said, “She told the police I was the only one in the apartment. She’s going to take the stand tomorrow and tell them I did it, that I killed Conroy because he was leaving me for her or Peggy or Valerie.”

  Dante did not know what to say. “Does your lawyer know about Valerie, too?”

  “I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. Valerie would just tell more lies, and those horrible lawyers George and Georgina would lie even more.”

  “It’s the prosecution’s case. That’s their story. Your attorney will tell your story, after.”

 
; “What story is that? I don’t even know what happened.”

  He stroked her hand. “Don’t cry. Don’t despair.”

  “I still don’t know what to do with the girls if I go to prison.” She snatched up the tissue and rested her face on it. “It’s all falling apart. I’m falling apart.”

  “I’ll talk to Leila. I’ll find out what she will say.”

  Bev swiveled toward him. The skin under her eyes was greasy with wiped tears. Tears rolled over her lower eye lids and dripped off her soaked lashes. “Please don’t go there.” She dropped the tissue in her lap and touched his arm. “Not you, too.”

  “I could find out what she knows, what she’s going to say tomorrow. She owes me a favor.” He missed talking to her about science, and he missed her long, cool, glances over her cigarette from between the falls of her black hair.

  “Not you, too.” Bev stumbled out of her chair and Dante shoved himself farther into his chair’s upholstery as Bev’s soft body landed on his knees. “Don’t go.”

  Her mouth covered his, lips smoothed by lipstick and breath ripe with whiskey—when had she had time to drink? He grabbed her arms and tried to set her away from him, back and off the chair and his legs and lap, but she whipped her arms around and his hands dislodged and she grabbed his collar, expertly unsnapped it, and unbuttoned him to the waist.

  His body had acclimated to her soft lips and skin and breasts pushing on him, and rushing blood roared in his ears.

  He had been dying without this.

  His hands crawled up her shirt and reached around behind her back, tracing the ridges and creases quilted into her skin.

  Scars.

  ~~~~~

  In the lab that night, Leila read through Conroy’s secretive notes, still trying to figure out what his settings had been on that damned gel.

  Conroy’s office door was closed.

  She had had it with the gossip from Yuri and Joe and all the others. They all sucked.

  Their voices leaked into Conroy’s office despite her efforts, and she wanted to scream.

  Joe asked, “Did you see LawTV tonight?”

  Leila wanted to walk out there and strangle him for such stupid, idle gossip, but she stayed put. The paper in her hand got damp as she crumpled it.