BLUE MERCY

by ILLONA HAUS

  “All right then. Give me a few minutes to set up.”

  “Wait.” Kay stopped DeSousa at the door. “You’ve taken samples, right?”

  “Of what? I can’t see anything to sample.”

  “Do the drain traps. The sides of the tub. The sink and the grout. Just swab. Do it before you spray. I’m not going to have the luminol destroy what little DNA evidence we might have here.”

  DeSousa gave her a nod. “I’ll call you when we’re ready.”

  “We’ll be upstairs,” she said, and Finn followed her.

  The air on the second floor was stale. Kay thought she could sense death up here as well. The back two rooms didn’t appear to have been used. Bare mattresses in battered bed frames, dressers with their drawers pulled out, closets empty. It was the master bedroom, overlooking Keystone, that the tenant had used. The sun-warped vinyl blinds were drawn. A lamp on the nightstand had been switched on by one of the officers who’d cleared the house for the team. In its dull glow, Kay saw evidence of the killer.

  He’d left clothes: several shirts and a couple pressed khakis hanging on dry-cleaner hangers, a pair of loafers and folded socks. On the top of a small desk in the corner was some loose change. All precisely stacked. The single drawer of the desk was empty.

  Finn found the phone line. The five-foot cord was plugged into the wall socket, the unused end lying behind one desk leg.

  “What do you figure? A modem?” he asked.

  Kay nodded. Of course he’d have a laptop. He’d probably followed the coverage of his murders through the WBAL news site. Maybe even lurked on Eales’s website, chatting online. Could she actually have read his posts on the board?

  There was little else. What few personal belongings he’d had in the house, he’d no doubt stuffed into the insulated pizza pouch along with the laptop.

  At least they’d get lots of prints. The Crime Lab had lifted several dozen cards’ worth already from the kitchen alone. Kay scanned the room again, turning, wishing for more light and knowing she’d have to come back in the daytime.

  “The guy’s a fucking nutcase,” Finn said, looking at the bed, the corners of the sheets tucked squarely like a hospital bed’s. “Probably did some army time.”

  “Or prison.”

  From downstairs, Lenny DeSousa called for them. When they reached the bathroom, the tech handed them each a vapor mask. “You ever done this before?” he asked.

  She and Finn both shook their heads.

  “Once the spray hits any trace blood, the luminol reacts with the iron in the hemoglobins. The proteins are the catalyst to the chemiluminescence—in other words, the glow you get. Same principle as those light sticks you buy at rock concerts.”

  “Yeah, like I go to those every weekend,” Finn said. “How long does it take?”

  “If there’s anything there, you should see the reaction within a few seconds.” DeSousa ushered them in, fastening his own mask and closing the door. His assistant was already standing by with a video camera, and between the four of them, it was tight quarters.

  “So what’s in this stuff?” Finn nodded to the spray bottle.

  “Three-aminophthalhydrazide and a little sodium carbonate.”

  “Sounds healthy.” Finn snugged the mask firmly over his nose.

  “If there are any trace blood patterns,” DeSousa explained, “we’ll get lucky in here. These pebbled tiles and this old grout hold more than the newer stuff. Where do you want me to start?”

  “The tub area.” Kay took a solidifying breath, already imagining what awaited them.

  “All right then.” He reached past Finn’s shoulder to the switch plate on the wall. “You ready?”

  “As I’ll ever be.”

  With a faint click, the room pitched into black. The darkness swallowed her. She felt Finn behind her, used him for support.

  She heard the first pump of the spray bottle. Then another. DeSousa mumbled instructions to his assistant. Another few sprays, silent seconds, and then the eerie blue-green luminescence began to grow. With each pump of the spray bottle there was more, as though Lenny DeSousa were pumping out blue glow-in-the-dark paint directly onto the tub and wall.

  The glow intensified. The entire wall, the edges of the tub, the floor around it. Everything glowed.

  “God, all that’s blood?” Finn’s voice sounded thin in the hollow room.

  “Doubtful.” Lenny’s voice. “It’s probably a false positive. Happens a lot. Luminol reacts to any kind of protein. My guess is it’s the bleach.” He sprayed more, revealing the entire outline of the tub. “Just give it a while. The proteins in blood are a stronger catalyst than bleach, so if there is any blood residue you’ll get a longer reaction.”

  They waited. Kay could hear her own heart beating, could feel Finn’s behind her, as the seconds slipped away into the eerie, glowing silence of the bathroom.

  “Here it comes,” Lenny said at last.

  And finally Kay saw it.

  57

  IT HAD BEEN A BLOODBATH.

  They spent almost an hour in the cramped bathroom. One spray after another, one savage luminescent smear leading them to the next. The fine mist filled the black air. Kay’s eyes had begun to sting, and her skin felt as if it were crawling.

  The luminol’s reaction to the bleach gave way to a display of violence that rendered even the technicians silent as they worked. The wall behind the tub glowed with luminesced blood: spatters and thick arches, handprints and streaks fanning across the old tiles in frenetic patterns. With his assistant videotaping it all, Lenny DeSousa had worked his way around the room, past the sink and to the toilet. There, Finn had cursed as the chemical revealed a crude smiley face drawn across the tiles, chest high. Kay imagined the killer pausing to relieve himself, then finding amusement in an impromptu sketch with a bloody finger.

  But always, Kay’s eyes came back to the tub wall: the partial handprints and wild smears. Now she knew what she’d only imagined. There was a reason he’d tied Patricia. It was because of Beggs. Kay remembered the prostitute’s bruises. The blood across the tub wall had to be from Beggs, thrashing in her final bid for survival.

  You didn’t expect that, did you, you sick fuck? The drugs wearing off, and her coming to. She saw you, saw herself bleeding, and she struggled. That’s why you tied Hagen. You didn’t want her flailing like Beggs had.

  Even in the dark, Kay could picture him standing over Beggs, then Hagen. Each paralyzed by the ketamine, each aware of her life ending. Every heartbeat forcing the life out of them through their opened wrists.

  “He wants to see them die.” She hadn’t meant to say it aloud.

  “What?” Finn asked behind her.

  “He watches them bleed. Only, he wants them to see it too. He wants to witness their fear as they’re dying. That’s part of the thrill for him.”

  The pump of DeSousa’s spray bottle continued while the gleaming red button on the video camera pierced the blackness. More spray. More fluoresced blood. This time a partial footprint in blood. Then another. Bare feet across the tile floor from the tub to the toilet, then the sink. Had he been naked?

  “Get close-ups of those,” Kay said. “Maybe we can get a patent print.”

  DeSousa had come full circle in the small room. The luminescence was dying now as the chemical compound of the luminol ate up the proteins in the blood.

  “That’s it.” DeSousa’s voice was muffled by his mask. “We’ve hit everything.”

  Kay felt shaky, wanted to blame the chemicals, but knew it was much more than that. She groped for the door. “I need some air.”

  “Go on,” DeSousa said. “We’ll finish up.”

  She was vaguely aware of Finn following her as she left the damp room, crossed the foyer, and pushed her way out the front door. The night’s heat felt cool compared to the thick air of the bathroom. She filled her lungs, steadied herself at the porch’s railing, and surveyed the crush of response vehicles. Farther down Keystone, the media h
ad arrived with their satellite trucks. She spotted Jane Gallagher from WBAL under a huge, black umbrella.

  Kay turned her back to the circus. In the flashing blue strobe of the radio cars, Finn’s face was unusually pale. And he looked older. Clearly he’d been as affected by the visuals in the bathroom as she had. This wasn’t the kind of stuff a murder cop in Baltimore saw daily.

  Finn patted his jacket for cigarettes, reconsidered briefly, then withdrew the pack anyway. Tapping one of the Marlboros out, he offered it to her. “You probably could use one too,” he said.

  She could almost taste the sweet, rolled tobacco. She looked at the cigarette, wanted it, then pictured Eales: his moist lips pinching the unfiltered end of her stale Camels.

  “No, thanks,” she said.

  Leaning against the porch railing, Finn lit up. He took in several long drags and scanned the sea of crime-scene vehicles and personnel. But his gaze seemed unfocused.

  “How the hell do you do it?” he asked eventually.

  “Do what?”

  “What you did back in there? It’s like you can see this asshole work or something.”

  “I just look at all the pieces. Let the evidence tell me.”

  “Naw, there’s more to it than that, Kay. I look at evidence every day and I can’t do what you just did in there. You’re inside this guy’s fucking head.”

  “I guess you just gotta think outside your own box, your own set of perceptions of the world and the way it should work. Letting go of who you are and how you view things. You have to see it through their eyes, think like them.”

  Finn gestured with his cigarette to the front door. “But this guy? How can you think like him? He’s a fucking nutcase. Probably hears voices in his head.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “After what you saw in there?”

  “The guy’s not psychotic. If he was, he couldn’t have pulled it off. He’s smart, Finn. Organized. His pattern is based on his needs, and he’s following it with passion. But he’s also cool enough to mastermind what he did tonight, killing that kid.”

  “So, where do we go from here?” Finn asked.

  “I don’t know.” She was too exhausted to think. “What I do know is that we’ve got all the evidence we need to build a case against this guy. It’s all in there.” She nodded at the open door of 311. “We’re fucking buried in evidence. We’ve got this guy’s prints, we’ve got possible DNA. Once the lab gets through with this house, we’ve probably got Hagen and Beggs in there too. And we can’t do shit with any of it until we get someone to match it all to.”

  Finn finished his cigarette, then squashed it out against the porch rail and pocketed the butt.

  “Come on. I want to tear this house apart. There’s gotta be something.”

  58

  BUT THERE WASN’T.

  They worked long into the night, side by side with the Mobile Crime Lab, going over every corner of 311, but found nothing to point them in any direction. Gunderson had made an appearance, then left sometime after midnight. Kay and Finn didn’t head out until the last technician had packed up, leaving the house under surveillance. Even then, Finn had sensed Kay’s reluctance to leave.

  At Headquarters, they’d typed the twenty-four-hour reports and Kay had sifted through the disappointing results from the search on Bates’s house. It was almost 3 a.m. before Finn steered them up Hamburg Street and parked outside Kay’s.

  Inside, the apartment felt good—a sanctuary from everything they’d seen tonight. Kay looked wrecked, and Finn could sense the weight of the kid’s murder still on her as she handed him a soda from the fridge. He watched her grab for a beer, then opt for a soda as well. They sat on the couch, drinking in silence. Being home seemed to relax Kay, take the edge off, and Finn hoped she would be able to let go of the case for even a few hours.

  He should have known better.

  “Patricia Hagen knew him,” she said. “Ten forty-five at night, she’s not going to some stranger’s house. Somehow she knew him. And she had to have trusted him to some degree.”

  “We’ve gone through Hagen’s employee list and there’s nothing there. No one connects to Eales except for Bates.”

  “What the fuck are we missing?” Kay’s grip on the soda can threatened to crush the thin aluminum. “I feel like we’re spinning our wheels, Finn. I mean, where the fuck are we with all this? What are we doing?”

  “We’re doing the legwork, Kay. We’re getting the evidence that’s going to guarantee the son of a bitch gets a needle in his arm.”

  “Yeah, well, we gotta get him first, don’t we?” She settled her head back on the top of the couch and stared at the ceiling.

  Finn knew she didn’t care about evidence. Not after tonight. Now, more than ever, Kay wanted the man who’d slipped through her fingers. The man who’d killed Jason Beckman and three women, maybe more. The man who may have shot Spencer. The man who was probably laughing at her right now.

  Tonight, the hunt had become far more personal for Kay.

  And it was becoming personal for Finn too. All he had to do was imagine Kay in the alley behind 311, standing with the man who’d so coldly slaughtered the kid tonight for no other reason than sport, and Finn wanted him in his own hands.

  “It’s Eales.” He heard the exhaustion in Kay’s voice. “He’s the common denominator.”

  “Then let’s get some answers from him. I want to talk to him myself this time,” Finn said, finally voicing what he’d been thinking all night.

  Kay closed her eyes. He thought she nodded.

  There was only the rattle of the AC unit in one of the tall windows overlooking Hamburg Street and the Hill. Spencer’s cat stalked into the room, regarded them briefly, then took to an empty sill to watch the street below.

  Finn’s thoughts went back to the bathroom in 311. The big tub. The fluoresced blood.

  “I just can’t let go of the cuts to the girls’ chests,” Kay said eventually. “Even the premortem ones, they’re not about subduing his victims. He’s using the ketamine for that.”

  “Subduing them for what though? Sex?”

  “I think it’s more about power.”

  “Well, what if it’s both, Kay? What if part of it is sex. I know there hasn’t been any evidence of penetration, but what about masturbation? What if …” He didn’t like the images that flashed in his brain then.

  “What if what, Finn?”

  “What if he … let’s say he gets into the tub with them. The wounds were inflicted before and after the women were dead. So what if he’s jacking off on them, Kay? In the tub? Before he bleeds them? Then again after they’re dead?”

  “Okay. Go on.”

  “And maybe he’s a breast man. Maybe he’s jacking off on their breasts, and while he’s doing that, he’s got the knife … I don’t know, maybe he’s holding it against his dick.”

  “Jesus, Finn.”

  “Look, after Jonesy told us about the knife, I checked the internet. Searched single-edged lock-backs. Some of these knives are pretty narrow-handled. Even Jonesy said it’s probably the kind that’d fit in the palm of your hand.

  “I may be completely off base, but I think, maybe, the blade’s making contact when he’s actually coming. That’s why there are sets of marks in one direction, and others at slightly different angles. He’s doing it more than once, using the knife. Different sessions. This guy, Kay, maybe this guy’s in love with his blade.”

  When Kay stared at him then, Finn imagined her thoughts were back at 311.

  “I’m going to take a shower,” she said suddenly, as though needing to wash away the images Finn’s theory had provoked. “You hungry?”

  “Yeah, you got anything?”

  “No. But you could go get something. Bring it back.”

  He left her to shower and drove to the Sip-and-Bite on Boston Street, serving up the only twenty-four-hour gyros. He ate half of his on the way back to Federal Hill and tried to let go of the mental images from tonig
ht, as well as the ones his own brain had created.

  What he’d seen at 311 had spooked him. Years of working drug murders had a way of dulling you to the violence. Drug shootings started to make sense after a while: a kid getting killed over a $20 pack of rock or for crossing onto someone else’s corner became commonplace. But this …the man who’d slashed the kid’s throat was a butcher, a psycho with a warped agenda. It went beyond the usual framework.

  The water was still running when he dropped the takeout containers onto the kitchen counter.

  “Kay?” He called several times, but got no response.

  In the open doorway of the bathroom, the steam washed over him. Through it he could just make out her figure behind the textured glass of the shower door. She stood, leaning against the front of the stall.

  “Kay? You all right?”

  She didn’t move, even as he crossed the room.

  “Hey. You okay?” This time Finn slid the door open an inch. With her head bowed under the pounding water, she looked lost. When she turned to him, her eyes were swollen from crying.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  She reached for him then, saying nothing. Her hand was hot against his arm, her skin red from the scalding water. She drew him closer.

  The water flowed off her, drowning their kiss and drizzling to the floor. One wet hand pressed against his cheek, while the other moved to his belt, fumbling with the buckle.

  “Damn it, Kay,” he mumbled against their kiss, and tried to push her away.

  “What?” She didn’t let him go.

  “I worry about you.”

  “I know.”

  “I want to be there for you.”

  “You are, Finn. I promise.” And in her kiss, Finn believed it at last.

  Later he didn’t remember undressing, only the hot needles of water stinging his back and the heat of her skin against his. Even as he kissed her, he could feel a shift in Kay’s need. A sense that this, tonight, was more than they’d ever shared. It was more than sex for the sake of feeling alive, for escape and for blocking out the job as they had in their past.