Cruel & Unusual

by Patricia Cornwell

  Neils Vander had a simple answer to that when I called him moments later.

  “It's not unusual far an inmate's prints to be deleted from AFIS after he's dead,” Vander said. “In fact, the only reason we wouldn't delete a deceased inmate's records would be if it were possible his prints might turn up in any unsolved cases. But Waddell had been in prison for nine, ten years - he'd been out of commission too long to make it worthwhile to keep his prints on line.”

  “Then the deletion of his record on December sixteenth would have been routine,” I said.

  “Absolutely. But it would not have been routine to delete his record on December ninth, when Lucy believes his SID number was altered, because Waddell was still alive then.”

  “Neils, what do you think this is all about?”

  “When you change somebody's SID number, Kay, in effect you have changed his identity. I may get a hit on his prints, but when I enter the corresponding SID number in CCRE, it's not his history I'm going to get. I'll either get no history at all, or the history of somebody else.”

  “You got a hit on a print left at Jennifer Deighton's house,” I said. “You entered the corresponding SID number in CCRE and it came back to Ronnie Waddell. Yet we now have reason to believe his original SID number was changed. We really don't know who left the print on her dining room chair, do we?”

  “No. And it's becoming dear that someone has gone to a lot of trouble to make sure we can't verify who that person might be. I can't prove it's not Waddell. I can't prove that it is.”

  Images flashed in my mind as he spoke.

  . “In order to verify that Waddell did not leave that print on Jennifer Deighton's chair, I need an old print of his that I can trust, one that I know couldn't have been tampered with. But I just don't know where else to look.”

  I envisioned dark paneling and hardwood floors, and dried blood the color of garnets.

  “Her house,” I muttered.

  “Whose house?” Vander puzzled.

  “Robyn Naismith's house,” I said.

  Ten years previously, when Robyn Naismith's house was processed by the police, they would not. have arrived with laser or Luma-Lite. There was no such thing as DNA printing then. There was no automated fingerprint system in Virginia, no computerized means to enhance a bloody partial pint left on a wall or anywhere else. Though new technology generally is irrelevant in cases that have long been closed, there are exceptions, I believed Robyn Naismith's murder was one of them.

  If we could spray her house. with chemicals, it was possible we could literally resurrect the scene. Blood dots, drips, drops, spatters, stains, and screams bright red. It seeps into crevices and cracks, and sneaks under cushions and floors. Though it may disappear with washing and fade with the years, it never completely goes away. Like the writing that wasn't there on the sheet of paper found on Jennifer Deighton's bed, there was blood invisible to the naked eye inside the rooms where Robyn Naismith had been accosted and killed. Unaided by technology, police had found one bloody print during the original investigation of the crime. Maybe Waddell had left more.. Maybe they were still there.

  Neils Vander, Benton Wesley, and I drove west toward the University of Richmond, a splendid collection of Georgian buildings surrounding a lake between Three Chopt and River roads. It was from here that Robyn Naismith had graduated with honors many years before, and her love of the area had been such that she had later bought her first home two blocks from the campus.

  Her former small brick house with its mansard roof was set on a half-acre lot. I was not surprised that the site should have been ideal for a burglar: The yard was dense with trees, the back of the house dwarfed by three gigantic magnolias that completely blocked the sun. I doubted the neighbors on either side could have seen or heard anything at Robyn Naismith's house, had they been home: The morning Robyn was murdered, her neighbors were at work.

  Due to the circumstances that had placed the house on the market ten years ago, the price had been low for the neighborhood. We'd discovered the university had decided to buy it for faculty housing, and had kept much of what was left inside it. Robyn had been unmarried, an only child, and her parents in northern Virginia did not want her furnishings. I suspected they could not bear to live with or even look at them. Professor Sam Potter, a bachelor who taught German, had been renting the house from his employer since its purchase.

  As we gathered camera equipment, containers of chemicals, and other items from the trunk, the back door opened. An unwholesome-looking man greeted us with an uninspired good-morning.

  “You need a hand with that?” Sam Potter came down the steps, sweeping his long, receding black hair out of his eyes and smoking a cigarette. He was short and pudgy, his hips wide like a woman's.

  “If you want to get the box here,’ Vander said.

  Potter dropped the cigarette to the ground and didn't bother stamping it out. We followed him up the steps, and into a small kitchen with old avocado-green appliances and dozens of dirty dishes. He led us through the dining. roam;, with laundry piled on the table, then into the-living room at the front of the house. I set down what I was carrying and tried not to register my shock as I recognized me console television connected to a cable outlet in the wall, the draperies; the brown leather couch, the parquet floor, now scuffed and as dull as mud. Books and papers were scattered everywhere, and Potter began to talk as he carelessly collected them.

  “As you can see, I'm not domestically inclined,” he said, his German accent distinct. “I will stick these things on the dining room table for now. There,” he said when he returned. “Anything else you would like me to move?”

  He slipped a pack of Camels from the breast pocket of his white shirt and dug a book of mate from, his faded denim jeans. A pocket watch was attached to a belt loop by a leather thong, and I noticed a number of things as he slid it out to glance at the time and then lit the cigarette. His hands trembled, his fingers were swollen, and broken blood-vessels covered his cheekbones and nose. He had no bothered to empty ashtrays, but he had collected bottles and glasses and had been careful to carry out the trash.

  “This is fine. You don't, need to move anything else,” Wesley said. “If we do, we'll put it back.” “

  And you said this chemical you're using won't damage anything and isn't toxic to humans?”

  “No, it's not hazardous. It will leave a grainy residue similar to when salt water dries,” I said to him. “We'll do our best to clean up.”

  “I really don't want to be here while you do this, Patter said, flaking a nervous drag on the cigarette. “Can you give me an approximation of how much time it will require?”

  “Hopefully, no more than two hours.”

  Wesley was looking around the room, and though his face was completely devoid of expression, I could imagine what was going through his mind.

  I took off my coat and didn't know where to put it, while Vander opened a box of film.

  “Should you finish before I get back, please shut the door and make sure it's locked. I don't have an alarm to worry about.” Potter went back out through the kitchen, and when he started his car it sounded like a diesel bus.

  “It's a shame, really,” Vander said as he lifted two bottles of chemicals from a box. “This could be a very nice house. But inside it's not much better than a lot of slums I've seen. Did you notice the scrambled eggs in the skillet on the stove? What more do you want to pick up here?”

  He squatted on the floor. “I don't want to mix this up until we're ready.”

  “I'd say we need to move as much, out o€ here as we can. You’ve got the picture. Kay?” Wesley said.

  I got out Robyn Naismith's scene photographs “You've noticed that our professor friend is living with her furniture,” I said.

  “Well, then we’ll leave it here.” Vander said as if it were common, for furniture from a ten-year-old murder scene to still be in place. “But the rug's got to go, I can tell that didn’t come with the house.”
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br />   “How?”

  Wesley stared down at the blue and red braided rug beneath his feet. It was filthy and curling up at the edges. “If you lift up-the edge, you can see that the parquet is just as dull and scratched underneath as it is everywhere else. The rug hasn't been here long. Besides, it doesn't look very well made I doubt it would have lasted all this time.”

  Spreading several photographs on the floor; I turned them this way and that until the perspectives were right and we could tell what needed to be moved. What furnishings were original to the room had been rearranged.

  As much as it was possible to do so, we began to re create the scene of Robyn's death. “Okay, the ficus tree goes over there, I said like a stage director. “Right, but slide the couch back about two more feet, Neils. And that way just a little bit more. The tree was maybe four inches from the left armrest. A little closer. That's good”

  “No, it's not. The branches are oar the couch.”

  “The tree's a little bigger now.”

  “I can't believe it's still alive. I'm surprised anything could live around Professor Potter except maybe bacteria or fungi.”

  “And the rug goes?” Wesley took off his jacket.

  “Yes. She had a small runner by the front door and another small Oriental under the coffee table. Most of the floor was bare.”

  He got down on his hands and knees and began to roll up the rug.

  I went over to the television and studied the VCR on top and the cable connection leading into the wall.

  “This has got to go against the wall opposite the couch and the front door. Either of you gentlemen good with VCRs and cable connections?”

  “No,” they answered simultaneously.

  “Then I'm left to my own devices. Here goes.”

  I disconnected the cable and the VCR, unplugged the TV, and carefully slid it across the bare, dusty floor. Referring to the photographs again, I moved it a few more feet until it was directly opposite the front door. Next I surveyed the walls. Potter apparently collected art and was fond of an artist whose name I could not quite make out, but it looked French. The sketches were charcoal studies of the female form with lots of curves, pink splotches, and triangles. One by one they all came down and I propped them against the walls in the dining room. By this point, the room was almost bare and I was itching from the dust.

  Wesley wiped his forehead on the back of his arm. “Are we about ready?”

  He looked at me.

  “I think so. Of course, not everything is here. She had three barrel chairs right over there.”

  I pointed.

  “They're in the bedrooms,” Vander said. “Two in one bedroom and one in the other. Do you want me to bring them out?”

  “Might as well.”

  He and Wesley carried in the chairs.

  “She had a painting on that wall over there, and another one to the right of the door leading into the dining room,” I pointed out. “A still life and an English landscape. So Potter couldn't live with her art but didn't seem to have a problem with anything else.”

  “We need to go around the house and close all blinds, shades, and curtains,” Vander said. “If any light is still coming through, then tear off a section of this paper” he pointed to a roll of heavy brown paper on the floor “and tape it over the window.”

  - For the next fifteen minutes, the house was filled with the sounds of footsteps, venetian blinds rattling, and scissors slicing through paper. Occasionally somebody swore loudly when the paper had been cut too short or the tape stuck to nothing but itself. I stayed in the living room and covered the glass in the front door and in the two windows facing the street. When the three of us reconvened and turned out the lights, the house was pitch-black. I could not even see my hand in front of my face.

  “Perfect,” Vander said as the overhead light went back on.

  Putting on gloves, he set bottles of distilled water, chemicals, and two plastic spray bottles on the coffee table. “Here's the way we're going to work this,” he said. “Dr. Scarpetta, you can spray while I videotape, and if an area reacts, just keep spraying it until I tell you to move on.”

  “What do you want me to do?” Wesley asked.

  “Keep out of the way.”

  “What's in this stuff?” he asked as Vander unscrewed the caps from bottles of dry chemicals.

  “You don't really want to know,” I replied.

  “I'm a big boy. You can tell me.”

  “The reagent's a mixture of sodium perborate, which Neils is mixing with distilled water, and three-aminophthalhydrazide and sodium carbonate,” I said, getting a packet of gloves out of my pocketbook.

  “And you're certain it will work on blood this old?” Wesley asked.

  “Actually, aged and decomposed blood reacts better with luminol than do fresh bloodstains because the more oxidized the blood, the better. As blood ages, it becomes more strongly oxidized.”

  “I don't think any of the wood in here is salt treated, do you?” Vander looked around.

  “I shouldn't think so.”

  I explained to Wesley, “The biggest problem with luminol is false positives. A number of things react with it, such as copper and nickel, and the copper salts in salt-treated wood.”

  “It also likes rust, household bleach, iodine, and formalin,” Vander added. “Plus, the peroxidases found in bananas, watermelon, citrus fruit, a number of vegetables. Also horseradish.”

  Wesley looked at me with a smile.

  Vander opened an envelope and removed two squares of filter paper that were stained with dried, diluted blood. Then he added mixture A to B and told Wesley to hit the lights. A couple of quick sprays, and a bluish white neon glow appeared on the coffee table. It began to fade almost as quickly as it had appeared.

  “Here,” Vander said to me.

  I felt the spray bottle touch my arm, and took hold of it. A tiny red light went on as Vander depressed the power button on the video camera; then the night vision lamp burned white and looked wherever he did like a luminescent eye.

  “Where are you?”

  Vander's voice sounded to my left.

  “I'm in the center of the room. I can feel the edge of the coffee table against my leg,” I said, as if we were children playing in the dark.

  “I'm way the hell out of the way.”

  Wesley's voice carried from the direction of the dining room.

  Vander's white light slowly moved toward me. I reached out and touched his shoulder. “Ready?”

  “I'm recording. Start and just keep going until I tell you to stop.”

  I began spraying the floor around us, my finger non-stop on the trigger as a mist floated over me and shapes and geometrical configurations materialized around my feet. For an instant, it was like speeding through the dark over the illuminated grid of a city far below. Old blood trapped in the crevices of the parquet emitted a bluewhite glow. I sprayed and sprayed, without having any real sense of where I was in relation to anything else, and saw footprints all over the room. I bumped against the ficus tree and dim white streaks appeared on the planter that held it. To my right smeared handprints flashed on the wall.

  “Lights,” Vander said.

  Wesley turned on the overhead light and Vander mounted a thirty-five-millimeter camera on a tripod to keep it still. The only light available would be the fluorescence of the luminol, and the film would need a long exposure time to capture it. I retrieved a full bottle of luminol and, when the lights were out again, resumed spraying the smeared handprints on the wall while the camera captured the eerie images on film. Then we moved on. Lazy, wide swipes appeared on paneling and parquet, and the stitching on the leather couch was a neon hatch line incompletely tracing the square shapes of the cushions.

  “Can you lift them out of the way?” ander asked.

  One by one I slid the cushions onto the floor and sprayed down the couch's frame. The spaces between the cushions glowed. On the backrest appeared more swipes and smears, and on .th
e ceiling appeared a constellation of small, bright stars. It was on the old television that we got our first pyrophoric display of false positives, as metal around the dials and screen lit up and cable connecters turned the blue-white of thin milk. There was nothing remarkable about the TV, only a few smudges that might be blood, but the floor directly in front of it, where Robyn's body had been found, went crazy. The blood was so pervasive that I could see the edges of the parquet's inlays and the direction of the wood fibers constituting the grain. A drag mark feathered out several feet from the densest concentration of luminescence, and nearby was a curious pattern of tangential rings made by an object with a circumference slightly smaller than a basketball.