Cruel and Unusual - Cornwell Patricia (книги онлайн полные версии .txt) 📗

“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.the 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.

The search did not end in the living room. We began to follow footprints. At intervals we were forced to turn on lights, mix more luminol, and move clutter out of the way, particularly in the linguistic landfill that once had been Robyn's bedroom and now was where Professor Potter lived. The floor was several inches deep in research papers, journal articles, exams, and scores of books written in German, French, and Italian. Clothes were strewn about and draped over things so haphazardly it was as if a whirlwind had kicked up in the closet and created a vortex in the center of the room. We picked up as best we could, creating stacks and piles on the unmade double bed. Then we followed Waddell's bloody path.

It led me into the bathroom, with Vander at my heels.

Shoe prints and smudges were scattered about the floor, and the same circular patterns that we had found in the living room fluoresced by the side of the bathtub. When I began spraying the walls, halfway up and on either side of the toilet, two huge handprints suddenly appeared. The video camera's light floated closer.

Then Vander's voice said excitedly, “Flip on the light.”

Potter's powder room was, to say the least, as disreputably maintained as the rest of his domain. Vander almost had his nose to the wall as he scrutinized the area where the prints had appeared.

“Can you see them?”

“ LJmm. Maybe barely.”

He cocked his head to one side, then the other, squinting. “This is fantastic. You see, the wallpaper is this deep blue design, so nothing much is going to show to the naked eye. And it's plasticized or vinyl - a good surface for prints, in other words.”

“Jesus,” said Wesley, who was standing in the doorway of the bathroom. “The damn toilet doesn't look like it's been cleaned since he moved in. Hell, it's not even flushed.”

“Even if he did mop up or wipe down the walls from time to time, you really can't get rid of every trace of blood,” I said to Vander. “On a linoleum floor like this, for example, a residue gets down in the pebbly surface, and luminol is going to bring it up.”

“Are you saying that if we sprayed down this place again in another ten years, the blood would still be here?” Wesley was amazed.

“The only way you could eradicate most of the blood would be to repaint everything, repaper the walls, refinish the floors, and pitch the furniture,” Vander said. “If you want to get rid of absolutely every trace, you'd have to tear down the house and start over.”

Wesley looked at his watch. “We've been here three and a half hours. “

“Here's what I suggest we do,” I said. “Benton, you and I can begin restoring the rooms to their normal state of chaos, and Neils, we'll leave you to do what you need to do. “

“Fine. I'll get the Luma-Lite set up in here, and keep your fingers crossed that it can enhance the ridge detail.”

We returned to the living room. While Vander carried the portable Luma-Lite and camera equipment back to the bath, Wesley and I looked around at the couch, the old TV, and the dusty, scarred floor, both of us somewhat dazed. With the lights on there was not so much as the slightest trace of the horror we had seen in the dark. On this sunny winter's afternoon, we had crawled back in time and witnessed what Ronnie Joe Waddell had done.

Wesley stood very still near the paper-covered window. “I'm afraid to sit anywhere or lean up against anything. Christ. There's blood all over this goddam house.”

As I looked around, I pictured fading white in the blackness, my eyes traveling slowly from the couch, across the floor, and stopping at the TV. The couch's cushions were still on the floor where I had left them, and I squatted to take a closer look. The blood that had seeped into the brown stitching was not visible now, nor were the streaks and smears on the brown leather backrest. But a careful examination revealed something that was important but not necessarily surprising. On the side of one of the seat cushions that had been flush against the backrest I found a linear cut that was, at most, three-quarters of an inch long.

“Benton, was Waddell left-handed, by chance?”

“It seems to me he was.”

“They thought he stabbed and beat her on the floor near the TV because there was so much blood around her body,” I said, “but he didn't. He killed her on the couch. I think I need to go outside. If this place weren't such a sewer, I'd be tempted to pinch one of the professor's cigarettes.”

“You've been good for too long,” Wesley said. “An unfiltered Camel would land you on your ass. Go on and get some fresh air. I'll start cleaning up.”

I left the house to the sound of paper being ripped down from the windows.

That night began the most peculiar New Year's Eve in memory for Benton Wesley, Lucy, and me. I wouldn't go so far as to say the holiday was all that odd for Neils Vander. I had talked to him at seven P.m., and he was still in his lab, but that was fairly normal for a man whose raison d'etre would cease to exist were the fingerprints of two individuals ever found to be the same.