The Last Precinct - Cornwell Patricia - Страница 79

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I point out smears and drips on the floor. I explain that stains produced from a ninety-degree angle are round. If, for example, you were on your hands and knees and blood was dripping straight down to the floor from your face, those drips would be round. Numerous drips on the floor are round. Some are smeared. They cover an approximate two-foot area. Bray was, for a brief time, on her hands and knees, perhaps trying to crawl as he kept on swinging.

"Did he kick or stomp?" Berger asks.

"Nothing I found would tell me that." It is a good question. Stomping and kicking would add other shadings to the emotions of the crime.

"Hands are more personal than feet," Berger remarks. "That's been my experience in lust murders. Rarely do I see kicking, stomping."

I walk around, pointing out more cast-off blood and satellite spatters before moving to a hardened puddle of blood several feet from the bed. "She bled out here," I tell her. "This may be where he tore off her blouse and bra."

Berger shuffles through photographs and finds the one of Bray's green satin blouse and black underwire bra on the floor several feet from the bed.

"This close to the bed and we begin finding brain tissue." I keep deciphering the gory hieroglyphics.

"He places her body on the bed," Berger interpolates. "Versus forcing her on it. Question is, is she still conscious when he gets her on the bed?"

"I really don't think so." I point out tiny bits of blackened tissue adhering to the headboard, the walls, a bedside lamp, the ceiling over the bed. "Brain tissue. She doesn't know what's going on anymore. That's just an opinion," I offer.

"Still alive?"

"She's still bleeding out." I indicate dense black areas of the mattress. "That's not an opinion. That's a fact. She still has a blood pressure, but it's very unlikely she's conscious."

"Thank God." Berger has gotten out her camera and begins taking photographs. I can tell she is skilled and has been properly trained. She walks out of the room and starts shooting as she comes back in, recreating what I have just walked her through and capturing it on film. "I'll get Escudero back here and videotape it," she lets me know.

"The cops videoed it."

"I know," she replies as the flash goes off again and again. She doesn't care. Berger is a perfectionist. She wants it done her way. "I'd love to have you on tape explaining all this, but can't do it."

She can't, not unless she wants opposing counsel to have access to the same tape. Based on the resounding absence of note-taking, I am certain that she doesn't want Rocky Caggiano to have access to a single word_written or spoken_that goes beyond what is on my standard reports. Her caution is extreme. I am shaded by suspicions that I have a hard time taking seriously. It really hasn't penetrated that anyone might seriously think I murdered the woman whose blood is all around us and under our feet.

BERGER AND I FINISH WITH THE BEDROOM. NEXT WE explore other areas of the house that I paid little if any attention to when I was working the scene. I did go through the medicine cabinet in the master bathroom. I always do that. What people keep to alleviate bodily discomforts tells quite a story. I know who has migraines or mental illness or is obsessive about health. I know that Bray's chemicals of choice, for example, were Valium and Ativan. I found hundreds of pills that she had put in Nuprin and Tylenol PM bottles. She had a small amount of BuSpar, too. Bray liked sedatives. She craved soothing. Berger and I explore a guest bedroom down the hall. It is a room I have never stepped inside, and unsurprisingly, it is unlived-in. It isn't even furnished, but instead is cluttered with boxes that Bray apparently never unpacked.

"Are you getting the sensation that she wasn't planning on staying here long?" Berger is beginning to talk to me as if I am part of her prosecution team, her second seat in the trial.

"Because I sure am. And you don't take on a major position in a police department without assuming you're going to stick it out for at least a few years. Even if the job is nothing but a stepping stone."

I look around inside the bathroom and note there is no toilet paper, no tissues, not even soap. But what I find inside the medicine cabinet surprises me. "Ex-Lax," I announce. "At least a dozen boxes."

Berger appears in the doorway. "Well, I'll be damned," she says. "Maybe our vain friend had an eating disorder."

It is not uncommon with people who suffer from bulimia to use laxatives to purge themselves after bingeing. I lift the toilet seat and find evidence of vomit that has splashed up on the inside of the rim and the bowl. It is a reddish color. Bray supposedly ate pizza before she died, and I recall that she had very little stomach contents: traces of ground meat and vegetables.

"If someone threw up after eating and then died maybe a half hour or hour later, would you expect his stomach to be totally empty?" Berger follows what I am piecing together.

"There would still be traces of food clinging to the stomach lining." I lower the toilet seat. "A stomach isn't totally empty or clean unless the person has drunk huge amounts of water and purged. Like a lavage or a repeated infusion of water to wash out a poison, let's say." Another section of footage plays before my eyes. This room was Bray's dirty, shameful secret. It is closed off from the regular flow of the house and no one but Bray ever came back here, so there was no fear of discovery, and I know enough about eating disorders and addictions to be very aware of the person's desperate need to hide his shameful ritual from others. Bray was determined that no one would ever catch even the slightest hint that she was bingeing and purging, and perhaps her problem explains why she kept so little food in the house. Perhaps the medications helped control the anxiety that is inevitably part of any compulsion.

"Maybe this is one of the reasons she was so quick to run Anderson off after eating," Berger conjectures. "Bray wanted to get rid of the food and wanted privacy."

"That would be at least one reason," I reply. "People with this affliction are so overwhelmed by the impulse it tends to override anything else that might be going on. So yes, she might have wanted to be alone to take care of her problem. And she might have been back here in this bathroom when Chandonne showed up."

"Thus adding to her vulnerability." Berger takes photographs of the Ex-Lax inside the medicine cabinet.

"Yes. She would have been alarmed and paranoid if she was in the middle of her ritual. And her first thought would have been about what she was doing_not about any imminent danger."

"Distracted." Berger bends over and photographs the toilet bowl.

"Extremely distracted."

"So she hurries to finish what she's doing, vomiting," Berger reconstructs. "She rushes out of here and shuts the door and goes to the front door. She's assuming it's Anderson who's out there knocking three times. Very possibly, Bray's rattled and annoyed and might even start saying something angry as she opens the door and…" Berger steps back out in the hallway, her mouth grimly set. "She's dead."

She lets this scenario hang pregnantly as we seek out the laundry room. She knows I can relate to the distraction and mind-searing horror of opening the front door and having Chandonne suddenly rush in from the darkness like a creature out of hell. Berger opens hall closet doors, then finds a door that leads to the basement. The laundry area is down here, and I feel strangely unsettled and unnerved as we walk about in the harsh glare of naked overhead lightbulbs that are turned on by tugging strings. I have never been in this part of the house, either. I have never seen the bright red Jaguar I have heard so much about. It is absurdly out of place in this dark, cluttered, dismal space. The car is gorgeously bold and an on-the-nose symbol of the power Bray craved and flaunted. I am reminded of what Anderson angrily said about her being Bray's "gofer." I seriously doubt Bray ever drove to the carwash herself.

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