The day is over. Only Frank and Darcy remain upstairs in Homicide. Darcy types outside her office and the tap-tap of his keystrokes is reassuring. Frank chides her superstition, but the admonishment is halfhearted. Since the day that Darcy inexplicably saved Frank's neck from a crazed Santerist's knife, she is willing to allow that things may exist 'twixt heaven and earth which she can't explain with only five senses.
She arranges papers and folders to one side of the desk, clearing a space to work in. Then she puts one of the Pryce binders in the empty spot and pulls her wooden chair close. She takes the crime scene pictures out and sorts them to reflect how the responding officer and subsequent personnel would have approached the scene. She studies the first picture for a long time.
It is a wide-angle color shot taken from the street. The bottom foreground includes a sidewalk spilling over into a weedy, garbage-strewn lot. A house lies in a charred pile in the center of the lot, the rubble having been heavily scavenged over time. Gutted, overstuffed furniture and rusted appliances dot the property. Plastic sacks and potato chip bags hang like flags from weed poles.
The lot is delineated on the left by a house with plank and corrugated fencing. Dead banana leaves drape over the fence at the rear of the lot. A plywood fence starts at the left rear corner and continues to the right rear corner of the lot. Along the right side of the lot, a four-foot chain link encircles a neatly kept house. Roofs are visible behind the houses and the plywood fence. All the roofs are roughly the same height. Three windows in the house on the right overlook the lot.
The next picture is a close-up of the ruined house. A handful of moldered sheetrock panels affixed to blackened 2 x 4s suggest the building's basic structure. Rubble and tall weeds obscure the interior. She scrutinizes the flotsam and jetsam. Nothing jumps out as extraordinary.
She flips to a new photo. Taken from the right side of the house, it looks into the shell of a large room. The skeletal framing suggests the photographer is shooting into what was the living room. Differently-sized footprints stand out against a concrete foundation overlaid with detritus from junkies, trannies, kids and taggers.
Almost unnoticed among the clutter, two heads jut from a dull green blanket spread on the right side of the room. Ashy faces jut toward the camera. Frank wants to see more, but aware of the luxury of time, she patiently resurveys the presented debris. Broken glass, twisted rebar, water-warped papers, a busted lawn chair, bottle caps, fresh candy wrappers, age-silvered cigarette packs—nothing in the litter seems unusual. She doesn't see it in this picture, but she is sure the trash obscures condoms, syringes and fading skin mags.
But that's speculation, which comes later. Right now Frank wants to see the scene as if she's walking into it for the first time. The first inconsistency she sees is the garbage splaying from under the carefully covered bodies. If the perp was thoughtful enough to arrange the kids side by side and cover them with a blanket, why didn't he clear away the garbage first? Frank puts the question to paper, studying the photo a few minutes more. When she places it facedown, a fresh one stares from the stack.
Two black children lie next to each other, on their backs, eyes closed, covered to their chins with the blanket. Their mouths are wrapped with duct tape. Above the tape, patches on the right side of the boy's face appear blanched, as if he were cheek-down while his blood settled. The girl's hair twists out from a barrette in wild tufts. The boy's skull is shaved close, but his head is oddly bent. Frank studies the girl's neck where there are marks in the flesh. She'll see close-ups of the marks in the autopsy photos.
The blanket is army-issue green. Not torn or stained, though slightly smudged with what looks like dust. Frank thinks the perp brought it with him. Because men kill more often than women, Frank will stick with the masculine pronoun, but she will not exclude the possibility that the offender is female.
Frank draws a line down a sheet of legal paper. On the left she lists ideas, on the right, supporting facts:
Frank has more thoughts but decides to wait until she's seen the rest of the pictures before committing them to paper.
The next shot is tighter, closer to the bodies, and the blanket has been removed. The boy is smaller than the girl, who's between nine and twelve, Frank thinks. She knows her age but has forgotten and doesn't want to remember. The boy looks to be from five to seven. The girl is thin and gangly, but the boy still carries his baby fat. He appears fully clothed, in blue jeans, sneakers and a plain blue wind-breaker. Under the jacket he wears a red sweatshirt. A white T-shirt pokes from beneath the sweatshirt, and white socks cover his ankles.
The girl wears a mustard-yellow sweater over a pink blouse, a sky-blue skirt, pink socks and one sneaker. Her arms and legs are straight. Postmortem lividity darkens the posterior edges of her thighs and calves. There appear to be smudges on her legs but the girl's clothes and skin are relatively clean. Frank thinks the kids were carried, not dragged.
She adds the last fact to the column opposite where she's written dump job. She also adds that the offender is likely male because the victims were carried to the site. A woman could have brought them, but she'd have to be pretty strong to pick her way through the rubble, probably in the dark, carrying at least a fifty-pound load each, more if the kids were carried together.
On the sheet underneath, Frank writes these reminders:
Frank is fairly sure there is no blood, but she'll double-check. She also thinks the other sneaker was found on the lot. The panties are a different story.
She examines the tape covering their mouths. It appears to be standard duct tape. Interestingly, and this could be a significant MO if this perp has committed similar assaults, the tape is wrapped at least twice around their heads, maybe three times. She looks at the boy's wrists. They are bound in front of him and wrapped at least twice around, as are his calves. The perp's thorough. The visible ends of tape are neatly torn, not cut. She thinks the perp is used to working with his hands.
The girl is bound only around the mouth. He must have felt he had control of her. Frank feels herself slipping into the perp's skin. It's like sinking her feet into sticky, sulphurous mud—not a completely unpleasant experience if one accepts the mud for what it is. Frank is willing to sink further, but not now.
First she has to court her suspect, woo him to her. She can initiate foreplay once she has assembled the facts about him. The climax of their union comes when she walks through her reconstructed scenario as the perp, when she
Aware that she has strayed from the case, she is pleased anew with the luxury of being able to do so. Though she has time to kill, Frank's habit, training and tacit need to immerse herself in a life other than her own sends her back to the pictures.
She taps Ladeenia Pryce with a forefinger. She's the case. Clothed and secured, the boy is inconsequential. The perp focused his energy on the girl. Frank is so immersed in the photograph she doesn't notice Darcy standing in the doorway. She jumps when he growls, 'Good night.'
'Jesus,' she breathes.
'No, just me,' he says, a thin grin under his moustache.
The clock over her door reads six-thirty and Frank says, 'You put in a long day.'
Darcy shrugs under a leather jacket. 'They're all long.'
'Roger that,' Frank says. She almost offers to buy him a cup of coffee. If he drank, she'd offer beers at the Sizzler, but she withdraws the invitation even before it's issued. Darcy gets his reports in on time, can handle
