Garnett. ‘‘I need you to try to remember. We don’t want anyone thinking you did this for any other reason.’’ He stopped as if waiting for her to respond.
‘‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous,’’ said Lynn, using her mildly scolding southern voice. ‘‘If she wanted to kill someone, she wouldn’t do it here and ruin her hardwood floors, for heaven’s sake. Besides, Diane is just like me. We both know a dozen ways to kill a person without making such a mess—and without detection, I might add.’’
‘‘I’m not suggesting anything like that and I didn’t mean it the way it sounded,’’ said Garnett. ‘‘I’m just afraid others might interpret things in the most negative way. You know how newspapers are.’’
Indeed Diane did. ‘‘I know this is strange. I’m not understanding it either...’’
The paramedics came in rolling a stretcher.
‘‘What’s that?’’ asked Diane. ‘‘I don’t need to go to the hospital. Neva has to process me and I have to shower and change. I don’t know if you have ever had occasion to wear bloodsoaked clothes, but it is not comfortable.’’
‘‘You can be processed at the hospital,’’ said Garnett. ‘‘I’ll be in charge here so there will be no—’’
‘‘Neva needs to stay here and help process the site.’’ Diane said
‘‘I’ll go with you,’’ said Lynn. ‘‘I process bodies all the time. They’re dead, of course. But I can do yours, no problem. You need to go to the hospital. I don’t like some of your readings, and any hit to the side of the head like that needs to be looked at more closely. And I don’t like that nausea you’ve been feeling.’’
In the end, they won. Before Diane left on the stretcher—which she was sure Garnett ordered in case any reporters were lurking outside—she directed Neva to process outside the apartment and have Jin do the inside. Neva was only too happy to let him take care of the blood. Diane expected Neva would find a dead body somewhere around the apartment building. It was still the early hours of the morning, so with good luck, it would be one of her crew who found it and not one of her neighbors.
Fortunately there were no reporters waiting outside. She was embarrassed to be riding to the hospital, taking up valuable ambulance space and the paramedics’ time. She was fine. Garnett simply wanted Diane to appear as the victim in case anyone was watching. Which was true, she was a victim, but not in the way he was staging it. She didn’t know how he would spin the presence of all that blood and no body.
As for Lynn, she was going along with Garnett. Lynn knew her way around politics, had sized everything up quickly, and fell easily into helping Garnett. Diane doubted that Lynn would be riding to the hospital with her under different circumstances. But then maybe she would have. Lynn wasn’t a brutally scheming person any more than Garnett was—but she was a player. Diane might have felt better about all this attention if it had actually been about her well-being. It wasn’t. It was all about the crime lab and maintaining its reputation.
The ride to the hospital was uneventful. Thank goodness they didn’t use the siren. Diane was rolled right into an examination room and the paramedics left, taking the gurney with them. She removed all her clothing and sealed it in a plastic bag for processing by the crime lab. It was a relief to get out of bloodsoaked clothes, even if it meant putting on one of the skimpy hospital gowns.
Lynn Webber did know how to process a body. She looked for bruises, defensive injuries, and bloodspatter patterns, and she took numerous photographs.
‘‘With all that blood you couldn’t have stabbed anyone and not have cuts on your hands. The knife would have been too slippery to hold,’’ said Lynn.
She was right. Diane’s grip would have slipped on a knife and sliced her palm or her fingers, assuming the weapon was a knife. But the victim, whoever the victim was, could have been bludgeoned with something like a tire iron. It would also have made castoff spatters and a lot of blood. Diane wanted to see the spatter pattern up close. She hadn’t been in a position to do much from her dining room table. Now that she was thinking more clearly, she realized that the castoff was very high, too much of an arc across the ceiling to be from stabbings; more like a beating.
Lynn took a blood sample from Diane and had her collect a urine specimen.
‘‘We need to find out why you slept through a massacre in your home,’’ said Lynn.
‘‘I don’t know when I could have been drugged,’’ said Diane.
‘‘Well, obviously someone had access to your house. Did you eat or drink anything before you went to bed?’’
‘‘I drank a bottle of green tea,’’ said Diane.
She remembered grabbing it out of the refrigerator. She had to think about that. Could someone have spiked it? She remembered that the lid was on tight. Did she hear the little clicks of the perforated plastic breaking as she unscrewed the cap? She didn’t remember.
‘‘How would anyone know I would drink that bottle of tea?’’ said Diane. ‘‘For that matter, what’s the point of this—to use my tiny apartment for an ultimate fighting ring because they weren’t able to find anyplace else?’’
Lynn laughed. ‘‘I suppose we’ll have to wait until we find a body to answer that. But tell me, what all do you remember? Do you remember going to bed?’’
Diane nodded. ‘‘Yes, I remember changing clothes and climbing into bed. I remember everything leading up to that. I went to sleep thinking about the Egyptian artifacts. The next thing I remember is the police banging on the door.’’
‘‘When you got up to answer the door, did you feel any pain anywhere?’’ asked Lynn.
‘‘No. Just a drowsy feeling.’’
‘‘If we find anything in your blood,’’ Lynn said, ‘‘the lab can test everything you came in contact with until they discover how it got into you.’’
When Lynn was done it was clear that Diane had no bruises other than the one on her head. The blood patterns on her body and her clothing were consistent with a fall. All that was good. A member of the hospital nursing staff showed Diane to a shower, where she scrubbed the blood from her body and hair.
‘‘Okay,’’ said Lynn when Diane came out. ‘‘Let’s X-ray your head.’’
Diane thought Lynn was enjoying this far too much. After having her head examined, Diane was sitting on one of the examination tables waiting for the doctor and Lynn to come with the X-rays. She knew what they would show. Nothing. She had hit her head on a plaster wall on the way down. She had been dazed, but that was all.
As she sat holding the back of her hospital gown closed, she realized she didn’t have any clothes with her.
