One Grave Too Many

“Possibly.” She handed him the bag and he put it in his jacket pocket. “We need to have it analyzed.” Diane glanced over at the guard sitting on the porch, watching them. The cost for Star’s defense was mounting and it had just begun. Unless the murders were solved soon, there wouldn’t be much for Crystal McFarland to fight over.

Diane examined the tree trunk, but saw no obvious blood spatters. She also looked around for more pieces of plastic, but found none.

“OK. Let’s go to the house now.”

“I think I’ll tell Harry he can take a break. How long will we be here?”

“All night.”

Chapter 13

Diane stood in George and Louise’s bedroom and stared at the bare bloodstained mattress. It had been new; now it was ruined. Before it was a crime scene, their bedroom probably had an airy brightness, with its light pine furniture, green iron garden bench at the foot of the bed, and floral-patterned wallpaper. It was the wallpaper that drew her attention away from the bed and created a frown on her forehead.

Frank stood next to her, his gaze darting from the chest of drawers to the dresser covered with family photographs, to a new green wrought iron headboard still in its box leaning against a wall, and finally to the bed and the bloodstained wall next to it.

“Louise was redecorating the bedroom. You should have heard George complaining on poker night. Said he had to win big just to pay for the new headboard. It’s all unfinished. Jay’s too-unfinished.”

Unconsciously, she grasped Frank’s hand and squeezed it. He squeezed back.

“This is going to take all night?” he asked.

She nodded, her thoughts focused on the scene before her. The room smelled of death. It emanated from the mattress, the curtains, the walls. And the house was hot. She felt her scalp prickle with sweat, and she hadn’t even begun yet. It was going to be an unpleasant night. She took two pairs of latex gloves from her kit and handed one pair to Frank. He took the gloves but looked at her quizzically.

“You think we still need to protect the crime scene, after all the people that have trampled through here?”

“The gloves are not to protect the crime scene,” she said. “They’re to protect us from the crime scene.”

“It is pretty ripe in here,” he said.

“You’ll get used to it.”

She looked in dismay at the wallpaper as she pulled on her gloves. Antique red roses, gold buttercups, baby’s breath and green leaves against a background of tiny flecks of color-and overlain by blood spatters.

She gestured to an area of fine spattering. “See this fine mist pattern here?”

Frank studied the wall, squinting. “Yes.”

“This is high-impact spatter from a gunshot. But where the drops are larger-here-these are places of medium impact. And this line of spattering that leads upward to the ceiling. That’s castoff from whatever was used to strike them.”

“I sort of see. Kind of hard to see on top of that wallpaper.”

“That’s going to be a problem. It’s difficult enough, but the pattern on the wallpaper makes it like a hidden- picture illusion.”

“You saying they were shot and beaten?” He asked, as if he had just realized what she had said.

Diane nodded.

“The autopsy will give us the details of that,” he said.

“But the autopsy can’t tell us what this spatter can. Up on your trig?”

“Trig?”

“Trigonometry.”

“Oh. Yes, math I understand.”

“Analyzing blood spatters is mostly geometry-you take the two-dimensional pattern from the wall and project to three dimensions.”

Diane looked over at Frank. This was the blood of his friends that she was at the moment being so dispassionate about. He was already getting a five o’clock shadow and, though most of the time it made him look sexy, it now made him look more melancholy. “Are you all right with this?” she asked.

“I’m fine.” His voice was a little too sharp, but Diane took him at his word and continued.

The only way to do a good job is to find your objectivity and hang on to it like an anchor. That was one of the things that Santos took away from her-for a while.

“What I’ll be analyzing is the medium-impact spatter, and I have to measure the two axes-the length and width-of the drops.”

Frank turned his face to her, his dark eyes startled. “You’re kidding. All of them?”

“Not all, but a significant enough number to make sure I get reliable results.”

“I guess that will take all night and then some. Damn, how can you even see them?”

“It’d definitely be easier if she’d chosen plain white wallpaper. I’ll use a magnifying glass.”

She picked up the glass from her case and showed Frank magnified spatters of blood that had hit the wall.

“A spatter that hits the wall head-on at a perpendicular angle will be round. As the angle of impact gets smaller, the more elongated the drop becomes. See the little tail on most of these drops here?”

“If I hold my head just right and put my tongue between my left molars.”

“Now you’re getting the idea. The drop goes in the direction of the tail, like a comet. If you’ve ever spilled anything that has any viscosity at all, you’ve noticed that phenomenon. Ever have a bottle of ketchup blow up on you and spatter across the table?”

“As a matter of fact, that happened in a restaurant once. Covered me and the people at the next table. I impressed that date. But I don’t recollect observing the shape of the drops of ketchup.”

Diane watched his face as he smiled. He was trying hard. The thing she had remembered most about Frank was his smile-it made his eyes squint with a mischievous twinkle that made you think he was sharing a joke with you, and it never failed to make her smile back at him. This one was short-lived. She wished she was someplace else, doing anything else.

“If I were to draw a line along the longest axis of the drops, I’d have the two-dimensional point of convergence.”

“Which tells you what?” he asked.

Diane hesitated a moment, biting her lower lip.

“Go ahead and tell me. I’ll have to explain it to Star’s lawyer-or maybe throw it in Warrick’s face. No way you can make it any harder for me than the fact that they’re dead.”

“I know. I’m sorry. OK. When the perp strikes a blow on a victim, blood is spattered on whatever surface is near. All of those drops in that spatter are part of a set that defines that particular blow. For analysis purposes, they all belong together. When the perp swings his. . his weapon, it will have blood on it, and that blood will be cast off, making a trail across the wall, the ceiling or whatever, depending on how he swings it. The victim, if he isn’t unconscious with the first blow, will move around. When he is hit again, it will leave another set of spatters, but at a different angle, with a different point of convergence. Finding the different lines of convergence can tell me how many times the victim was struck and where the victim was located at the time of each blow.”

Frank nodded. “That makes sense. So if you know that the more elongated the drop, the more acute the angle of impact, then you can compute the angle. What is it? Something like, the sine of the angle equals the width over the length?”

“You are good at trig.”

“I was going to get a degree in math until my father asked what kind of job I could get with it. I went into accounting instead.”

“And that led to crime?”

“I was determined to make as little money as possible.”