into a chair as Paige scuffed down the hall and closed a door behind her.
Mary gazed at the heart-shaped photo. She couldn't see the boyfriend's face. Why did she think it was the kid in the hall? She ran her finger over the picture, and her finger pad ended up on the tear down the thigh of the boyfriend's blue jeans, visible beside Paige's slim hip. The jeans were ripped lengthwise.
Mary looked closer. Everybody's jeans were ripped. People paid extra for them that way. Then she remembered. The kid in the hall had an up-and-down slit, too. Odd. All of Mary's jeans ripped the same way eventually; sideways, not up and down. So this pair must have been cut lengthwise, on purpose. How many kids cut their jeans that way? Some, but not many. But the boy in the hall and the boy in the photo did, both of whom were tall and roughly the same body build.
It puzzled her. Was Paige lying about her boyfriend being here tonight? No, of course not. Why would she? Duh.
Okay. Maybe it was personal. Paige lied because she didn't want Mary to know she had boys over. At sixteen, she was way too young for that, and Mary thought instantly of thirty-three nuns who would sign affidavits to that fact. And on this one issue, she would side with her church. Suddenly the door down the hall opened, and Paige reappeared in casual clothes.
Mary set down the photo, but couldn't chase the nuns from her head.
8
Brinkley got out of the Chrysler and scanned the scene in the drizzle. Squad cars, news vans, and black vehicles from the Medical Examiner's office blocked the narrow colonial street of million-dollar town houses, many bearing iron plaques of historic registration. Cops stood around the squad cars talking, their breath making steamy clouds in the chill. The plastic crime-scene tape stretched under the pressure of the media, which pissed Brinkley off. He knew which photo they wanted: the 'bag shot.' The photo of the dead body in a black plastic bag, being lifted on a stretcher as it was taken from the house to the coroner's van. The bag shot equaled ratings. In the photos, the bag's industrial zipper would be closed tight, its secrecy only encouraging the imagination's dirty work.
Brinkley slammed the car door closed, with Kovich following suit. The detectives exchanged a look over the rain-slick roof, sharing the same thought. If these idiots knew what murder really looked like, they wouldn't anticipate body bags like birthday cakes. They'd react like Brinkley did, with a familiar nausea, every time he smelled the new-car odor that clung to the black vinyl.
He gritted his teeth as he shouldered the spectators aside, flashed his badge needlessly to the uniform at the door, and went inside the Newlin house. Kovich signed them both in at the scene log and he would take his time, since he was writing the scene, in charge of recording everything. As the assigned, Brinkley had an investigation to run. He strode into the entrance hall, where he found himself the dark eye at the center of a crime-detection hurricane. Techs swirled around him, dusting the telephone and furniture for prints, bagging routine items from a coffee table for evidence, and vacuuming the elegant Oriental in the entrance hall for hair and fiber samples. Behind the entrance hall, the strobe lights of the photographers flashed like lightning.
He took out his notebook and followed the strobe into the living room. He had in mind the advice one of the vets had given him. A good cop needs a toilet brain. When you get to the scene, the vet had said, forget your assumptions about what happened. Flush the friggin' toilet. It was crude but vivid, and since then, Brinkley could never cross the threshold of a crime scene without hearing a toilet flush in his head. It made sense, especially in Newlin, with the husband's arrest and confession coming before Brinkley's visit to the scene.
He scanned the dimensions of the room. It was large by city standards and the living room had two fireplaces, both on the opposite wall. The ceiling was filigreed with white crown molding and scrollwork like a museum. He took out his notebook, wrote down what he saw, and then rendered it faithfully. Though the lab techs would do detailed scaled sketches, he always liked to do his own, too.
He sketched the grey sofa and two matching chairs arranged in front a glass coffee table, which was now blackened as barbecue with smudges of fingerprint dust and something else that caught Brinkley's eye. He squinted, then walked over with pencil poised. On the glossy glass of the table lay a tiny sprinkling of black dirt. It was located halfway up the table, hidden in the shadow of a crystal ashtray that contained a single cigarette butt, pink lipstick encircling the filter. The ashtray must be why the crime techs hadn't seen it, or they weren't finished here, but the dirt was too dark to be cigarette ash. Brinkley eyeballed the distance from the back of the couch to the line of dirt.
Notebook still in hand, he sat down on the sofa and stretched out his leg in his loafer. His heel, wet with street silt, hovered two or three inches in front of the dirt on the table. In another minute the silt would fall from his
heel, right on the spot. He was right. Somebody had put his feet up on the coffee table recently; somebody tall, between five-eleven and six-one. Brinkley got up, grabbed a passing tech, and directed him to photograph and bag the dirt sample and vacuum the sofa.
'Must be nice,' Kovich said, catching up with him.
'What?' Brinkley hovered as the tech took Polaroids of the dirt on the coffee table. He wanted no screw-ups on procedure. That was why he hadn't collected the sample himself.
'You know, it's an expression. 'Must be nice.' To have money, huh?'
'You have money,' Brinkley said. The tech was finishing with the Polaroids.
'I don't have money like this.' Kovich gestured, skinny pad in hand. 'This is paintings, furniture, crystal shit. That's fresh flowers in that vase. Real roses, I smelled 'em. I mean, that's real money.'
'You want real money, you can get real money, too. Their money doesn't take from you. Got no relation to you.'
'All right, Mick.' Kovich frowned and backed off. 'I signed us in. Log shows the D.A. already here.'
'Shit. Who caught it?'
'You gotta ask? Davis.'
'The Golden Boy. And we're last at the party.' Brinkley watched the tech scrape the grit into an evidence Baggie.
'What'cha got in the bag?'
'Dirt from the table.'
'Excellent police work. Place like this, dirt on the table is a crime.' Kovich laughed.
'Fool,' Brinkley said, smiling in spite of himself, then finished his furniture drawing. He drew the coffee table to fill in his feet-on-the-table theory, noticing that its surface glistened where it hadn't been dusted. When had it been polished last? He made a note, then realized something. There were no photos on the table. He looked around. None in the whole room, not a single one. Not even of
the kid, who was a model? 'Kovich, you got kids,' he said, as he sketched.
'Last time I checked.'
'You got pictures of 'em in the living room?'
'Sure. Katie, she puts ' em around. From school.'
'No pictures in this living room.'
'So what?'
'I'm glad you're here, Kovich. Renews my faith in law enforcement.' Brinkley finished his drawing of the table, and Kovich peered over his shoulder.
'That's prettier than mine, Mick. I think I'm in love.'
'Fuck you,' Brinkley said, without rancor, and strode into the dining room. He had heard the body was in there but would have known anyway. The room had already started to smell, not from decomposition, way too soon for that, but from blood. The air carried the distinctive scent; fresh blood had a sweet aroma before it coagulated and grew stale. He ignored it, surveyed the dining room, and started to draw.
Another big room, another craggy fireplace, a costly mahogany table, lengthwise, with eight high-backed chairs. Two place settings at the table: husband and wife. Two tall champagne flutes next to pristine white china. Appetizer on a fancy platter. Otherwise nothing. No books, photos, clutter. No bills piled up, no newspapers. Nothing to tell Brinkley anything. Maybe its absence told him something. There was no life in this house. There hadn't been, even before the dead body.
