Fear Nothing (7 page)

And yet, as she turned around, not in the rest of the room.

Alex followed her lead, once more sweeping the walls and floors with the high-intensity beam, as they considered the final step of the murderer’s process.

“Cleanup,” D.D. muttered.

“Definitely,” Alex concurred. “He cleaned up.”

He worked the beam in slow, rhythmic patterns around the perimeter of the queen-size bed, illuminating paw prints, another larger smear stain near the bedroom door that matched the one down the hall. Lily the dog, once more lying down.

“The dog didn’t bark?” D.D. asked.

“Not that anyone heard.”

“And yet, clearly the dog was distressed.” She indicated all the paw prints, back and forth and back.

“Distressed, but maybe more confused? Remember, as strange as it sounds, this wasn’t a violent attack. At least we have no evidence of a killer breaking into the home and overpowering the victim. Whatever happened, it was . . . subdued. Even the postmortem mutilation. He would’ve sat upon the body. No screaming, no struggling, no outward signs of the victim’s distress.”

D.D. shuddered. She couldn’t help herself. “He had a plan,” she stated out loud, refocusing. “He enacted the plan. And then . . .”

“And then he tidied up after himself,” Alex said, then frowned. “Which is the part I don’t understand. Even if it’s not a chaotic scene—no running, no chasing, no restraining—the amount of blood, seeping from the victim’s body, soaking into the mattress . . . The killer’s hands, forearms, would be covered in it. Not to mention his legs from sitting astride the body, his feet . . . This floor should be a case study of blood evidence. If not covered in bloody footprints, spatter, etcetera, then, at the very least, covered in smear patterns from him attempting to wipe up all of the above. So why isn’t it?”

D.D. saw Alex’s point. She could count more than a dozen paw prints from the dog tracking back and forth across the floor. And that was it.

“He cleans up in the bathroom afterward?” D.D. considered. “Maybe showers? I’m sure Phil had the team swab the shower and sink drains for bodily fluids.”

“I’m sure Phil did. But how did the killer get there? Levitation?” Alex swept his beam from the bed to the doorway of the master bath. The floorboards didn’t offer up one glimpse of stain. He lit up the brass doorknob as well. Equally clean of bodily fluids. Then, just to be thorough, he swept the high-intensity light beam across the cracked linoleum floor, tired white bathtub, pedestal sink, toilet. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

“Some kind of special cleaner?” D.D. thought next. “He scoured the space with a toothbrush and bleach, got every square inch. . . .”

“Possible, but probable?” Alex’s expression remained dubious. As he had stated, blood was nearly impossible to remove 100 percent. Hence, criminalists could build entire careers using blood evidence to catch savvy killers who’d bleached walls but forgotten the window latch, or loofahed off a layer of their own skin but forgot about the wind-up dial of their watch. Killers could clean only what they could see. While thanks to tools such as high-intensity lights and chemicals such as luminol, a savvy investigator essentially approached every scene with X-ray vision.

D.D. was struck by a fresh thought. “Let’s consider this from another angle. We have a killer who not only entered undetected but also left that way. Except on the way out, he should’ve appeared disheveled, even bloody from all the knife work. So how did he disguise all that?”

Alex shrugged. “Most obvious solution would be for him to shower after the killing, as you suggested. He washed off all traces of blood, changed into fresh clothes, then walked out the front door, just another guy in the neighborhood.”

“Except, as you said, we’d see traces of blood leading from the bed to the bathroom, not to mention on the bathroom floor, shower, sink. Meaning . . . What if he was naked? What if, after subduing his victim . . . before getting started with the main event, the killer removed his own clothes?”

“Prudent,” Alex said. “Blood is easier to remove from skin than clothes.”

“Other thing I’m noticing is that there don’t seem to be any towels missing from the victim’s bathroom. There’s a hand towel in the hand towel ring, and two bath towels on the rack. So if he showered here, what did he use to dry off?”

Alex nodded shortly, considering.

“Maybe,” D.D. continued, “as long as the killer is bringing in props for the murder, he’s also providing his own cleanup kit. Packed a couple of towels, maybe even his own bath mat, for the floor next to the bed. See this mark here?” She gestured to the lone smear pattern, near the right-side nightstand. “He lays down the bath mat, strips off his clothes, then climbs on the bed to do what he’s going to do. Afterward, he steps from the bed back onto the bath mat, wipes himself down with his towel, replaces his clean clothes, socks, shoes. Then it’s a simple matter of rolling up the mat, bloody towel, knife, etcetera, tucked safely inside. Sticks everything back in his duffel bag and he’s good to go. Certainly that would explain the lack of blood evidence in the rest of the house, including the bathroom.”

“Not just prudent,” Alex amended. “Clever.”

“Experienced,” D.D. emphasized. “Isn’t that what the ME said? This guy knows what he’s doing. And he’s controlled. From the beginning through the middle to the end. We’re not going to find any magic answers here.”

Alex turned on a bedside lamp, snapped off his flashlight. “I wouldn’t be so sure about that. Removing his clothes may limit his risk of blood-transfer evidence, but it increased the killer’s chances of leaving behind hair, fiber, DNA.”

“Fair enough.”

“And there’s still the small matter of he has to incapacitate his victims somehow. Once the ME figures that out, we’ll have something more to pursue.”

They turned away from the bed, toward the hallway, the descending flight of stairs.

“I don’t want to be injured anymore,” D.D. heard herself say, gazing toward the staircase.

“I know.”

“I don’t want to feel this weak and useless. I want to be on the job. I want to be tracking this killer.”

“Do you remember anything more?”

“You mean like why I tried to fly down a staircase? Or fired my gun three times into drywall?” She shook her head.

“You’ve helped tonight.”

“Not officially. Officially, I’m a detective who returned to a crime scene all alone and may or may not have discharged my weapon without probable cause. As things stand right now, I’m a liability for the department, and we both know even if my left arm miraculously heals overnight, they’re not going to simply return my badge. I’m an unanswered question, and cops hate that.”

“You are an unanswered question,” Alex agreed, walking over to her.

“Gee, thanks.”

He regarded her thoughtfully. “But you know what? You’re something more.”

“A brilliant detective? Perfect wife? Loving mother? It’s okay; you can lay it on thick. Melvin’s starting to really piss me off, and I could use some sickeningly sweet platitudes right now.”

“Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of how detectives answer questions. Or really, how I answer questions.”

She stared at him. “You’re a criminalist.”

“Exactly. I study crime scenes. And you, D.D., your shoulder, your arm, your injuries, you are a crime scene. Better yet, you’re the one scene our killer didn’t control.”

Chapter 5

P
AIN IS . . .

A conversation. My adoptive father started it when I was twelve, seeking to help me understand all the various forms and functions of both physical and emotional discomfort. Pain is . . . watching our housekeeper break a glass, then use tweezers to remove a shard from the meat of her thumb, her breath hissing sharply.

Pain is . . . forgetting how to spell
vertebrae
on a test, though I had studied it just the night before. Thus, I scored ninety, which my father said was okay, but which we both knew wasn’t excellent.

Pain is . . . my father not making it to the state science fair. Another case, a pressing paper, work forever demanding. But assuring me that he loved me and was sorry, while I studied him closely and attempted to understand those sentiments as well. Regret. Remorse. Repentance. Emotions that were by definition corollaries of the pain process.

Pain is . . . my best friend reciting every detail of her first kiss. Watching her face glow and hearing her voice giggle and wondering if I would ever feel the same. My father had found two case studies of sisters with congenital insensitivity to pain who’d married and had children. In theory, the inability to feel pain did not preclude the possibility of falling in love, of being loved back. It didn’t stop the genetically abnormal from hoping to grow into normalcy.

It didn’t keep you from wanting a family.

My adoptive father loved me. Not right away. He wasn’t the type. His was a measured, controlled approach to life. Understanding the hard realities facing a foster child, he made the necessary investment in my future care by opening his large home and considerable financial resources. Most likely, he assumed proper staffing would meet my everyday needs, while he continued to study my condition and write up stunningly dry academic reports.

He hadn’t anticipated my nightmares, however, or foreseen that a little girl who couldn’t feel pain was still perfectly capable of dreaming of it, night after night. In the beginning, he puzzled over this phenomenon, asking me endless questions. What did I see? What did I hear? What did I feel?

I couldn’t answer. Only that I did fear. The night. The dark. The sound of canned laugh tracks. Dolls. Scissors. Nylons. Pencils. Once, I spotted a shovel leaning against the gardening shed; I ran screaming for my closet and wouldn’t come out for hours.

Thunder, lightning, hard rain. Black cats. Blue quilts. Some of my fears were ordinary enough in the lexicon of childhood. Others were completely bewildering.

My adoptive father consulted with a child therapist. Under her advice, he asked me to draw pictures of my nightmares. But I couldn’t. My artistic vision was limited to a black pool, bisected by a faint line of yellow.

Later, I overheard the therapist saying to my father, “Probably all she could see, shut up in the closet like that. But understand even an infant is capable of recognizing and responding to terror. And given what was going on in that house, the things her father was doing . . .”

“But how would she
know
?” my father pressed. “And I don’t mean because she was just an infant at the time. But if you can’t feel pain, then how do you know what to fear? Isn’t the root of most of our fears pain itself?”

The therapist had no answers, and neither did I.

When I was fourteen, I stopped waiting for my nightmares to magically reveal themselves and started researching my family instead. I read about the various exploits of my birth father, Harry Day, under headings such as “Beverly House of Horrors,” and “Crazed Carpenter’s Killing Rampage.” Turns out, not only did my birth father murder eight prostitutes, but he buried them beneath his private workshop as well as our family room floor. The police theorized some of the women had been kept alive for days, maybe even weeks, while he tortured them.

For a while, I was obsessed with uncovering every piece of information I could find about Harry Day. And not just because my past was horrifying and shocking, but also because it was so . . . alien. I would gaze at pictures of the house, a rusted-out bike propped against the front porch, and I would feel . . . nothing.

Even staring at the photo of my own father, I couldn’t summon the tiniest flicker of recognition. I didn’t see my eyes or my sister’s nose. I didn’t picture large calloused hands or hear a faint, deep chuckle. Harry Day, 338 Bloomfield Street. It was like staring at scenes from a movie set. All real, but all make-believe.

Of course, I was only eleven months old when the police discovered Harry’s homicidal hobby and rushed our house. Harry was found dead in the bathtub, wrists slit, while my mother was taken away to a mental hospital. She died, alone and still restrained for her own safety, while my sister and I became official wards of the state.

Some days, when not staring at Harry’s grinning face, I would study my mother instead. Not many photos of her existed. High school dropout, I learned. Ran away from her own family, who lived somewhere in the Midwest. She made her way to Boston, where she worked as a waitress in a diner. Then she hooked up with Harry, and her fate was sealed.

The only pictures I could find were police photos of her standing in the background while detectives ripped up the floorboards of her home. A gaunt-looking woman with washed-out features, unkempt long brown hair and an already broken posture.

I didn’t see my eyes or my sister’s nose when I looked at her, either. I saw merely a ghost, a woman who was lost way before outside help arrived.

Eventually, my nightmares faded. I worried less about the family that had gifted me with faulty DNA and worked harder to gain my adoptive father’s praise. And in turn, my father began excusing the weekend staff, helping me himself with school projects and, in time, even sitting up with me the nights I couldn’t sleep, offering the quiet reassurance of his solid, contemplative company.

He loved me. Despite his academic’s heart, despite my flawed wiring, we became a family.

Then he died, and my nightmares returned with a vengeance.

First night, all alone after my father’s funeral. Having consumed too much port. Finally closing my eyes . . .

And seeing the closet door suddenly swing open. Recalling the thin glow cast by a bare bulb across the tiny, cluttered bedroom. Seeing my toddler sister in the center of the room, clutching a threadbare brown teddy, as my father’s gaze cast from her to me to her.

Hearing my mother say, “Please, Harry, not the baby,” before I was plunged once more into the gloom.

Pain is not what you see and not what you feel. Pain is what you can only hear, alone in the dark.

 • • • 

I
WOKE FOR THE FIRST TIME
shortly after eleven. I’d been asleep for approximately ten minutes, and yet my heart was pounding uncontrollably, my face covered in sweat. I stared at the tray ceiling of my bedroom. Practiced the deep-breathing exercises I’d been taught so many years ago.