Blood Angel by Bernard Schaffer

Author:Bernard Schaffer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2020-03-15T16:00:00+00:00

11

The toilet across the hall from the bedroom flushed. Carrie leaned against the doorway. “Sal? You okay, buddy?”

She heard him run the sink faucet and spit and wash his hands. He came out of the bathroom wiping his mouth. “I’m fine. I’m sorry about that.”

“No problem. Listen, somebody was calling for you downstairs. They need you outside for something.”

“Did they say what?”

“I didn’t ask.”

His face turned hangdog. She was lying and he knew it. He looked past her into the room. “I’m supposed to be in there with you.”

“I’m good for now,” Carrie said.

There were dark circles under his eyes that hung heavy and low. “I’ll come back to check on you.”

“Sounds good.”

Carrie went back in the room. It would be easier to work by herself anyway. She stayed near the door, as far back from the bed as she could, and looked around the entire room like she was seeing it for the first time. Trying to find any details she had missed.

It was daylight outside, but the bedroom’s curtains were thick. No one had turned the lights on, for fear of disturbing any trace evidence. Carrie reached in her coat for her flashlight and turned it on, aiming the beam directly into the cavity of Linda Shelley’s back.

There were tool marks etched into Linda’s spine. Scrapes and divots in the bone where he’d pried the ribs loose. They could take impressions of those marks and the state police lab would be able to match those impressions to the knife or screwdriver or whatever else Tucker had used, once they found it.

As she looked, she saw light reflecting off the headboard in front of Linda’s body and stopped. She moved the flashlight to either side of the large wound and realized it was shining through the injury itself. Christ, he cut her open all the way through to the other side, she thought.

Carrie went around the side of the bed and bent forward with her flashlight. There, in the center of Linda’s chest, just beneath her breastbone, was a deep stab wound, with a puddle of thick coagulated blood pooled on the bed between Linda’s knees. It had soaked through the mattress and box spring and gone through to the floor.

Carrie ran her flashlight around Linda’s back and saw very little blood leaking down from the wound there. She ran the flashlight across Linda’s shoulders and outstretched arms, seeing purplish bruising on her flesh. She went back around Linda’s front and inspected her breasts and belly and the underside of her arms and saw no discoloration there at all.

Blood settles to the lowest point in the human body at the moment of death. Sometimes it can’t been seen for a few hours, but it always does, and it’s always true. If Linda had died sitting up, bent facedown over her lap, there would be no lividity on her back.

Linda’s eyes were closed. Her mouth was open and had filled with the spongy foam or whatever her body had coughed up from her throat at the moment she died.

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