Fragile (2010) by Unger Lisa

Author:Unger, Lisa [Lisa, Unger,]
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2011-01-14T19:07:43.484000+00:00

17

Blood cannot be cleaned. Not totally. The proteins react to heat and certain chemicals, tending to bind. Even if the stain is removed, those proteins might remain, making them easily discoverable with today’s forensic technology. But it generally didn’t take fancy police work or high-tech equipment, just an unyielding gaze. Blood splatter is insidious, hiding in the doorjamb or on the baseboards or where the light switch cover meets the wall, any place stressed and tired eyes might miss. And, in Jones’s limited experience with such things, people in general weren’t that smart, thorough, or calculating. Maybe it was just The Hollows. The five homicides that had occurred on his watch had been predictable and easily solved.

In the case of the Murray home, it wasn’t just the three large spots of blood on the outer gasket of the refrigerator door. It was the Google history on the computer—“how to clean bloodstains”—that told the tale. But Melody Murray wasn’t talking. She’d taken to a silent rocking that Jones didn’t find quite sincere.

“Melody,” he said, standing in her living room near the arched entry. She reclined in a ratty old La-Z-Boy, her eyes glassy, gaze distant.

“Whose blood is that? What happened here?”

“What blood?” she asked, dreamily. “There’s no blood.”

Seeing her like that made him think of Sarah’s funeral. Melody had gone silent and traumatized like this in the days her friend was missing and was virtually catatonic when Sarah’s body was found. Even then, though she had plenty of reason to lose herself to grief and fear, he didn’t quite buy it.

In the laundry room, Jones had seen a baseball bat leaning beside the dryer. He walked away from Melody now, went over and picked it up with a gloved hand, stood for a moment feeling its heft and width. An open box of fabric softener on the shelf above released the lightest scent of lilac into the air. Her house was clean, which surprised him. He would have predicted it to be a pigsty. But it was orderly, floors and surfaces free from collected dust.

Jones could hear the two other detectives moving around upstairs. Katie Walker, the town’s only crime scene tech, a graduate of John Jay College in Manhattan, had already photographed the blood and the position of the bat and now sat at the kitchen table labeling items in crime scene bags—some rags from the washing machine, a pair of dishwashing gloves from the garbage can on the side of the house. She glanced up at him as he passed with the bat. Katie, another graduate of Hollows High, had moved back home to be near her sister, who’d just had twins. Jones liked her; she was quiet, thorough, into details. She didn’t make assumptions, just collected evidence and coolly analyzed it. Of course, they didn’t really need her in The Hollows, not often. But there was money in the budget for a part-time tech. So when Katie asked the Hollows police chief, Marion Butler, for a job, she got it.

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