Дэвид Балдаччи - Redemption

That was problematic, Decker knew. And he had thought so all those years ago too, though he had finally discounted the significance of it. You shoot two people on the first floor, there’s going to be some noise, and not just the gunshots. There will be people shouting, presumably, or a scuffle. The house was not that large. Those sounds would surely have carried upstairs.

There was one landline phone upstairs, in the parents’ bedroom, and they had determined that neither of the Richards kids had cell phones. But still, they could have tried to reach the phone in the bedroom and call the police, then hide, or escape out a window. But they hadn’t.

He could imagine the older Frankie Richards being a little more able to react to something like that than his younger sister. The kid was a drug user and also a small-time dealer, and was thus used to being around potentially bad actors and some level of risk. He kept cash and product at his house, they had found. He had to know that someone might come and try to take either one or both. Back in those days, you didn’t have to have thousands of dollars or bricks of coke to warrant a theft like that. People would kill you for fifty bucks and a bag of weed.

Had the sounds of the storm covered the two deaths downstairs? And had the children not known what was happening until it was too late?

Decker passed on to his next question as the rain continued to pound outside. Why had Abigail been strangled when all the other victims had been shot? Decker thought he knew the answer to that one.

But as his eyes hovered over the screen, his mind suddenly filled up with so many blinding images that he almost felt like he would vomit.

In his mind’s eye he was at his house the night he’d found his family dead. Electric blue sensations were pounding him from all corners. He had always been able to push, or at least diminish, this memory by banishing it to a far recess of his mind. But now, stunningly enough, he was unable to do so. It was as if he was no longer in control of his own mind. It was like a spontaneous, uncontrolled data dump from a computer.

He stood on shaky legs and wondered whether he could make it to the bathroom before he threw up. But then his stomach cleared, yet his mind did not.

He glanced over at Mars, who was still sound asleep on the bed. Part of Decker wanted to wake his friend, explain what was happening to him, and ask for help. But what sort of help could Mars possibly give him? And Decker would feel embarrassed even asking.

Instead, he stumbled out of the room, down the hall, and then down the stairs. He used the rear exit door that he had told Lancaster about. He lurched outside where the trash and recycling Dumpsters were located. The rain was still pouring, and in just a few seconds Decker was soaked to the skin.

He finally hunched down under a metal roof that covered part of the rear of the inn. Over and over in his mind he saw himself going through his old house, the one now occupied by the Hendersons. Step by step.

His brother-in-law in the kitchen.

His wife on the floor by the side of their bed, only her foot visible when he entered the room.

And finally, Molly tied to the toilet in the bathroom with the sash from her robe. She’d been strangled to death, just like Abigail Richards.

And they had all died because of—

Me.

Decker put his hands over his head and sat there on the cold asphalt as the rain pounded down on the metal roof above.

He thought he had hit rock bottom when he’d lost his family, his job, his home. He had nothing.

But this, he thought to himself as the images unspooled over and over in his head, beginning with his brother-in-law and ending with daughter.

This... this is rock bottom.

“You okay?”

It was the next morning and Mars was staring at Decker from across the table in the Residence Inn’s dining area.

“Fine, why?”

“Because when I woke up you were in the bathroom, sounding like you were throwing up.”

“Must’ve imagined it. My stomach was a little rocky, but that’s it.”

“I knocked on the door, don’t you remember that? Asking if you were okay?”

“Don’t you remember? I told you I was good and then I guess you went to your room. But before that you’d fallen asleep on my bed. You were probably mentally out of it when you checked on me.”

Mars studied him for a moment but then shrugged. “You were up late. I ran out of gas.”

“I was going over stuff, trying to make sense of things that don’t seem to make sense.”

“Like what?”

Decker outlined for him what he had thought about last night.

“Okay, they probably died around eight-thirty. And the call comes in an hour later,” said Mars. “Well, I know from experience that an hour means a lot in a criminal investigation.”

“Actually, it’s an hour and five minutes, because the 911 call came in at nine-thirty-five. But the ME couldn’t nail the TOD to the minute, so it’s at least an hour discrepancy.”

“What exactly did the 911 call say?”

“That they heard suspicious noises from inside the Richardses’ house. People screaming and then a gunshot.”

“But that’s impossible. They weren’t killed at nine-thirty-five.”

“We don’t know if the person really heard a shot or something else. And we don’t know if they heard a shot that killed someone or just a shot.”

“Well, dead people don’t scream.”

“True, but who’s to say someone else wasn’t in the house screaming at that time and that’s what the caller heard?”

“Who would that person be?”

“I have no idea. I have no idea if such a person exists. But I do have a thought about something else.”

“What?”

“Abigail Richards was strangled, not shot. Why?”

“You mean why wasn’t she shot like the others because it was easier than strangling somebody?”

“Right.”

Mars thought about this for a few moments. “I give.”

“When you shoot someone, you don’t transfer your DNA to under their fingernails. When you strangle someone, that opportunity presents itself.”

“Wait a minute, are you saying somebody somehow got some of Hawkins’s DNA from his skin and placed that under the girl’s nails?”

“Yes.”

“So that can be done?”

“Sure. And Hawkins had scratches on his arms. So something happened to him. I think that’s when his DNA was harvested to incriminate him.”

“But if somebody else had scratched him, let’s say, and then took that skin and, I guess, blood and hair and put it under Abigail’s nails, wouldn’t some of that person’s DNA also end up under her nails?”

“Possibly but not necessarily. Depends on how it was done. In any event, the DNA screen done at the time confirmed it was Hawkins’s DNA under her nails.”

“And the fingerprint? Could that have been placed there too?”

“It could be. It’s extraordinarily rare to find a forged print. It’s far more likely to find a fabricated one at a crime scene.”

“What’s the difference?” asked Mars, looking curious.

“Cop finds a glass with a suspect’s prints on it outside of the crime scene and then places the glass at the crime scene and swears he found it there. Or a third party could do the same thing. Person wasn’t at the scene but the glass with his print was because it was intentionally placed there. That’s a fabrication. A forgery is where you actually take someone’s prints from one surface and transfer them to another surface at a crime scene.”

“Is that hard to do?”

“Well, you certainly have to know what you’re doing. You lift a print with tape, you’re going to disturb ridge lines. And prints interact differently with different surfaces. You lift a print from a metal surface and transfer it to a wooden surface, chances are you’re going to interject some anomalies into the picture that’ll throw up a red flag.”