Patricia Cornwell - Book of the Dead

“Why are you asking me?” Madelisa says, and she begins to cry. “I said, I don’t know anything other than what I already told that investigator.”

She continues glancing past Marino toward the back of her small, yellow house. Yellow wallpaper, yellow carpet. Marino’s never seen so much yellow. It looks like an interior decorator peed on everything the Dooleys own.

“The reason I bring up image recovery is I understand your husband erased part of what he videotaped out there on the beach,” Marino says, unmoved by her tears.

“It was just me standing in front of the house before I had permission. That’s the only thing he erased. Of course, I never did get permission, because how could I? It’s not that I didn’t try. I have manners.”

“I really don’t give a shit about you and your manners. What I care about is what you’re hiding from me and everybody else.” He leans forward in the recliner chair. “I know damn well you’re not being totally honest with me. Why do I know that? Because of science.”

He doesn’t know anything of the sort. To recover deleted images from a digital recorder isn’t a given. If it can be done at all, the process is painstaking and would take a while.

“Please don’t,” she begs him. “I’m so sorry, but please don’t take him. I love him so much.”

Marino has no idea what she’s talking about. It occurs to him she means her husband, but he isn’t sure.

He says, “If I don’t take him, what then? How do I explain it when I leave here and I’m asked?”

“Pretend you don’t know about it.” She cries harder. “What difference does it make? He didn’t do anything. Oh, the poor baby. Who knows what he’s been through. He was shaking and had blood on him. He didn’t do anything except get scared and escape, and if you take him you know what will happen. They’ll put him to sleep. Oh, please, let me keep him. Please! Please! Please!”

“Why did he have blood on him?” Marino asks.

In the master bathroom, Scarpetta shines a flashlight obliquely over an onyx floor the color of tigereye.

“Bare footprints,” she says from the doorway. “Smallish. Maybe hers again. And more hair.”

“If what Madelisa Dooley says is to be believed, he had to have walked around in here. This is so weird,” Becky says as Lucy shows up with a small blue-and-yellow box and a bottle of sterile water.

Scarpetta steps inside the bathroom. She pulls open the tiger-striped shower curtain and shines the light inside the deep copper tub. Nothing, then something catches her attention, and she picks up what looks like a piece of broken white pottery that for some reason was between a bar of white soap and a dish hooked to the side of the tub. She examines it carefully. She gets out her jeweler’s lens.

“Part of a dental crown,” she says. “Not porcelain. A temporary that somehow got broken.”

“I wonder where the rest of it is,” Becky says, crouching in the doorway and peering at the floor, turning on her flashlight and shining it in all directions. “Unless it’s not recent.”

“Could have gone down the drain. We should check the trap. Could be anywhere.” Scarpetta thinks she sees a trace of dried blood on what she estimates is almost half of a crown from what she believes is a front tooth. “We have any way of knowing if Lydia Webster has been to the dentist lately?”

“I can check it out. There’s not that many dentists on the island. So unless she went elsewhere, it shouldn’t be hard to track down.”

“It would have to be recent, very recent,” Scarpetta says. “I don’t care how much you neglect your hygiene, you don’t ignore a broken crown, especially on a front tooth.”

“Could be his,” Lucy says.

“That would be even better,” Scarpetta says. “We need a small paper envelope.”

“I’ll get it,” Lucy says.

“I don’t see anything. If it broke in here, I don’t see the rest of it. I guess it could still be attached to the tooth. I broke a crown once and part of it was still stuck to the little nub that’s left of my tooth.” Becky looks past Scarpetta, at the copper tub. “Talk about the biggest false-positive on the planet,” she adds. “This will be a new one for the books. One of the few times I need to use luminal, and the damn tub and sink are copper. Well, we can forget it.”

“I don’t use luminol anymore,” Scarpetta says, as if the oxidizing agent is a disloyal friend.

Until recently, it was a forensic staple and she never questioned using it to find blood no longer visible. If blood had been washed away or even painted over, the way to know was to mix up a spray bottle of luminol and see what fluoresced. The problems have always been many. Like a dog that wags its tail at all the neighbors, luminol is excited by more than the hemoglobin in blood and is, unfortunately, quite responsive to a number of things: paint, varnish, Drano, bleach, dandelions, thistle, creeping myrtle, corn. And, of course, copper.

Lucy retrieves a small container of Hemastix for a presumptive test, looking for any residue of what may be scrubbed-away blood. The presumptive test says blood might be there, and Scarpetta opens the box of Bluestar Magnum and removes a brown glass bottle and a foil pack, and a spray bottle.

“Stronger, longer-lasting, don’t have to use it in total darkness,” she explains to Becky. “No sodium perborate tetrahydrate, so it’s nontoxic. Can use it on copper because the reaction will be a different intensity, a different color spectrum, and will have a different duration than blood.”

She has yet to see blood inside the master bathroom. Despite what Madelisa claimed, the most intense white light revealed not the slightest stain. But this is no longer surprising. By all indications so far, after she fled from the house, the killer meticulously cleaned up after himself. Scarpetta selects the finest setting on the spray bottle’s nozzle and pours in four ounces of sterile water. To this she adds two tablets. She gently stirs with a pipette for several minutes, then opens the brown glass bottle and pours in a sodium hydroxide solution.

She begins to spray, and spots and streaks and shapes and spatters luminesce bright cobalt blue all over the room. Becky takes photographs. A little later, when Scarpetta has finished cleaning up after herself and is repacking her crime scene case, her cell phone rings. It’s the fingerprint examiner from Lucy’s labs.

“You’re not going to believe this,” he says.

“Don’t ever start a conversation like that with me unless you mean it.” Scarpetta isn’t joking.

“The print on the gold coin.” He’s excited, talking fast. “We got a hit — the unidentified little boy who was found last week. The kid from Hilton Head.”

“Are you sure? You can’t be sure. It makes no sense.”

“May not make sense, but there’s no doubt about it.”

“Don’t say that, either, unless you mean it. My first reaction is there’s an error,” Scarpetta says.

“There’s not. I pulled his ten-print card from the prints Marino took in the morgue. I visually verified it. Unquestionably, the ridge detail from the partial on the coin matches the unidentified kid’s right thumbprint. There’s no mistake.”

“A fingerprint on a coin that’s been fumed with glue? I don’t see how.”

“Believe me, I’m with you. We all know the fingerprints of prepubescent kids don’t last long enough to fume. They’re mostly water. Just sweat instead of the oils, amino acids, and all the rest that comes with puberty. I’ve never superglued a kid’s prints and don’t think you could. But this print is from a kid, and that kid is the one in your morgue.”

“Maybe that’s not how it happened,” Scarpetta says. “Maybe the coin was never fumed.”