Tess Gerritsen - The Mephisto Club

“I wouldn’t automatically reject the possibility it’s a woman,” said Sansone. “We have no usable footprints here.”

“I don’t reject anything. I’m just going with the odds.”

“That’s all they are. Odds.”

“How many killers have you tracked down?” shot back Jane.

He regarded her with an unflinching stare. “I think the answer would surprise you, Detective.”

Maura turned to Jurevich. “The killer must have spent hours here, in this house. He must have left hair, fibers.”

“Our crime-scene unit went over all these rooms with ALS.”

“They couldn’t have come up empty.”

“Oh, they came up with plenty. This is an old house, and it’s been occupied on and off for the last seventy years. We turned up hairs and fibers all over these rooms. Found something that surprised us. Let me show you the rest of the house.”

They went back into the hallway, and Jurevich pointed through a doorway. “Another bedroom in there. Lot of dust, plus a few cat hairs, but otherwise nothing that caught our interest.” He continued down the hall, past another bedroom, past a bathroom with black-and-white tiles, giving the rooms only dismissive waves. They came to the last doorway. “Here,” he said. “This turned out to be a very interesting room.”

Maura heard the ominous note in his voice, but when she stepped into the bedroom, she saw nothing at all alarming, just a space devoid of all furniture, with blank walls. The wood floor here was in far better shape than in the rest of the house, its boards recently refinished. Two bare windows looked out over the knoll’s wooded slope, which swept down to the frozen lake below.

“So what makes this room interesting?” asked Jane.

“It’s what we found on the floor.”

“I don’t see anything.”

“It showed up when we sprayed it with Luminol. The crime-scene unit surveyed the whole house, to see where our killer might have tracked blood. Whether he left traces that we couldn’t see in other rooms. We found his footprints in the hallway, on the stairs, and in the foyer, all of them invisible to the naked eye. So we know he did try to clean up as he exited the house. But you can’t really hide blood. Spray it with Luminol, and it’ll light right up.” Jurevich looked down at the floor. “It sure as hell lit up in here.”

“More shoe prints?” asked Jane.

“Not just shoe prints. It was like a wave of blood had washed through this room, splashed on the wall. You could see it in the cracks between the floorboards, where it seeped into the molding. That wall there, there were big swipes of it, where someone tried to wash it away. But they couldn’t erase it. Even though you can’t see it now, it was all over the place. We stood here, looking at this whole damn room glowing, and it freaked the hell out of us, I can tell you. Because when we turned on our lights, it looked just the way it does now. Nothing. Not a trace of blood visible to the naked eye.”

Sansone stared at the walls, as though trying to see those shocking echoes of death. He looked down at the floor, its boards sanded smooth. “This can’t be fresh blood,” he murmured. “Something else happened in this house.”

Maura remembered the FOR SALE sign, half-buried in snow, posted at the bottom of the knoll. She thought of the weathered clapboards, the peeling paint. Why was such a handsome home abandoned to years of neglect? “That’s why no one will buy it,” she said.

Jurevich nodded. “It happened about twelve years ago, just before I moved to this area. I only found out about it when the realtor told me. It’s not something she likes to advertise, since the house is on the market, but it’s a matter of disclosure. A little detail that every potential buyer would want to know. And it pretty much sends them running in the other direction.”

Maura looked down at the floor, at seams and cracks harboring blood that she could not see. “Who died in here?”

“In this room, it was a suicide. But when you think about everything else that happened in this house, it’s like the whole damn building is bad luck.”

“There were other deaths?”

Jurevich nodded. “There was a family living here at the time. A doctor and his wife, a son and daughter. Plus a nephew staying with them for the summer. From what everyone says, the Sauls were good people. Close family, lots of friends.”

Nothing is exactly what it seems, thought Maura. Nothing ever is.

“Their eleven-year-old son died first. It was a heartbreaking accident. Kid headed down to the lake to go fishing, and he didn’t come home. They figure he must have fallen into the water and panicked. They found his body the next day. From there, it just got worse for the family. A week later, the mother takes a tumble down the stairs and snaps her neck. She’d been taking some sedatives, and they figure she just lost her balance.”

“That’s an interesting coincidence,” said Sansone.

“What?”

“Isn’t that how Sarah Parmley’s aunt died? A fall down the stairs? A broken neck?”

Jurevich paused. “Yeah. I hadn’t thought about it. That is a coincidence, isn’t it?”

Jane said, “You haven’t told us about the suicide.”

Jurevich nodded. “It was the husband. Think about it-what he’d just suffered through. First his son drowns. Then his wife falls down the stairs. So two days later, he takes out his gun, sits here in his bedroom, and blows off his own head.” Jurevich looked at the floor. “It’s his blood on the floor. Think about it. A whole family, practically wiped out within a few weeks.”

“What happened to the daughter?” asked Jane.

“She moved in with friends. Graduated from high school a year later, and left town.”

“She’s the one who owns this house?”

“Yeah. It’s still in her name. She’s been trying to unload it all these years. Realtor says there’ve been a few lookers, but then they hear what happened, and they walk away. Would you live in this house? You couldn’t pay me enough. It’s a bad-luck place. You can almost feel it when you walk in that front door.”

Maura looked around at the walls and gave a shudder. “If there’s such a thing as a haunted house, this would be it.”

“ Abyssus abyssum invocat, ” said Sansone quietly. “It takes on a different meaning, now.”

They all looked at him. “What?” said Jurevich.

“That’s why he chose this for his killing place. He knew the history of this house. He knew what happened here, and he was attracted to it. You can call it a doorway to another dimension. Or a vortex. But there are dark places in this world, foul places that can only be called cursed.”

Jane gave an uneasy laugh. “You really believe that?”

“What I believe doesn’t matter. But if our killer believes it, then he chose this house because it called to him. Hell calls to Hell. ”

“Oh man,” said Jurevich, “you’re giving me goose bumps.” He looked around at the blank walls and shuddered, as though feeling a chill wind. “You know what I think? They should just burn this place. Burn it right down to the ground. No one in his right mind will ever buy it.”

“You said it was a doctor’s family living here,” said Jane.

“That’s right. The Sauls.”

“And they had a nephew staying with them that summer.”

Jurevich nodded. “Fifteen-year-old kid.”

“What happened to that boy? After the tragedies?”

“The realtor says the kid left Purity a short time later. His mother came and got him.”

“Do you know anything else about him?”

“Remember, it was twelve years ago. No one knew him very well. And he was only here for that summer.” Jurevich paused. “I know what you’re thinking. The kid would be twenty-seven right now. And he’d know all about what happened here.”