Patricia Cornwell - All That Remains

"He may save putting that on for last. May even keep it in a gym bag in his trunk. My guess is he has a kit."

"Did you find a gym bag?" Abby asked bluntly.

"No," Marino said. "No murder kit."

"Well, if you ever find a gym bag, or murder kit," Abby added, "then maybe you'll find his knife, gun, goggles, and all the rest of it."

"We'll be looking until the cows come home."

"Where is he now?"

I asked.

"Was sitting in his kitchen drinking coffee when I left," Marino replied. "Friggin' unbelievable.

Here we are tearing up his house and he's not even sweating. When he was asked about the warm-up suits, the gloves, decks of cards, and so on, he said he wasn't talking to us without his attorney present. Then he took a sip of his coffee and lit a cigarette like we wasn't there. Oh, yeah, I left that out. The squirrel smokes."

"What brand?"

I asked.

"Dunhills. Probably buys them in that fancy tobacco shop next to his bookstore. And he uses a fancy lighter, too. An expensive one."

"That would certainly explain his peeling the paper off the butts before depositing them at the scenes, if that's what he did," I said.

"Dunhills are distinctive."

"I know," Marino said. "They've got a gold band around the filter."

"You got a suspect's kit?"

"Oh, yeah."

He smiled. "That's our little trump card that will beat his jack of hearts hands down. If we can't make these other cases, at least we got the murders of Jill Harrington and Elizabeth Mott to hang him with. DNA ought to nail his ass. Wish the damn tests didn't take so long."

After Marino left, Abby stared coolly at me…

"What do you think?" I asked.

"It's all circumstantial."

"Right now it is."

"Spurrier's got money," she said. "He's going to get the best trial lawyer money can buy. I can tell you exactly how it's going to go. The lawyer's going to suggest that his client was railroaded by the cops and the feds because of the pressure to solve these homicides. It's going to come out that a lot of people are looking for a scapegoat, especially in light of the accusations Pat Harvey has made."

"Abby…"

"Maybe the killer is someone from Camp Peary."

"You don't really believe that," I protested.

She glanced at her watch. "Maybe the feds already know who it is and have already taken care of the problem. Privately, which would explain why no other couples since Fred and Deborah have disappeared. Someone's got to pay in order to remove the cloud of suspicion, end the matter to the public's satisfaction…"

Leaning back in my chair, I turned my face up to the ceiling and shut my eyes while she went on and on.

"No question Spurrier's into something or he wouldn't be stealing license plates. But he could be selling drugs. Maybe he's a cat burglar or gets his jollies from driving around with borrowed tags for a day? He's weird enough to fit the profile, but the world is full of weirdos who don't ever kill anyone. Who's to say the stuff in his house wasn't planted?"

"Please stop," I said quietly.

But she wouldn't. "It's just so goddam neat. The warm-up suits, gloves, decks of cards, pornography, and newspaper clips. And it doesn't make sense that no weapons or ammunition were found. Spurrier was caught by surprise, didn't have any idea he was under surveillance. In fact, it not only doesn't make sense, it's very convenient. One thing the feds couldn't plant was the pistol that fired the bullet you recovered from Deborah Harvey."

"You're right. They couldn't plant that."

I got up from the table and began wiping the counters because I couldn't sit still.

"Interesting that the one item of evidence they couldn't plant didn't show up."

There had been stories before about the police, federal agents, planting evidence in order to frame someone.

The ACLU probably had a file room full of such accusations.

"You're not listening," Abby said.

"I'm going up to take a bath," I replied wearily.

She walked over to the sink where I was wringing out the dishrag.

"Kay?" I stopped what I was doing and looked at her.

"You want it to be easy," she admonished.

"I've always wanted things to be easy. They almost never are."

"You want it to be easy," she repeated. "You don't want to think that the people you trust could send an innocent man to the electric chair in order to cover their asses."

"No question about that. I wouldn't want to think it. I refuse to think it unless there is proof. And Marino was at Spurrier's house. He would never have gone along with it."

"He was there." She walked away, from me. "But he wasn't the first one there. By the time he arrived, he would have seen what they wanted him to see."

The first person I saw when I reached the office on Monday was Fielding.

I had come in through the bay, and he was already dressed in scrubs, waiting to get on the elevator. When I noticed the plasticized blue paper booties over his running shoes, I thought of what the police had found inside Steven Spurrier's house. Our medical supplies were on state contract. But there were any number of businesses in any city that sold booties and surgical gloves. One did not need to be a physician to purchase such items any more than one needed to be a police officer to buy a uniform, badge, or gun.

"Hope you got a good night's rest," Fielding warned as the elevator doors parted.

We stepped inside.

"Give me the bad news. What have we got this morning?"

I said.

"Six posts, every one of them a homicide."

"Great," I said irritably.

"Yeah, the Knife and Gun Club had a busy weekend. Four shootings, two stabbings. Spring has sprung."

We got off on the second floor and I was already taking off my suit jacket and rolling up my sleeves when I walked into my office. Marino was sitting in a chair, his briefcase on his lap, a cigarette lit. I assumed one of the morning's cases was his until he handed me two lab reports.

"Thought you'd want to see it for yourself," he said.

Typed at the top of one report was the name Steven Spurrier. The serology lab had already completed a workup on his blood. The other report was eight years old, the results of the workup done on the blood found inside Elizabeth Mott's car.

"Of course, it's going to be a while before the DNA results are in," Marino began to explain, "but so far so good."

Settling behind my desk, I took a moment to study the reports. The blood from the Volkswagen was type O, PGM type 1, EAP type B, ADA type 1, and EsD type 1. This particular combination could be found in approximately 8 percent of the population. The results were consistent with those of the tests conducted on the blood from Spurrier's suspect kit. He also was type O, types in other blood groups the same, but since more enzymes had been tested for, the combination had been narrowed to approximately 1 percent of the population.

"It's not enough to charge him with murder," I said to Marino. "You'd have to have more than the fact that his blood type includes him in a group of thousands of people."

"A damn shame the report from the old blood isn't more complete."

"They didn't routinely test for as many enzymes back then," I replied.

"Maybe they could do it now?" he suggested. "If we could narrow it down, that would be a big help.

The damn DNA for Spurrier's blood is going to take weeks."

"They're not going to be able to do it," I told him. "The blood from Elizabeth's car is too old.

After this many years the enzymes would have degraded, so the results this time would be less specific than what's on this eight year old report. The best you could get now is the ABO grouping, and almost half of the population is type O. We have no choice but to wait for the DNA results. Besides," I added, "even if you could lock him up this minute you know he'd make bail. He's still under surveillance, I hope."