Karin Slaughter - Fallen

Will should have been here. He should’ve been the kind of partner Faith knew she could call no matter what.

Mittal said, “I’ve yet to write my report, but I am prepared to share my working theory.”

Amanda rolled her hand in a circle to move things along. “Tell me what you’ve got.”

Mittal’s lips pursed at the commanding tone. “I assume that Captain Mitchell was preparing lunch when the crime commenced.” There were bags of cold cuts on the counter beside a knife and cutting board where Evelyn had obviously been slicing tomatoes. An empty Wonder bread sleeve was wadded up in the sink. The toaster had popped up long ago. Four slices of bread. Evelyn had probably known Faith would need lunch when she got home.

It was a normal enough scene, even pleasant, but for the fact that every item on the counter was spattered or smeared with blood. The toaster, the bread, the cutting board. More blood had dripped down to the floor and pooled onto the tiles. Two sets of red shoe prints crisscrossed the white porcelain, one small, one large; there had been a struggle.

Mittal continued, “Captain Mitchell was startled by a noise, possibly the sliding glass door breaking, which likely made her cut her finger with the knife she was using to slice the tomatoes.”

Amanda noted, “That’s a lot of blood for a kitchen accident.”

Mittal obviously didn’t want any editorial comments. He paused again before continuing, “The infant, Emma, would’ve been here.” He pointed to the counter space beside the fridge, opposite the area where Evelyn had been preparing lunch. “We found a small drop of blood on the counter here.” He pointed to the spot beside an older-model CD player. “There’s a blood trail to and from the shed, so Captain Mitchell was most likely bleeding when she left the kitchen. Her handprint on the door supports this.”

Amanda nodded. “She hears a noise, so she hides the baby to keep her safe, then comes back in with her S&W.”

Charlie’s words came out in a rush, as if he could no longer hold his tongue. “She must’ve wrapped a paper towel around the cut, but it bled through quickly. There’s blood on the kitchen door and the wooden handle of the S&W.”

Will asked, “What about the car seat?”

“It’s clean. She must’ve carried it with her uninjured hand. We’ve got a blood trail back and forth across the carport where she carried Emma to the shed. It’s Evelyn’s blood. Ahbidi’s people already typed it, so we can kinda puzzle it out from that.” He glanced up at Mittal. “Sorry, Ahbi. I hope I’m not stepping on your toes.”

Mittal made an expansive gesture with his hands, indicating Charlie should continue.

Will knew that this was Charlie’s favorite part of the job. There was a swagger to his walk as he went to the open doorway and clasped his hands together near his face as if he held a gun. “Evelyn comes back into the house. Pivots, sees bad guy number one waiting in the laundry room and shoots him in the head. The force spun him around like a pinwheel. That’s the exit wound you see at the back of his head.” Charlie turned back around, hands raised again in a classic Charlie’s Angel pose, which was the best way to make sure you got shot in the chest. “Then bad guy number two comes, probably from over there.” He pointed to the pass-through between the kitchen and dining room. “There’s a struggle. Evelyn loses her gun. See there?”

Will followed his pointing finger to a plastic marker on the floor. Now that Charlie had put the suggestion in his head, he could see the faint, bloody outline of a handgun.

“Evelyn grabs the knife off the counter. Her blood is on the handle, but it’s not on the blade.”

Amanda interrupted, “It’s not just her blood on the knife?”

“No. According to her personnel file, Evelyn is typed as O-positive. We’ve got B-negative coating the blade and here by the fridge.”

They all looked down at a dozen large, round drops of blood on the floor.

Mittal provided, “It’s a passive spatter. No arteries were compromised or there would be a spray pattern. All the samples were sent to the lab for DNA analysis. I imagine we’re looking at a week for results.”

A smile played at Amanda’s lips as she stared at the blood. “Good girl, Ev.” There was a sound of triumph in her voice. “Any of the dead guys B-negative?”

Charlie glanced at Mittal again. The man nodded his acquiescence. “The Asian in the ugly shirt was O-positive, which is a fairly common type across races. It’s Evelyn’s type. It’s my type. The other, the guy we’re calling Ricardo because of his tattoo, was B-negative, but here’s the kicker: he doesn’t have any stab wounds. I mean, he bled at some point. He was obviously tortured. But the blood we’re looking at here is a larger volume than anything—”

Amanda interrupted, “So, we’ve got someone out there with a stab wound whose blood type is B-negative. Is that rare?”

“Less than two percent of the U.S. Caucasian population is B-negative,” Charlie told them. “It’s a quarter of that for Asians, and around one percent for Hispanics. Bottom line, it’s a very rare blood type, which makes it probable that our dead B-negative Ricardo is genetically related to our missing and wounded B-negative.”

“So, we’ve got a wounded man out there, blood type B-negative.”

Charlie was ahead of her for once. “I already put a be-on-the-lookout at all hospitals within a hundred miles for a stab wound of any kind—male, female, white, black, orange. We’ve already had three rule-outs from domestics just in the last half hour. More people get stabbed than I’d realized.”

Mittal made sure Charlie was finished, then pointed to the blood smeared across the floor. “These shoe prints are conducive to a struggle between a small woman and a medium-sized man, probably around seventy kilos. We can tell from the variation of light to dark in the print that there is a medial roll to the foot, or supination.”

Amanda stopped the lesson. “Take me back to the stab wound. Are we talking fatal?”

Mittal shrugged. “The medical examiner’s office would have to give you their opinion. As was stated earlier, there’s no blood spray on the walls or ceiling, from which we can posit that none of the arteries were damaged. This spatter, then, could perhaps be the result of a head wound, where one would find a fair amount of blood with minimal damage.” He looked at Charlie. “Do you concur?”

Charlie nodded, but added, “A gut wound might bleed like this. I’m not sure how long you could last with that. If you trust the movies, not long. If a lung was punctured, then he’d have an hour, tops, before he suffocated. There’s absolutely no arterial spray, so it’s a seeping wound. I don’t disagree with Dr. Mittal about the possibility of a head wound.…” He shrugged, then disagreed anyway. “The blade was coated tip to hilt, which might indicate that the knife plunged into the body.” He saw the frown on Mittal’s face and backpedaled. “Then again, it could be that the victim grabbed the knife, which cut his hand and coated the blade through transfer.” He showed his hand, palm up. “In which case we’d have a B-negative out there with a wounded hand as well.”

Amanda had never embraced the equivocations of crime scene science. She tried to sum it up in absolutes. “So, bad guy B-negative struggles with Evelyn. Then I suppose we bring in the second man, the Asian in the Hawaiian shirt, who later ended up dead in the bedroom. They managed to subdue Evelyn and take away her gun. And then there’s a third man, Ricardo, who was a hostage at one point, and then became a shooter, and then, thanks to Agent Mitchell’s quick action, became dead before he could injure anyone.” She turned to Will. “My money is on Ricardo being hooked up in all of this, torture or not. He pretended to be a hostage to try to leverage Faith.”