“Now we’re cookin’,” he said. “Bray didn’t smoke. Looks like she had company last night.”
“When did the nine-one-one call come in?”
“Nine-oh-four. About an hour and a half ago. And it don’t look to me like she was up making coffee, reading the paper or anything else this morning.”
“I’m pretty sure she was already dead by this morning,” Butterfield offered.
We moved on, following a carpeted hallway to the master bedroom in the back of the house. When we reached the open doorway, both of us stopped. Violence seemed to absorb all light and air. Its silence was complete, its stains and destruction everywhere.
“Holy shit,” Marino said under his breath.
Whitewashed walls, floor, ceiling, overstuffed chairs, chaise longue were spattered so completely with blood it almost seemed part of a decorator’s plan. But these droplets, smears and streaks weren’t dye or paint; they were fragments from a terrible explosion caused by a psychopathic human bomb. Dried speckles and drips sullied antique mirrors, and the floor was thick with coagulated puddles and splashes. The king-size bed was soaked with blood and oddly stripped of its linens.
Diane Bray had been beaten so severely I couldn’t have told her race. She was on her back, green satin blouse and black underwire bra on the floor. I picked them up. They had been ripped from her body. Every inch of skin was dried wipes and smears and swirls reminding me of fingerpainting again, her face a mush of splintered bone and battered tissue. On her left wrist was a smashed gold watch. On her right ring finger, a gold band was beaten into the bone.
For a long time we stared. She was naked from the waist up. Her black corduroy pants and belt didn’t seem to have been touched. The soles of her feet and her palms were chewed up, and this time Loup-Garou hadn’t bothered eradicating his bite marks. They were circles of widely spaced, narrow teeth that didn’t look human. He had bitten and sucked and beaten, and-Bray’s complete degradation, her mutilation, especially of her face, instantly screamed rage. It cried out that she might have known her killer, just as Loup-Garou’s other victims had.
Only, he didn’t know them. Before he showed up at the door, he and his victims had never met except in his hellish fantasies.
“What’s wrong` with Anderson?” Marino was asking Butterfield.
“She heard about it and freaked.”
“That’s kinda interesting. That mean we don’t got a detective here?”
“Marino, let me see your flashlight, please,” I said.
I shone the light all around. Blood was spattered on the headboard and a bedside lamp, caused when the impact of blows or slashes projected small droplets away from the weapon. There were low-velocity stains as well, blood that had dripped to the carpet. I got down and probed the bloody hardwood floor next to the bed, and I found more pale long hairs. They were on Bray’s body, too:
“The word we got was to secure the scene and wait for a supervisor,” one of the cops was saying.
“What supervisor?” Marino asked.
I shone light obliquely on bloody footprints close to the bed. They had a distinctive tread and I looked up at the officers in the room.
“Uh, I think the chief himself. I think he wants to assess the situation before anything’s done,” Butterfield was talking to Marino.
“Well, that’s tough shit,” Marino said. “And he shows up., he can stand out in the rain.”
“How many people have been inside this room?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” one of the officers answered.
“If you don’t know, then it’s too many,” I replied. “Did either of you touch the body? How close did you get to it?”
“I didn’t touch her.”
“No, ma’am.”
“Whose footprints are these?” I pointed them out. “I need to know, because if they aren’t yours, then the killer hung around long enough for the blood to dry.”
Marino looked at the officers’ feet. Both men were wearing black crosstrainers. Marino squatted and looked at the faint tread pattern on the hardwood floor.
“Could it be Vibram?” he sarcastically said.
“I need to get started,” I said, getting swabs and a chemical thermometer out of my case.