“We need to go around the house and close all blinds, shades, and curtains,” Vander said. “If any light is still coming through, then tear off a section of this paper” he pointed to a roll of heavy brown paper on the floor “and tape it over the window.”
– For the next fifteen minutes, the house was filled with the sounds of footsteps, venetian blinds rattling, and scissors slicing through paper. Occasionally somebody swore loudly when the paper had been cut too short or the tape stuck to nothing but itself. I stayed in the living room and covered the glass in the front door and in the two windows facing the street. When the three of us reconvened and turned out the lights, the house was pitch-black. I could not even see my hand in front of my face.
“Perfect,” Vander said as the overhead light went back on.
Putting on gloves, he set bottles of distilled water, chemicals, and two plastic spray bottles on the coffee table. “Here’s the way we’re going to work this,” he said. “Dr. Scarpetta, you can spray while I videotape, and if an area reacts, just keep spraying it until I tell you to move on.”
“What do you want me to do?” Wesley asked.
“Keep out of the way.”
“What’s in this stuff?” he asked as Vander unscrewed the caps from bottles of dry chemicals.
“You don’t really want to know,” I replied.
“I’m a big boy. You can tell me.”
“The reagent’s a mixture of sodium perborate, which Neils is mixing with distilled water, and three-aminophthalhydrazide and sodium carbonate,” I said, getting a packet of gloves out of my pocketbook.
“And you’re certain it will work on blood this old?” Wesley asked.
“Actually, aged and decomposed blood reacts better with luminol than do fresh bloodstains because the more oxidized the blood, the better. As blood ages, it becomes more strongly oxidized.”
“I don’t think any of the wood in here is salt treated, do you?” Vander looked around.
“I shouldn’t think so.”
I explained to Wesley, “The biggest problem with luminol is false positives. A number of things react with it, such as copper and nickel, and the copper salts in salt-treated wood.”
“It also likes rust, household bleach, iodine, and formalin,” Vander added. “Plus, the peroxidases found in bananas, watermelon, citrus fruit, a number of vegetables. Also horseradish.”
Wesley looked at me with a smile.
Vander opened an envelope and removed two squares of filter paper that were stained with dried, diluted blood. Then he added mixture A to B and told Wesley to hit the lights. A couple of quick sprays, and a bluish white neon glow appeared on the coffee table. It began to fade almost as quickly as it had appeared.
“Here,” Vander said to me.
I felt the spray bottle touch my arm, and took hold of it. A tiny red light went on as Vander depressed the power button on the video camera; then the night vision lamp burned white and looked wherever he did like a luminescent eye.
“Where are you?”
Vander’s voice sounded to my left.
“I’m in the center of the room. I can feel the edge of the coffee table against my leg,” I said, as if we were children playing in the dark.
“I’m way the hell out of the way.”
Wesley’s voice carried from the direction of the dining room.
Vander’s white light slowly moved toward me. I reached out and touched his shoulder. “Ready?”
“I’m recording. Start and just keep going until I tell you to stop.”
I began spraying the floor around us, my finger non-stop on the trigger as a mist floated over me and shapes and geometrical configurations materialized around my feet. For an instant, it was like speeding through the dark over the illuminated grid of a city far below. Old blood trapped in the crevices of the parquet emitted a bluewhite glow. I sprayed and sprayed, without having any real sense of where I was in relation to anything else, and saw footprints all over the room. I bumped against the ficus tree and dim white streaks appeared on the planter that held it. To my right smeared handprints flashed on the wall.