Wesley looked at his watch. “We’ve been here three and a half hours. “
“Here’s what I suggest we do,” I said. “Benton, you and I can begin restoring the rooms to their normal state of chaos, and Neils, we’ll leave you to do what you need to do. “
“Fine. I’ll get the Luma-Lite set up in here, and keep your fingers crossed that it can enhance the ridge detail.”
We returned to the living room. While Vander carried the portable Luma-Lite and camera equipment back to the bath, Wesley and I looked around at the couch, the old TV, and the dusty, scarred floor, both of us somewhat dazed. With the lights on there was not so much as the slightest trace of the horror we had seen in the dark. On this sunny winter’s afternoon, we had crawled back in time and witnessed what Ronnie Joe Waddell had done.
Wesley stood very still near the paper-covered window. “I’m afraid to sit anywhere or lean up against anything. Christ. There’s blood all over this goddam house.”
As I looked around, I pictured fading white in the blackness, my eyes traveling slowly from the couch, across the floor, and stopping at the TV. The couch’s cushions were still on the floor where I had left them, and I squatted to take a closer look. The blood that had seeped into the brown stitching was not visible now, nor were the streaks and smears on the brown leather backrest. But a careful examination revealed something that was important but not necessarily surprising. On the side of one of the seat cushions that had been flush against the backrest I found a linear cut that was, at most, three-quarters of an inch long.
“Benton, was Waddell left-handed, by chance?”
“It seems to me he was.”
“They thought he stabbed and beat her on the floor near the TV because there was so much blood around her body,” I said, “but he didn’t. He killed her on the couch. I think I need to go outside. If this place weren’t such a sewer, I’d be tempted to pinch one of the professor’s cigarettes.”
“You’ve been good for too long,” Wesley said. “An unfiltered Camel would land you on your ass. Go on and get some fresh air. I’ll start cleaning up.”
I left the house to the sound of paper being ripped down from the windows.
That night began the most peculiar New Year’s Eve in memory for Benton Wesley, Lucy, and me. I wouldn’t go so far as to say the holiday was all that odd for Neils Vander. I had talked to him at seven P.m., and he was still in his lab, but that was fairly normal for a man whose raison d’etre would cease to exist were the fingerprints of two individuals ever found to be the same.
Vander had edited the scene videocassette tapes to a VCR and turned copies over to me late that afternoon. For the better part of the early evening, Wesley and I had been stationed in front of my television, taking notes and making diagrams as we slowly went through the footage. Lucy, meanwhile, was working on dinner, and came into the living room only briefly from time to time to catch a glimpse. The luminescent images on the dark screen did not seem to disturb her. At a glance, the uninitiated could not possibly know what they meant.
By eight-thirty, Wesley and I had gone through the tapes and completed our notes. We believed we had charted the course of Robyn Naismith’s killer from the moment she walked into her house to Waddell’s exit through the kitchen door. It was the first time in my career I had retrospectively worked the scene of a homicide that had been solved for years. But the scenario that emerged was important for one very good reason. It demonstrated, at least to our satisfaction, that what Wesley had told me at the Homestead was correct. Ronnie Joe Waddell did not fit the profile of the monster we were now tracking.
The latent smudges, smears, spatters, and spurts that we had followed were as dose to an instant replay as I had ever seen in the reconstruction of a crime. Though the courts might consider much of what we determined was opinion, it did not matter. Waddell’s personality did, and we felt pretty certain that we had captured it.