Red Dragon - Thomas Harris [5]
Leeds rose with his cut throat and tried to protect the children, losing great gouts of blood and an unmistakable arterial spray as he tried to fight. He was shoved away, fell and died with his daughter in her room.
One of the two boys was shot in bed. The other boy was also found in bed, but he had dust balls in his hair. Police believed he was dragged out from under his bed to be shot.
When all of them were dead, except possibly Mrs. Leeds, the smashing of mirrors began, the selection of shards, the further atten?tion to Mrs. Leeds.
Graham had full copies of all the autopsy protocols in his box. Here was the one on Mrs. Leeds. The bullet entered to the right of her navel and lodged ii] her lumbar spine, but she died of strangu?lation.
The increase in serotonin and free histamine levels in the gunshot wound indicated she had lived at least five minutes after she was shot. The histamine was much higher than the serotonin, so she had not lived more than fifteen minutes. Most of her other injuries were probably, but not conclusively, postmortem.
If the other injuries were postmortem, what was the killer doing in the interval while Mrs. Leeds waited to die? Graham wondered. Struggling with Leeds and killing the others, yes, but that would have taken less than a minute. Smashing the mirrors. But what else?
The Atlanta detectives were thorough. They had measured and photographed exhaustively, had vacuumed and gridsearched and taken the traps from the drains. Still, Graham looked for himself.
From the police photographs and taped outlines on the mattresses, Graham could see where the bodies had been found. The evidence - nitrate traces on bedclothes in the case of the gunshot wounds - in?dicated that they were found in positions approximating those in which they died.
But the profusion of bloodstains and matted sliding marks on the hall carpet remained unexplained. One detective had theorized that some of the victims tried to crawl away from the killer. Graham did not believe it - clearly the killer moved them after they were dead and then put them back the way they were when he killed them.
What he did with Mrs. Leeds was obvious. But what about the others? He had not disfigured them further, as he did Mrs. Leeds. The children each suffered a single gunshot wound in the head. Charles Leeds bled to death, with aspirated blood contributing. The only additional mark on him was a superficial ligature mark around his chest, believed to be postmortem. What did the killer do with them after they were dead?
From his box Graham took the police photographs, lab reports on the individual blood and organic stains in the room and standard comparison plates of blooddrop trajectories.
He went over the upstairs rooms minutely, trying to match injuries to stains, trying to work backward. He plotted each splash on a measured field sketch of the master bedroom, using the standard comparison plates to estimate the direction and velocity of the bloodfall. In this way he hoped to learn the positions the bodies were in at different times.
Here was a row of three bloodstains slanting up and around a corner of the bedroom wall. Here were three faint stains on the carpet beneath them. The wall above the headboard on Charles Leeds's side of the bed was bloodstained, and there were swipes along the baseboards. Graham's field sketch began to look like a jointhe-'lots puzzle with no numbers. He stared at it, looked up at the room and back to the sketch until his head ached.
He went into the bathroom and took his last two Bufferin, scooping up water in his hand from the faucet in the sink. He splashed water on his face and dried it with his shirttail. Water spilled on the floor. He had forgotten that the trap was gone from the drain. Otherwise the bathroom was undisturbed, except for the broken