The Neighbor - Lisa Gardner [11]
D.D. sighed again, grabbed the handrail, and headed up the chocolate-painted stairs.
Upstairs was as cozy as the downstairs. D.D. had to fight the urge to duck, as a pair of old light fixtures brushed the top of her hair. The hallway boasted hardwood floors, colored the same dark chocolate as the stairs. Over the years, dust had become trapped in the tight corners of the floorboards, with a couple tumbleweeds of fine hair and dander drifting across her footsteps. Pet, D.D. guessed, though no one had mentioned one yet.
She paused long enough to look back the way she came, a parade of footsteps mixing and mingling in an indistinct blur against the dusty floor. Good thing the floor had already been processed, she thought. Then frowned, as another thought struck her and made her immediately, acutely concerned.
She almost opened her mouth to say something, then at the last minute thought better of it. Better to wait. Get all the ducks in a row. Quickly.
They passed a cramped bathroom that had been decorated in the same fifties motif as the kitchen. Across from it was a modest bedroom with a single-sized bed covered in a pink comforter, tucked under the heavily slanted eaves of the room. The ceiling and eaves had been painted a bright blue, and dotted with various clouds, birds, and butterflies. Definitely a little girl’s room, and just cute enough that D.D. felt a pang for little Clarissa Jane Jones, who had gone to bed nestled inside such a pretty sanctuary, only to wake up to a nightmarish parade of dark-suited officials traipsing through her home.
D.D. didn’t linger in the bedroom, but continued down the hall, to the master bedroom.
Two evidence techs were in front of the windows. They’d just pulled the shades and were now shooting the room with blue light. D.D. and Miller stayed respectfully in the hallway, as the first white-garbed figure scanned the walls, ceiling, and floor for signs of bodily fluids. As spots emerged, the second figure marked them with a placard, for further analysis. The process took about ten minutes. They didn’t do the bed. No doubt the sheets and blankets had already been rolled up to be processed at the lab.
The first figure snapped up the blinds, turned on the surviving bedside lamp, then greeted D.D. with a cheery, “Hiya, Sergeant.”
“How goes the battle, Marge?”
“Winning as always.”
D.D. stepped forward to shake Marge’s hand, then the hand of the second evidence tech, Nick Crawford. They all went way back, spending too much time at these kinds of scenes.
“What do you think?” D.D. asked them.
Marge shrugged. “Some hits. We’ll test them, of course, but nothing glaring. I mean, every bedroom in the United States has bodily fluids somewhere.”
D.D. nodded. When processing a room for bodily fluids there were two red flags: one, an obvious display such as spatter lighting up across a wall or a giant puddle illuminating the floor; two, the total lack of bodily fluids, which indicated someone had used chemicals for one helluva cleanup job. Like Marge said, every bedroom had something.
“What about the broken lamp?” D.D. asked.
“We recovered it from the floor,” Nick spoke up, “with all the shards in the immediate vicinity. At first glance, the lamp toppled and shattered against the floor, versus being used as a weapon. Visual inspection, at least, didn’t reveal any sign of blood on the lamp’s base.”
D.D. nodded. “Bedding?”
“Blue-and-green top quilt is missing, but the rest of the bedding appears intact.”
“You process the bathroom?” D.D. asked.
“Yep.”
“Toothbrushes?”
“Two were still damp when we got here. One a pink Barbie electric toothbrush