“It will only take a moment.” O’Donnell walked over to the vending machine across the hall. She swiped her card and bought a Coke for herself. She pulled the tab, the satisfying hiss already promising sugary goodness. She took a long swig that helped settle her nausea and headache. Then she turned to Zoe and Tatum, who were looking at her, bemused. “What’s your poison? I need some sugar after an autopsy.”
They both asked for Cokes as well. For a few seconds, the three of them sipped silently from the cans outside the morgue. This was great advertising material. “Coca-Cola, a fresh taste after seeing a brain being scooped out of a skull.”
Maybe it needed a copywriter for a better catchphrase.
Her phone rang. It was Kyle.
“Yeah.” She answered the phone in a tone meant to clarify to her husband that now was not the time to talk.
“Mommy?”
O’Donnell immediately softened. “Hey, baby,” she said. “I can’t really talk right now. Is everything okay?”
“No.” Nellie sounded close to tears. “It’s an emergency.”
Nellie was five years old, but she already knew what an emergency was. Because she was only allowed to call her mother in case of an emergency. So an emergency meant any situation that warranted calling Mom.
O’Donnell sighed. “What is it, baby?”
“Daddy can’t find my purple pants. And I need those pants for Anna’s tea party, I told you I need them, and you said that you will wash them and that I could wear them, so Daddy said I have to wear my black pants, but I can’t.”
In the background, Kyle, her husband, shouted, “Nellie, don’t bother Mommy—those are perfectly good pants. Come here. Nellie, don’t . . .” His voice suddenly disappeared.
“Nellie?” O’Donnell said. “Are you there?”
“Yes. I locked myself in the bathroom.”
O’Donnell sighed. “Tell Daddy they’re on the laundry couch.” The laundry couch was just a regular couch in the living room, but since it was constantly covered in laundry, no one actually sat on it, ever.
“Daddy already looked on the laundry couch. He made a mess.” Nellie sounded pleased at the opportunity to snitch on her dad.
“It’s in the third pile from the left, under the white shirts.”
“Daddy!” Nellie screeched, presumably through the locked bathroom door. “The purple pants are on the laundry couch under the white shirts in the third pile.”
Even though it wasn’t perfect timing, O’Donnell still felt a strange joy at hearing Nellie say purple. She always said it a bit slow, as if struggling to get the syllables right. It was the sweetest thing.
“I already searched there.” Kyle’s voice was muffled and frustrated.
“Look again!” Nellie screamed.
O’Donnell glanced at Tatum and Zoe. “One more second,” she told them.
“He found it,” Nellie reported. “Thanks, Mommy.”
“Bye, baby. Have fun.”
Nellie hung up, and O’Donnell pocketed her phone.
“I talked to Martinez yesterday,” she told the two feds. “Well, yelled at him, really. He had no place telling you about the murder without talking to me first.”
“We didn’t mean to overstep any boundaries,” Tatum said.
“You didn’t care about overstepping them either,” O’Donnell retorted. “Never mind. Martinez said you’re both a pain in the ass.”
“We have a complicated relationship,” Tatum explained.
“But he also said you two know what you’re doing. And I could really use your opinion on this one. I’ve investigated two sexual homicides before. One was the ex-boyfriend; one was a rape that got out of hand. These are cases I can wrap my head around. But I never had a case where the murderer drank the victim’s blood. Or took the time to put some nice jewelry on her before leaving. Martinez said if you could profile this murder for me—”
“We’re currently on a different case,” Zoe said.
“Your Rod Glover case—you told me. What if it’s the same guy?”
“That’s not likely.”
“Why not?”
“This murder seems to diverge significantly from Glover’s—”
O’Donnell’s phone rang again. “Hold that thought.” She pulled out her phone in annoyance. But it was Larsen, from Forensics. He was the one in charge of Catherine Lamb’s murder scene. She answered the call. “O’Donnell.”
“I’ve got something for you,” Larsen said.
O’Donnell waited. Larsen waited too. He was the kind of guy who wanted you to play second fiddle to his tune. She sighed. “What did you find?”
“We went over the shoe prints that we got from the scene.” Yesterday he’d told her they’d gotten both the left and right shoe prints of the murderer—a size 9. Larsen had told her he could easily match the shoe to the print, if she ever managed to find the shoe. It would be a good thing to have in court. “We took a bunch of them, in the different rooms. So I was filing them today, and one seemed different. It was only a partial print that we got in the bathroom. But it looked like a different shoe. One that definitely didn’t belong to the victim. And since you made sure everyone put their shoe condoms on, it wasn’t ours either.”
“The father entered the scene before us,” O’Donnell pointed out. “Maybe he went to the bathroom.” She could imagine him running to the bathroom to throw up. It wouldn’t be unusual for him not to mention it.
“The father is a size 7.5. The print we got is an 8.5. So we went through everything we had again, and guess what?”
Did she really have to guess? She decided not to. “What?”
“Those bloody finger smudges we found everywhere at the scene? Definitely belong to two different pairs of hands. I sent them over to an expert in fingerprinting, and he verified it. Even though the hands were gloved, there’s a list of characteristics that can identify hands beyond fingerprints, and there were some key differences.”
“So we have two unknown people in the victim’s house after the murder. Both male?”
“Almost definitely male, according to shoe size and hand structure. And that’s not all . . .”
There was that pause again. “What else?” O’Donnell asked.
“I got the idea to look outside more carefully, you know? If two men were at the door, maybe there’d be some indication. We found another footprint that matches the 8.5 shoe outside in the yard. And we have another handprint on the doorframe. Don’t get excited, no fingerprints, but the handprint matches the same characteristics of the second individual.”
“Got it. Anything else?”
“That’s all.”
“Keep me posted,” she said, and knowing he expected it, she added, “Fantastic work, Larsen.” Hanging up, she turned to face the feds.
Zoe had morphed. Instead of the tired, dejected person who had been there before, she was now tense and eager. “There were two men at the scene?” she asked.
“Looks like it,” O’Donnell said carefully.
“That would explain the inconsistencies.” Zoe glanced at Tatum. “If Glover paired up with someone else—”