Trail of Dead (Scarlett Bernard #2)(4)
When Jubilee’s door had closed, Jesse opened the door in front of us and flicked on a light switch. “Go ahead,” he said, tilting his head. “I want to hear your impressions.”
I should have been angry that he’d dragged me out here only to give me the silent treatment, but he was beginning to really freak me out. I straightened up and stepped forward, looking around the small bedroom. I saw the enormous bloodstain on the carpet right away, and glanced back at Jesse. His arms were folded in front of him, face expressionless. No help there. I squatted down for a closer look. The stain ran almost the length of the room, maybe five or six feet. It had to be at least a few hours old—I figured Jesse’s crime scene guys had come and gone already—but it still looked soaking wet. It was also much longer than it was wide—vaguely person shaped, I guess, but more like a snow angel than a chalk outline. I deal with blood all the time, but usually it’s just little spatters. The vampires, of course, don’t waste much blood, and the werewolves usually start healing before it gets this bad. The only other time I’d seen this much blood in one place was during the massacre in La Brea Park in September. I shuddered. Turning to look at Jesse, I spotted a framed picture on the wall of a young woman, twenty or so, smiling arm in arm with Jubilee. She had light-brown hair, an easy smile, and a hint of something secretive in her eyes. Erin, I presumed.
“Is this…Erin’s blood?”
“We think so. Blood type matches, though it’ll take a while for DNA.”
“Did your experts think…can she still be alive?” I asked, keeping my voice low.
“No. With that much blood loss, unless she’d basically been at the hospital…she’s dead.”
I sidestepped the pool and continued around the room. The girl who lived here was a student, judging from the textbooks that were stacked on the small bookshelf above the computer table and the backpack tossed against the wall just inside the doorway. All of her belongings also had this look like they’d been purchased separately over time. The curtain and bedspread were a matching purple-and-green pattern, but the desk and desk drawer were a different green that didn’t quite match. The desk lamp was from a completely different style…genre, I guess. I’d seen the same thing when my brother Jack was in college; it happens when you move a lot.
I turned in a circle, and finally figured out what was bothering me. The entire room was fairly neat, especially by my own low standards, but the half with the desk and the bed was slightly tousled. Books were stacked haphazardly on the shelf instead of lined up, and the pillow and covers were thrown across the bed, like someone had shaken them out without smoothing them down. In a hurry. That could have just been Erin’s style, except that the opposite half of the room was pristine.
And the window…Erin’s window was standing open, and had no screen or bars. When I stepped closer I realized why—the whole apartment building was like a big hollow box, with a little courtyard in the middle, containing a few picnic tables and a small spa pool. This window faced inward, with a straight thirty-foot drop to the courtyard below. Cool air drifted into the room, and I shivered in my wool peacoat, which had seemed too warm only a few minutes ago.
“We found the window screen floating in the spa,” Jesse’s voice said behind me. Reading my mind. I pulled my head in and turned around.
“Did your guys find anything else?”
He gave me a little not much shrug. “There was some gray dirt on the floor. The roommate says they were both pretty careful about tracking mud in, so we’ll try to match it to a pair of her shoes to see if it’s related.”
I went back to the bloodstain and crouched down, automatically tucking the bottom of my jacket against my body so it wouldn’t drift into the blood. There was just something wrong with the bloodstain, and in spite of the hour and the travel and the cryptic detective beside me, I was getting interested. I ran through a grisly list of injuries in my head, things I’d seen or heard about: gunshot, stabbing, decapitation, dismemberment, throat cutting. Nothing seemed to fit. If Erin had died from straightforward blood loss—a stab wound, for example—there would be a smeared end where the body had lain, and then the rest of the stain would be circular, if the floor was even, or all misshapen and wispy on carpeting like Erin’s. If she’d died from a cut artery, there would be blood spray everywhere. This wasn’t right. I looked up at Jesse. “It’s too…neat.”
He nodded, and his voice had an edge. “Techs said the blood is nearly the same depth over the whole stain.”
Huh. “What causes that?”
“My crime-scene people had one theory, but only in a half-joking kind of way, because it was so out there.”
I froze.
“They said it looked like she’d been crushed. Slowly.” He gave me a pointed look, and I finally understood why I was here. It wasn’t for my expert opinion. It was an accusation.
The crime scene had been cleaned. Professionally.
Chapter 2
“I don’t know anything about it, Jesse. I just got off a plane, remember?” As I said it, I was really wishing that I’d gotten a chance to check my messages before Jesse had grabbed me in baggage claim. Eli, my apprentice/former sex buddy, had been in charge of the cleanup business while I was in New York. He would definitely have called about a complete body; those were rare. Jesse didn’t know that Eli was the one covering for me, though, and since what we do is technically illegal, I wasn’t about to tell him.