Gated Prey (Eve Ronin #3)(32)

The ambulance attendants continued out with the gurney and Eve went into the family room. The tiny baby was on the couch, swaddled in the blanket, like he was sleeping, only he was far too still. His skin was grayish blue and the blood and amniotic fluid had been wiped away from his face. There was some blood on a seat cushion and a little more on the hardwood floor.

The blanket around the baby bothered her.

She looked over her shoulder and saw Duncan leaving the bedroom, carrying some women’s clothing. He shook his head to indicate that he didn’t see anything unusual and went outside to the waiting deputy. The firefighters started to clear out, too. One of the paramedics was still by the couch, putting away his equipment. Eve approached him.

“Excuse me. I’m Detective Eve Ronin. Could I talk to you for a minute?”

“Yeah, sure.” He turned and wiped tears from his cheeks. “Sorry. I’m not usually so emotional. Stillbirths are always hard to take but my wife is pregnant and, well, this time it really got to me.”

“Is that why you wrapped the baby in a blanket?”

The paramedic looked over at the baby for a long moment. “I know we’re not supposed to do that, but the mother was a total wreck. I didn’t want her to have to see all that blood, the umbilical cord, and everything. I wanted her last memory of her baby to be . . . peaceful, you know? He looks peaceful now, doesn’t he?”

He did, Eve thought. Ordinarily, at an unattended death, it was wrong to cover the body or to unnecessarily disturb the scene in any way. But she could see that it was an emotionally charged situation and, judging from the paramedic’s reaction, not a crime scene, so preserving evidence wasn’t going to be an issue. Even so, it irritated her.

“Is there anything we need to know? Anything out of the ordinary?”

“No, she did all she possibly could to save her baby. She was still doing CPR and sobbing when we got here. We had to pull her away. I can’t imagine how horrible this must be for her.”

“Can I get your name for my report?”

“Rick Gage.”

“Thank you, Rick.”

He closed up his equipment case and started to leave, the last man out, when he paused for a moment in the entry hall. “I usually tell my wife everything about my day, but I’m not going to tell her about this.”

Rick looked back at Eve, as if seeking her permission. So she nodded. He gave her a half smile of thanks and left her alone with the baby’s body.

Eve had goose bumps, not from the situation, but from the cold air in the room. She thought about waiting outside in the warm sunshine for the attendant from the ME’s office, but instead she went through the motions of documenting the scene by taking photos of the baby, the couch, and everything else in the room.

When she was done, she wandered into the dining room and looked at the stacks of food. It was mostly cookies, sugary cereals, candy, and a wide assortment of pastries, along with some jumbo bags of potato chips. Obviously, Anna McCaig had some strong cravings for junk food during her pregnancy. Eve decided it was a good thing Duncan wasn’t the one who’d been left alone in the house. He might have eaten everything.

The doorway to the kitchen was open, the door removed, and she could see the remodel was nearly done, so she went in to check it out.

There was dust everywhere. The drywall was up, and the cabinets and the stone countertops were installed. A few of the backsplash subway tiles, arranged in a herringbone pattern, were up, and she liked it. She’d also picked subway tiles for her backsplash, but a herringbone design hadn’t occurred to her, nor was it suggested by her contractor, whose expertise was cleaning crime scenes, not interior design. Was it too late to make a change?

The kitchen island, like the one in the sting house, was absolutely enormous, a second kitchen unto itself. There was no room for one like that in Eve’s kitchen and she felt a pang of island envy.

She walked to the french doors at the end of the kitchen, which opened up to a patio with a built-in barbecue grill, a small refrigerator, and a Jacuzzi. The yard overlooked the Volvo dealership on Calabasas Road and the Ventura Freeway. It wasn’t Eve’s idea of a million-dollar view.

Eve left the kitchen through an open doorway to the family room just as the attendant from the medical examiner’s office came in. He was black with salt-and-pepper hair, wearing a white jumpsuit with the office emblem on the chest and holding a clipboard and a small black body bag in his gloved hands.

“It’s colder than the morgue in here,” he said. “Are you the detective in charge?”

“Yes. Eve Ronin. LASD.”

He handed her the clipboard. “I’ve got some paperwork for you to fill out.”

While she did that, he carefully picked up the blanket-swaddled baby, slipped him into the body bag, and zipped it up.

“You don’t remove the blanket?” she asked.

He looked at her like she was the stupidest person on the planet. “I don’t remove anything. That’s all done at the morgue.”

“Right,” Eve said and, trying not to look embarrassed, handed him the completed paperwork. “Just double-checking.”

“Uh-huh.” He tore off the bottom sheet, handed it to her, then picked up the body bag, holding it like a football player on the run with the ball. “I’ve been doing this for fifteen years. How about you?”