Page 31 of Only Girl Alive

“I’d slide,” said Collin. “No visible spatters on this side of the bed, just blood that came from his throat. It could cover drops from the knife but there isn’t a trail.” He walked to the opposite side where Marcella’s body had been and squatted down to look closely at the carpet. “There are some here.” Collin stood. “The direction of the spatter shows the killer didn’t walk around. He got off the bed on Marcella’s side and walked to the foot then straight out the door. Slide over,” he said when no one argued.

Ray moved and repeated his gruesome movement with the knife once he was in place.

He waited a minute and climbed off the bed holding his fist upward.

“He would have carried it low, at his side,” said Collin. “The directional spatter is minuscule, which means the knife was closer to the carpet. He had to have carried it with his hand down at his side or the spatters would have shown they came from a greater distance. I noticed the same thing in the hallway.”

Ray lowered his hand and they followed him outside the bedroom door.

“Tracy’s room next,” Ray said, and they followed.

He entered the room and crawled onto the bed. He repeated what happened in the master bedroom. They trailed him to Elijah’s room. There were still bloodstains on the wall behind where the boy’s head would have been.

“The cut to his throat wasn’t clean like the others,” Clyde said. The autopsy evidence matched the crime scene.

Elijah being killed last meant the suspect’s clothes were already covered in blood. When the return came in on the DNA from the bed of each victim, it would most likely show a combination and would pinpoint the order of the murders precisely. The house would be released by then but they could walk through it in their minds using Eve’s photos if the scenario changed at all. Hopefully they would have a suspect in custody but they still had to have an airtight case for trial.

Ray got on the bed, his back to the wall.

“He started fighting, which caused the blood behind the pillow,” Collin said. “The killer would have moved with Elijah to keep the knife at his throat to try and finish the job.”

“Did he wrestle his assailant to the floor or did the person get off the bed and watch him bleed out?” Eve asked.

“Could have gone either way but we don’t have footprints with blood on them, which is strange. Nothing close to the other two beds, either.”

They thought about it for several minutes.

“Could he have been pushed off the bed?” asked Collin.

“More likely fallen,” said Clyde.

They examined the images and moved to the bathroom next.

Bina stood looking in the bathroom. “The killer brought clothing. It’s the only explanation.”

No one could disagree.

“Any other scenarios?” asked Eve, moving beside Bina, each with a shoulder touching the doorframe.

“The blood trail is all we have to go on and how we just walked the scene is the most likely scenario,” Collin said, looking at the spots in the hallway again.

“Let’s go back down to the table and lay out the photos in order,” Eve told them now that they had an outline of the homicides in their heads.

She started laying them out from the left end of the table, then began again below the first picture to make a second row. Her team spread around the table, pulling in their chairs so they could get a closer look.

A few seconds after Eve laid down the last photo, Bina turned to the front door.

“Did you hear that? A woman’s voice?”

Bina was up and moving before they understood what they were hearing. She threw the door open. A police officer, inside the inner crime scene tape, had his arms wrapped around a woman in a yellow dress. He was trying to carry her out of the small gap left between the wall and the van. Her feet and arms flailed and she yelled out again.

“Let her go,” Bina demanded, and ran toward them.

The officer ignored her and didn’t release the woman. Clyde grabbed the uniformed arm. The media was looking through the same small gap and Eve wasn’t sure how much they could see.

“Stand down,” Clyde told the officer.

The woman wrenched herself away and the officer’s attention turned to Clyde, his hand going to his gun. “This does not concern you,” he sneered. “She needs her husband.”

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