Page 52 of Snow Creek

“Not that it will do much good,” she says, indicating the barn, the workshop and the two deputies. “I brought a couple of clean suits.”

She looks at the sheriff.

“Sorry,” she says, “I don’t have one that’ll fit you.”

He pats his belly. “Now my size is interfering with my work. My wife’s going to kill me.”

“I hope she doesn’t,” Mindy says. “You’d have to get a new criminalist because there’s no way that I would ever want to process your scene. Especially if she shoots you in the shower.”

He scratches his head and makes a face. “Yeah, she’s a neat freak. She’d probably do something like that.”

The deputies have already taped the windows with black plastic in anticipation of the Luminol test. I thank them and tell them to search the property while Mindy and I get dressed for the hut.

Once inside, she opens her kit and double-checks its contents. “Luminol is not a failsafe detector of the presence of blood, Megan. If a killer attempts to conceal his or her crime by using bleach to clean up blood, it can give an erroneous read. In some cases, Luminol can destroy DNA.”

She’s told me all of this before. I think of it as her way to move the gerbera daisies and fern fronds from her consciousness. Mindy hasn’t worked a case in quite some time. “Hammer was recovered here,” I say pointing, then turning. “And over here, see that rectangular space on the floor?”

She nods.

“Mrs. Wheaton was found rolled up in carpet. Looks like that space had something covering it.”

“All right,” Mindy says. “I’ll spray here around the workbench. We’ll see what we get and then move over to the section where you think the carpet was. I’ll spray. You’ll shut the door. I’ll photograph whatever turns up. Remember, we’ll only have twenty or thirty seconds.”

Mindy motions for me to stand back and she starts spraying the area where the hammer was found. She’s not a tall woman with long arms, but somehow, she manages to sweep in very large, even movements, depositing the misty chemical that reacts to iron in blood.

“This being a working space,” she says, “we might get a lot of false positives.”

“Metals?” I ask.

“Who knows what they did in here.”

She looks at me, picks up her camera and I shut the door.

Blue glows in the shape of an arc, revealing a couple of smears and some spatter freckles: errant castoff from what I’m sure is the hammer, on the lower half of the workbench.

The camera’s digital and set on a slow speed. Even so, Mindy’s emits the clicking sound of an SLR.

“I’d say you found your crime scene,” she says.

I drop markers in the areas that reacted with the Luminol and we move to the space on the floor.

I turn on my flashlight app and direct its soft beam to the floor. Mindy starts spraying, so evenly, so precisely that I wonder if she should have become an airbrush artist instead of a florist. There is no overlap. No place where her spray isn’t anything but perfect. I turn off my phone’s flashlight.

Right away a pale blue line appears on the edge of the rectangle closest to the front of the hut.

“Good eye, Megan,” she says as she photographs the space.

I set a marker.

“I’ll collect samples,” she goes on.

“I’ll tell Sheriff.”

I find him standing outside with Bernie.

We don’t need to speak. He can read my face.

“Oh shit,” he says.

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