The door to Number Nine was damaged but intact. Instinctively standing to one side, I turned the knob and pushed. Aside from the squealing hinges, there was nothing but silence from within.
Like a distant breeze, Ron nervously whispered, “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”
I looked around the corner and shined my light into the room. As far as I could see, there was no one to come out. I crossed the threshold, motioning the others to fan out behind me.
We stood three abreast, lighting the room like a battery of search lamps. The walls were smeared, discolored, and riddled with fist-sized holes, the ceiling stained and sagging, the rug only visible in odd patches over mildewed cement flooring. The sink in the alcove near the bathroom was shattered and hanging by one bolt. All that was left of the two mirrors was a single, lightning-shaped shard leaning against a dresser with no legs. And yet, the room had been maintained, however minimally. The bed had a bare mattress, the center of the floor had been cleared with a broom, still standing in one corner, and several candles were clustered on a chair passing for a bedside table.
“Check the bathroom,” I told Ron.
He carefully moved across the room and stuck his head through the door beyond the broken sink. “Clear.”
Tyler approached the bed. “Looks like a bullet hole in the mattress.”
“Any blood?”
He was already crouched down, opening one of his cases with a penlight held in his teeth. “Too dirty to tell in this light.”
“We could tear the plywood from the windows,” Ron suggested.
“No,” J.P. said enigmatically. “The darker the better for the moment.” From an insulated carrying case, he extracted a spray bottle much like a mister used on plants and poised it over the mattress. “Give me a little more light.”
We did as he asked and watched as he lightly dampened the entire surface of the bed.
“Okay. Kill the lights.”
It was like seeing a ghost take shape in the coal-black darkness. Glowing from the mattress’s fabric in an amber luminescence was the clearly identifiable pattern of a stain. “Jesus,” Ron said softly.
“Luminol mixed with sodium perborate and sodium carbonate,” J.P. explained. “Reacts with blood.” He quickly checked under the bed with his light. “From the angle connecting the hole in the mattress to the one in the floor, I’d say the shot came from there.” He pointed to where Ron was standing in front of the dresser, closer to the bathroom than to the front door.
He stepped back, spraying the luminol on the floor heading toward the door. At the entrance, he had us kill the lights again. We could clearly see glowing drops, their pattern indicating the direction of flight.
“Looks like he ran for it after he was shot,” J.P. said.
Ron played his flashlight across the floor. “Why can’t we see any of it?”
“It was absorbed in the filth. It’s still there, though. The lab’ll be able to analyze it once we collect it.” He glanced out to the hallway. “But let’s find out what happened first.”
We worked our way slowly down the closed-in passageway, away from the office, J.P. spraying, and Ron and I alternately turning our flashlights on and off. Section by section, we followed the grisly testament of pain and suffering until we reached the room at the dead end. Its door was missing and its contents a shambles, but there was another mattress tossed on top of all the debris, crumpled against the far corner facing the entrance. Inexorably, J.P. led us straight to it. Removing the mattress, we could see there was no further need for fancy chemicals. A huge, dry, black, clotted mass of blood covered the trash on the floor like an obscene doily.
“I guess I can’t complain about a lack of evidence,” J.P. said sadly. Positioning himself so as not to disturb anything, he leaned far over the coagulated mess and peered at a spot low on the wall, grunting softly as he discovered what he was after. “Second bullet hole. With any luck, one of ’em will yield something we can put under a microscope.”
For several hours, we stayed in that funereal location, picking through the chaos, collecting odds and ends, photographing everything. J.P. insisted on time-lapse photography to document the luminol, capturing on film the ghost of the victim’s useless flight for safety.
Although I only had Marie Williams’s word for it, I visualized Jasper Morgan in that role-all of twenty years old, leaving behind not a body, but only the putrid fluids he’d once contained. It was as pathetic a monument as I could imagine.
The plywood having at last been removed from the windows and doors for easier access and visibility, I finally left the motel through its lobby entrance and sat in the sun with my back against the disintegrating cement wall. Gail found me there ten minutes later.
“Don’t tell me you were just in the neighborhood,” I said with a smile, as she kissed me and settled down next to me.
“Hi to you, too,” she answered. “Actually, my spies told me you’d finally come up for air. I can still smell that place on you.”
I glanced down at my pants, dusty and streaked with God-knows what. “Sorry.”
“Did you find Jasper?”
I ran my fingers through my hair and sighed. “The lab’ll tell us for sure. Whoever it was, we’re pretty sure of the weapon. J.P. keeps a reference binder in his evidence kit. He had an enlargement of Lavoie’s test-fired bullet. We have one made of every officer’s gun. He used a field microscope to compare what we dug out of the wall to Lavoie’s and he’s pretty sure it’s a match.”
“Which tells you what?”
“Nothing specific. We figure he was shot in bed-wounded-and ran to escape in the wrong direction. He was finished off in a far room and his body removed.”
“He couldn’t still be alive somewhere?”
“J.P. says not according to the amount of blood he left behind.”
She didn’t respond, no doubt taken by the same mood that was clinging to me.
“The angle of the first shot and the fact Morgan was on the bed are suggestive, though,” I added. “We entered this building the only way available and made a hell of a noise doing it, so whoever shot him was probably expected. Also, J.P. guesses the shooter was sitting on the edge of a busted dresser facing the foot of the bed. Not the standard pose of someone doing a hit-and-run.”
“But no footprints or fingerprints or anything else?”
I shook my head. “We found the cartridges from the gun, but they probably have Pierre’s prints on them, if that. Maybe Tyler’ll find something once he sorts it all out, but I’m not counting on it. The best we can do is link the DNA in the blood to Morgan’s parents and positively ID him as the victim.”
I sighed and stared out at the passing traffic. Gail took my hand in hers. “It’s not getting any better, is it?”
“No,” I admitted, thinking of my own tangled motives in becoming involved with the case. “And I think it’s just beginning.”
That short, ambivalent conversation with Gail, coupled with the phone call I’d had with Greg Davis earlier, stimulated a small change of plans from what I’d told Jonathon and Kathleen. Leaving Ron Klesczewski and Tyler to wrap things up at the motel, I drove to Westminster, south of Bellows Falls, and knocked on Brian Padget’s door.
As sorry as they were, it wasn’t the fates of Jasper Morgan, Jan Bouch, Marie Williams, or the hundreds that had preceded them that tugged at me like weights around a swimmer’s ankles. It was more general in scope than that. I was concerned with my own kind, too-Latour and Emily Doyle and Brian Padget and their ilk. The first because, after all these years, he’d run out of self-reliance and hope, the latter two because despite their best intentions, they were being blindsided by an increasingly cynical world, and by a support system lagging behind on its implied promises. A law enforcement career hinted at something exclusive to people who weren’t used to such offers. To a high school graduate with a dubious future, it suggested a secure and supportive enough family to withstand the buffeting of a baffling world. The tradeoff for low pay, social isolation, and the constant exposure to humanity’s dregs was supposed to be a sense of loyalty, faith, and security.