Judy enjoyed the growing sensation of solitude; it was the way she felt climbing, where it was only her and the rock. She dug her poles in and kept pushing. By the time she reached Grays Ferry, she felt completely relaxed. Her heart pumped happily and her muscles were warm and limber. It wasn't so wacky, skiing to get somewhere. At least no wackier than this assignment.
Going back to the scene of the crime, almost a year later. It made absolutely no sense. If the Commonwealth had found evidence incriminating Steere, it hadn't come from the murder scene. All the conditions had changed. The carjacking happened in late spring, not winter, and at midnight, not in the daytime. The assignment was absurd. Still, Judy popped out of her skis, left them and her poles by the curb, and walked, suddenly light-footed, to the spot under the Twenty-fifth Street Bridge where the carjacking had occurred.
Grays Ferry, the city's old slaughterhouse district, was a neighborhood marred by abandoned homes, deserted warehouses, and racial strife. The Twenty-fifth Street Bridge, which used to carry an elevated railroad through the neighborhood to points west, now cut a rotting swath to nowhere. The massive concrete pillars that buttressed it had eroded, their rusted reinforcement rods protruding like exposed ribs, and the underside of the bridge had crumbled off in chunks. Icicles spiked from wide, jagged cracks rent in its bed, where its joints had expanded and finally split open. The bridge platform made a long roof over Twenty-fifth Street, but it was low. A grimy sign on a pillar read WARNING— MINIMUM CLEARANCE 13 FEET, 2 INCHES.
Dopey assignment. Judy stood in the street directly under the bridge, where the double center line disappeared under a dusting of snow. Two lanes under the bridge ran in opposite directions, and there was almost no traffic because of the blizzard. The bridge sheltered Judy from the snow, but a bracing wind snapped between the pillars and she felt her eyes tear in the frigid air. The carjacking of their client had taken place in the right lane, westbound. Judy's wet gaze fell on the spot.
The first time she'd visited the crime scene, blood had stained the gritty asphalt in a lethal pool. Judy had never seen a crime scene before and had stared at the blood for a long time, trying to appear professional, which was code for emotionless. The police had taped a cliched outline of the body in the street and had set tiny cards, folded and numbered, next to a bloodstain and a bullet casing, like grisly place cards. Now the bloodstain was covered by snow, as any leftover evidence would be. Boy, was this dopey. Creepy and dopey.
Judy's muscles tightened in the cold and she walked stiffly under the bridge to the cross street where the killing occurred. She couldn't imagine what evidence the D.A. could have on Steere. He might have overreacted, but who could question someone in that position? Judy mentally reconstructed the crime. Steere had been driving home after a fund-raising dinner at the University Museum. The businessman had no date, even though he was Philly's most eligible bachelor. He'd been heading to his town house in Society Hill, but he'd drunk a little too much and took a wrong turn from Penn. It could have happened to anybody; Judy had gotten lost in the University Avenue area herself when she first moved to Philadelphia from Palo Alto.
Judy blinked against the snowflakes that strayed under the bridge. To her left was a round concrete pillar, one of the line bordering both sides of the street. The pillars were thick, about four feet in diameter, easily wide enough for a man to hide behind. That was what had happened to Steere. It was past midnight, and he had stopped at the cross street under the bridge for the traffic light to turn red. Steere had been driving with the car radio cranked up. Judy liked that. It was the only thing she liked about Elliot Steere.
There'd been no other traffic that night and no one on the street. It had been warm and muggy, a preview of a typical Philadelphia summer, so Steere had put the top down on his convertible, a pearl-white Mercedes two-seater. The car was new at the time of the carjacking, and when Judy had inspected it in the police impound lot, its pristine enamel was sullied by a spray of dried blood. Judy had to examine the splatter pattern, standing behind Erect and her blood expert. The expert found the pattern consistent with Steere's account. Erect would have fired him if he hadn't.
Judy imagined Steere at the stoplight in the dead of night, sleepy and slightly buzzed behind the wheel of an expensive convertible. Suddenly, a large man jumps from behind a pillar. Steere thinks about hitting the gas, but the man yanks open the convertible door, sticks a knife at Steere's neck, and demands the Mercedes. Steere gets out of the car in fear, intending to surrender. He takes his gun with him just in case. But the carjacker slashes Steere's cheek, and Steere sees his own blood arc into the air, feels its warm rain on his face. He fights for his life. The gun fires while the two men struggle. The carjacker crumples to his knees and becomes the taped outline.
Judy shuddered as she stared at the white snow sprinkled on the street like so much baby powder and imagined the rich, red blood that was spilled. She even knew its composition: tests showed the carjacker's blood was Type O, and Steere's was AB. It had been Judy's job on the Steere case to maintain the trial exhibits, but nothing in them was helping her now. She squatted and brushed snow away from the spot with her hand, but found herself distracted by the snow's fine texture. Judy had been painting since she broke up with Kurt, who had left some of his art supplies behind. She was enjoying it and thought it made her more observant than she used to be.
Judy straightened and brushed off her knee. Everywhere was whiteness, the only splotch of color the traffic light at the cross street as it blinked from yellow to red, as it did the night Steere was attacked. Judy watched the traffic lights under the bridge changing and twinkling, their rich hues set in vivid relief against the snow. The red light glowed the brightest, tinging the icicles on its metal hood a crimson hue. The green registered cartoony, like green Dots candy. The yellow burned a hot circle like the sun; a dense chrome yellow, a Van Gogh color. Judy thought of haystacks and sunflowers and the rich gold of the artist's straw hat in a self-portrait. Judy could never get the yellows right in her own work.
Funny. Yellow, red, then green. Judy hadn't noticed it before and she wouldn't have noticed it at all but for the contrast between the snow and the colors. Under the bridge, where Steere had been attacked, the traffic lights were mounted sideways. Horizontally. They were bolted to metal frames under the buttressed ceiling of the bridge, maybe because of the low clearance. Thick covered wires snaked to the metal panel where the traffic lights sat in a row. Red was the leftmost circle, the yellow was in the middle, and the green light was at the right.
Odd. Judy couldn't recall seeing a traffic light set up this way elsewhere in the city, or at least it was uncommon. Nor did she remember it from her initial visit, when she'd been focused on the blood and the horror of the crime. Judy blinked at the traffic light, which blinked back. Colors shining bright against the white backdrop. The whiteness was just a blank sheet to her, without color of its own. Try as she might, Judy couldn't appreciate white as a color, only absence of color, and she couldn't imagine a world without color.
Then she remembered Steere's medical records, a joint exhibit of a hospital report. Steere had been taken to the hospital after the carjacking and an ER surgeon had stitched the slash under his eye. Another doctor had given him an eye test and noted that his vision was blurry. But Judy was thinking of the note in the medical records, Dichromatism. Color blindness. She had asked Steere about it later, and he'd said he was color blind and couldn't distinguish between red and green. Judy had wondered how he drove a car, but figured he knew which light was on top. Everybody knew that. Red on the top.