Captain Cab Jackson came down the front steps of 4140, closely followed by Sergeant Tim Hicks. "Come by way of the heritage trail, did you, Decker?" Cab demanded, checking his watch. Cab was huge, over six feet five inches, with a dented bald head like one of the bollards where the sternwheelers tied up by the James River. All the same, his face was chubby and his voice was unexpectedly high, so he had grown himself a Little Richard–style moustache in the hope of investing himself with some extra maturity. He wore a red-and-yellow-striped shirt with rows of pens and pencils clipped in the pocket, and his buttocks stuck out so far at the back that Detective Rudisill had famously described them as "Mount Buttmore."
Hicks himself was short, handsome, young, and bouncily fit, like a human basketball. He had been transferred to Richmond's Central Zone only three months ago, from Fredericksburg, upstate, and he was still pepped up about working in the city. "We the elite," he kept repeating, as they drove around town, slapping his hand rhythmically on
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the car door. Decker didn't have the heart to tell him that his transfer had probably had far less to do with the excellence of his service record than it did with the interim chief's urgent need to fill her quota of detectives of color.
"So what's the story?" Decker asked. "Pretty upscale neighborhood for a stabbing."
"You'd best come inside and see for yourself."
Decker followed Cab's buttocks up the front steps and in through the glossy, black-painted front door. He noticed that the frame was splintered, where the paramedics had kicked it open. Hicks bubbled, "I never saw anything like it. I mean, the blood, Lieutenant. It's like all over."
"Well, remember that you can decorate an entire living room with the blood from a single person's circulatory system. Two coats, if you use a roller."
Alison's pregnant body was still lying in the hallway, one shoe on, one shoe off. She was staring at the skirting board, her blue eyes wide open. She looked more baffled than horrified, even though her head was three inches away from her neck. Hicks was right about the blood. It was all over the polished oak floor, in splashes and smears and handprints. It was up the walls, all over the doors, spattered all over the cream linen blind. There was even a fan-shaped spray of blood on the ceiling.
Decker knew from experience that blood had a way of getting everywhere. You could shoot somebody in an upstairs bedroom and tiny specks of blood would be found on the walls in the hall.
A sallow, acne-pitted police photographer called Dave Martinez was taking pictures, and the intermittent flash gave the optical illusion that Alison was still twitching. Decker hunkered down beside her and looked into her wide blue Doris Day eyes. She looked back at him, her expression pleading, What's happened to me?
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Decker glanced at her blood-drenched smock. "How far gone?" he asked Cab.
"She was due on the twenty-first, according to her mother. But she was stabbed at least six times in the stomach. Baby didn't stand a frigging chance."
"Uncanny, don't you think?" Hicks said, breathing down Decker's neck. "She looks as if she's just about to say something."
"Oh yeah? You'd crap your pants if she did." Decker abruptly stood up again, so that Hicks had to step back out of his way. He collided with one of the kitchen chairs and almost lost his balance.
Cab sniffed and said, "Victim's name is Alison Maitland, aged twenty-eight, wife of Gerald Maitland, aged thirty-three, who's a junior partner with Shockoe Realty, 1818 East Cary Street."
"Where's Maitland now?"
"Still out in the ambulance. Arrested. Mirandized. They're giving him first aid for some serious lacerations to his arms and face. Don't worry . . . Wekelo and Saxman are with him."
"Talked to him yet?"
Cab shook his head. "I tried, but he's pretty shaken up. He said, 'It just kept cutting us.' I asked him what he was talking about, what kept cutting them, but he didn't give any response. Well, nothing that made any damn sense."
"I also heard him say, 'There was nobody there," Hicks put in. "He said it five or six times, 'There was nobody there, there was nobody there.' He was kind of muttering and mumbling, so you couldn't hardly hear him."
Hicks paused, and then he added, "Funny thing was, it wasn't like he was trying to convince me that there was nobody there. It was like he was trying to convince himself."
"I wouldn't read too much into that," Cab said. "Guy to‑
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tally flipped, for whatever reason. Stress, business problems, domestic dispute, who knows? Every marriage is a mystery. Mine is, anyhow."
"Who called the cops?" Decker asked.
Hicks snapped the elastic band off his notebook. "Alison Maitland put in a 911 call at 13:56 screaming for an ambulance. She said something about blood and she called out her husband's name, but there was some kind of fault on the line and the rest of it was unintelligible. The paramedics arrived here at 14:14 but nobody answered the door and it took them a couple more minutes to gain access. When they broke in they found the victim lying right here in the hallway and her husband kneeling next to her, apparently attempting to replace her head."
"Looks like we're dealing with an optimist, then," Decker said.
"Gerald Maitland himself was very badly cut, especially his arms and face. In fact his injuries could have been life-threatening."
"Self-inflicted ?"
"Must have been. When the paramedics broke down the door, the security chain was still fastened on the inside. Officers Wekelo and Saxman arrived a few minutes later at 14:28, and they found that all the back doors were securely locked and the only windows that were open were too small for anybody to have climbed in."
"Okay," Decker said, looking around. "What about the weapon?"
Cab said, "We haven't actually located it yet."
"We haven't located it? He would have needed a goddamned sword to cut her head off like this."
"Absolutely," Cab agreed. "Not only that, at least three of the abdominal injuries penetrated right through the victim's body from front to back, which indicates that the
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weapon was at least two feet long. But—whatever it was—we didn't find it in the immediate locality of the body." "You've been through the whole property?"
Hicks said, "I organized a quick room-to-room. But Gerald Maitland was absolutely smothered in blood, head to foot—his wife's blood and his own—and he couldn't have disposed of the weapon anyplace else in the house without leaving any footprints or handprints.
"There are some traces of blood on the wall staircase, but Maitland was hanging wallpaper immediately prior to the killing and it looks as if he might have cut himself with his craft knife. We found the knife on the floor in the nursery, but it only has a two-inch blade, and although it does have a few drops of blood on it it obviously wasn't the murder weapon."
"Kitchen knives?"
"All of them clean except a small cook's knife used for cutting a chicken sandwich."
Decker said, "Hicks—we need to do another search and we need to do it now. I want this whole house taken apart. Look outside in the yard. Take up the floorboards. Look in the toilet cisterns and the water tanks. For Christ's sake, a weapon that size—it has to be somewhere."
Hicks raised his eyebrows at Cab in a mute appeal, but Cab nodded his assent. "Let's just find this sucker, shall we?"
While Hicks called in five uniformed officers for another search, Decker and Cab stepped outside the front door, onto the porch. It was stiflingly hot out there, but at least it didn't reek of blood. One or two reporters shouted at Cab for a statement, but he waved his hand and shouted back, "Five minutes! Okay? Give me five minutes!"