Through her closed eyelids, she saw a light flicker.
She opened her eyes. Beyond the trees, a blue light pulsed. A pair of headlights suddenly veered toward her, and she was trapped in the glare, kneeling in her pitifully thin nightgown. Tires skidded to a halt, spitting gravel. A car door swung open and she heard the crackle of a police radio.
“Miss? Are you okay, miss?”
She blinked, trying to make out who was speaking to her. But the voice faded and the headlights dimmed, and the last thing she registered was the slap of the gravel against her cheek as she slumped to the ground.
Frost and Jane stood in Gemma Hamerton’s driveway, staring down at the trail of dried blood that Josephine had left behind in her desperate crawl toward the street. Birds chirped overhead and the summer sun shone down through dappling leaves, but a chill seemed to have settled in this shady patch of driveway.
Jane turned and looked at the residence, which she and Frost had not yet set foot in. It was an unremarkable house with white clapboards and a covered porch, like so many others that she’d seen on this rural road. But even from where she stood in the drive way, she could see the jagged reflection of a broken porch window, and that bright shard of light warned: Something terrible happened here. Something you have yet to see.
“Here’s where she first fell,” said Detective Mike Abbott. He pointed to the start of the bloody trail. “She made it pretty far up the driveway when she was shot. Landed here and started crawling. It took a hell of a lot of determination to move as far as she did, but she managed to get all the way to that point.” Abbott indicated the end of the bloody trail. “That’s where the patrol car spotted her.”
“How did that miracle happen?” asked Jane.
“They came in response to a 911 call.”
“From Josephine?” asked Frost.
“No, we think it came from the owner of the house, Gemma Hamerton. The phone was in her bedroom. Whoever made the call never got the chance to speak, though, because the receiver was hung up immediately afterward. When the emergency operator tried to call back, the phone had been taken off the hook again. She dispatched a patrol car, and it got here within three minutes.”
Frost gazed down at the stained driveway. “There’s a lot of blood here.”
Abbott nodded. “The young woman spent three hours in emergency surgery. She’s now laid up in a cast, which turns out to be lucky for us. Because we didn’t find out till last night that Boston PD had put out a bulletin on her. Otherwise, she might have managed to skip town.” He turned toward the house. “If you want to see more blood, follow me.”
He led the way to the front porch, which was littered with broken glass. There they paused to pull on shoe covers. Abbott’s ominous statement warned of horrors to come, and Jane was prepared for the worst.
But when she stepped in the front door, she saw nothing alarming. The living room looked undisturbed. On the walls hung dozens of framed photos, many of them featuring the same woman with cropped blond hair, posing with a variety of companions. A massive bookcase was filled with volumes on history and art, ancient languages and ethnology.
“This is the owner of the house?” asked Frost, pointing to the blond woman in the photos.
Abbott nodded. “Gemma Hamerton. She taught archaeology at one of the local colleges.”
“Archaeology?” Frost shot Jane a Now, that’s interesting look.
“What else do you know about her?”
“Law-abiding citizen as far as we know. Never married. Spent every summer abroad doing whatever it is that archaeologists do.”
“So why isn’t she abroad now?”
“I don’t know. She came home a week ago from Peru, where she was working at some excavation. If she’d stayed away, she’d still be alive.” Abbott looked up at the stairs, his face suddenly grim. “It’s time to show you the second floor.” He led the way, pausing to point out the bloody tread marks on the wood steps.
“Athletic sole. Size nine or ten,” he said. “We know these are the killer’s, since Ms. Pulcillo was barefoot.”
“Looks like he was moving fast,” added Jane, noting the smeared imprints.
“Yeah. But she was faster.”
Jane stared down at the descending tread marks. Though the blood was dry and sunlight slanted in through a stairwell window, the terror of that chase still lingered on these stairs. She shook off a chill and looked up toward the second floor, where far worse images awaited them. “It happened upstairs?”
“In Ms. Hamerton’s bedroom,” said Abbott. He took his time climbing the final steps, as though reluctant to revisit what he’d seen two nights before. The marks were darker up here, left by shoes still wet with fresh blood. The prints emerged from the room at the far end of the hall. Abbott pointed into the first doorway they came to. Inside was an unmade bed. “This is the guest room, where Ms. Pulcillo was sleeping.”
Jane frowned. “But it’s closer to the stairs.”
“Yeah. I found that strange, too. The killer walks right past Ms. Pulcillo’s room and heads straight up the hall to Ms. Hamerton’s. Maybe he didn’t know there was a guest in the house.”
“Or maybe this door was locked,” said Frost.
“No, that’s not it. This door doesn’t have a lock. For some reason, he bypassed it and went to Ms. Hamerton’s room first.” Abbott took a breath and continued to the master bedroom. There he paused on the threshold, hesitant to step inside.
When Jane looked past him, through the doorway, she understood why.
Though the body of Gemma Hamerton had been removed, her last moments on earth were recorded in vivid splatters of red on the walls, the bedsheets, the furniture. Stepping into that room, Jane felt a cold breath whisper against her skin, as though a ghost had just brushed past. Violence leaves its imprint, she thought. Not just in bloodstains, but on the air itself.
“Her body was found crumpled in that far corner,” said Abbott. “But you can see, from the blood splatters, that the initial wound was made somewhere near the bed. Arterial splashes there, on the headboard.” He pointed to the wall on the right. “And over there, I think those are cast-off drops.”
Jane tore her gaze from the soaked mattress and stared at the arc of angular droplets thrown off by centrifugal force as the bloody knife had swung away from the body. “He’s right-handed,” she said.
Abbott nodded. “Judging by the wound, the ME says there was no hesitation, no tentative slices. He did it with one clean stroke, severing major vessels in the neck. The ME estimates she had maybe a minute or two of consciousness. Long enough for her to grab the phone. Crawl to that corner over there. The receiver had her bloody fingerprints on it, so we know she was wounded when she dialed.”
“So the killer hung up the phone?” asked Frost.
“I assume so.”
“But you said the operator tried calling back and got a busy signal.”
Abbott paused, thinking about it. “I guess that is a little weird, isn’t it? First he hangs up, then he takes the receiver off the hook again. I wonder why he’d do that.”
Jane said. “He didn’t want it to ring.”
“The noise?” said Frost.
Jane nodded. “It would also explain why he didn’t use his gun on this victim. Because he knew someone else was in the house, and he didn’t want to wake her.”
“But she did wake up,” said Abbott. “Maybe she heard the body fall. Maybe Ms. Hamerton managed to cry out. Whatever the reason, something woke up Ms. Pulcillo, because she came into this room. She saw the intruder. And she ran.”
Jane stared at the corner where Gemma Hamerton had died, curled up in a lake of her own blood.
She walked out of the bedroom and headed back up the hall. At the doorway to Josephine’s room she stopped, gazing at the bed. The killer walked right past this room, she thought. A young woman is sleeping in there and her door is unlocked. Yet he bypassed her and continued to the master bedroom. Did he not know a guest was here? Did he not realize there was another woman in the house?