“Maybe she decided to go back home?” Carter suggested. “Unfortunately, women in that position often change their minds.”
“No,” Lindsay said. “It’s a small town, and I already checked with people there.” She mentally crossed her fingers that Carter would not make a call to Hopewell to verify the false backstory that Robin had just repeated to him. Would this officer worry if a domestic violence victim hiding from an abusive ex-husband suddenly disappeared? Maybe, maybe not. But he certainly wasn’t going to drop everything on his day off for a woman who had only moved to town a month earlier after living fifteen years under an assumed identity and a claim of amnesia. The part about the cash advance from Evan would be the icing on the cops-won’t-care cake.
“Tell you what. I’ve got a bag of tricks in my truck from an in-service training last week. Let me take a look and make sure we’re not missing something with the naked eye. How about that?”
He was obviously humoring them, but Lindsay would take whatever help she could get at this point. “That would be great.”
“Just give me a few minutes.”
Well more than a few minutes later, the shades in the Stansfield house were all drawn, and Carter was spraying liquid from a pump bottle onto the floor beneath the sliding kitchen door, explaining that it was a highly sensitive compound that would emit light when oxidized.
Lindsay wasn’t a cop, but she was raised by one. She also considered herself a pretty talented cross-examiner when it came to challenging the processing of a crime scene. Carter had skipped every initial step—identifying and securing a perimeter, a thorough visual inspection with photographs and notes, perhaps a secondary sweep enhanced by ultraviolet light. She could have a field day with a single officer, off duty, jumping directly to what she suspected to be luminol. Because the compound had the potential to destroy certain types of evidence at a crime scene, police tended to use it sparingly and only after exploring other options.
But because Carter was humoring them, he probably didn’t care about any of that. And because Lindsay was desperate for help, she said nothing.
“What is that stuff?” Robin asked. “I don’t see it doing anything.”
“It’s luminol,” Carter said. He followed up with an oversimplified explanation of the way that the liquid reacted to iron found in hemoglobin. He avoided the use of the word blood, but the implication was clear. “And it’s not doing anything because there’s nothing here that’s an oxidizing agent. This way, you’ll know for certain.”
Lindsay could see that Carter didn’t have enough of the liquid to spray every surface of the house, even if he was inclined to. An image of Hope’s dead body on Evan Hunter’s area rug flashed again in her mind.
“Would you mind if we checked the front hallway?” she asked.
Without even bothering to ask for her reasons, he skipped right over all the intervening square footage and began applying the liquid to the hardwood floor in the foyer. The space was halfway covered with spray when Lindsay spotted the glow of pale-blue luminescence, exactly where the missing rug should have been for the open house.
Robin Stansfield actually screamed.
8
Wednesday, June 16, 1:28 p.m.
Detective Carter Decker hit the nearest light switch as quickly as he could.
Jesus H, this was a stupid idea. He had been thinking only of the potential upsides of giving Mrs. Stansfield and her new visitor the all-clear. But now he had a glowing blue zone to deal with in the front hallway of his neighbors’ house.
Robin was moving toward the place where she’d seen the blue light. “Stop,” Lindsay yelled. “We’ve got to preserve the scene.”
Great, the neighbor’s new friend fancied herself a law enforcement expert. She probably had a degree in cable television crime shows.
“So is that . . . blood?” Robin whispered.
“No, we don’t know that,” Carter said. He did his best to run through a myriad of alternative explanations. “We get false positives all the time: fruit juice, cooking oil, paint, glue, cleaning liquid, horseradish. A whole lot of stuff can be mistaken for hemoglobin.”
He could feel Lindsay staring at him. Horseradish?
“They have to follow it up with a confirmatory test,” Lindsay said. “Isn’t that right, Officer Decker?”
She might be a know-it-all, but this woman totally had his number. He had been looking for a way to appease Mrs. Stansfield, but one phone call to his supervisor, and he’d be left explaining why he’d hopped over to a neighbor’s house with a bottle of luminol.
Carter was an ass. He knew that about himself. He was capable of playing the role of a happy-go-lucky eager-to-pleaser, but deep down, he felt absolutely no connection to 98 percent of other people. The day-to-day banter between most human beings was nails on the chalkboard to him.
So why did he always go out of his way to make the Stansfields happy?
Because they were the real deal—truly good people who were exactly as nice as they appeared to be. After Carter’s father died, Robin had left him casseroles twice a week for months. Stan, he suspected, was responsible for the miraculous fact that his old man’s lawn never once needed a mow until Carter started doing it himself after moving in. It had also been the Stansfields who had suggested that he could afford to keep his parents’ beloved home if he were to build a small guest house in the back for himself and rent out the main house during the summer to pay for the entire year’s expenses.
And they were always asking him over for movie nights and dinners, which, as sweet as they were, sounded to Carter like torture, because Carter was, sigh, an ass.
So in lieu of torturous dinners filled with mind-numbing chitchat, he found other ways to be nice to these extremely nice people. He remembered Stan coming to his door in tears four years earlier. Their daughter, Hannah, had come home from a date with her top ripped and a fat lip and wouldn’t tell him or her mother what had happened. Fortunately, the Stansfields’ worst fears had not come to pass, but likely only because Hannah kneed the guy in the groin and scrambled out of the car. Like so many victims in her situation, she did not want to press charges, but Carter had paid the guy a visit.
His loyalty to the Stansfields didn’t extend, however, to this new visitor, Lindsay Kelly. When he stepped out for the luminol kit, he’d made a quick call to the Hopewell, New Jersey, police department to see if the town might be small enough for someone to know Lindsay’s missing friend with the abusive ex. Turned out the whole story was bogus and that the woman who called herself Hope Miller had left town of her own volition. Starting over again in the Hamptons, she then suckered some real estate agent into giving her a $2,000 advance, as a second quick phone call—this one to the number on the Stansfields’ For Sale sign—had revealed. It was pretty clear to Carter that the woman was a grifter who’d moved on to her next mark.
But now here he was, stuck with a positive luminol test, in front of a stranger who, if he had to bet based on the way she talked and the things she knew, was a lawyer. “I’m sure there’s no reason to panic about your friend. Like I said, the spot could be anything.”
Robin snapped her fingers. “Wait! Before we left town, Stan cut himself with those damn gardening shears, trying to clear the front path for the open house. He was bleeding all over. It probably just dripped when he was running to the kitchen for a towel.”