Collecting the Dead Read Online Free PDF Page A

only the telltale sliver of red trailing across the porch, but even this disappeared by the bottom step.
    Quillan did his work well.
    But the frantic scrubbing and washing of a tweaker nine days gone is no match for solid forensics … in this case chemiluminescence. That’s the use of chemical agents, usually luminol, to illuminate trace elements of blood. It’s a favorite among crime scene investigators because it reacts with the iron in blood to create a temporary blue glow. You can wash, scrub, and scour to your heart’s content, but it’s nearly impossible to fool the luminol.
    They found a dead pool in the kitchen, a nasty patch of neon-blue where a river of blood had emptied onto the tile, splashing upon the cabinet facings, the fridge, the stainless-steel dishwasher, like so much water over a fall: too much blood to survive the loss. What had been a white and yellow kitchen and dining room now shimmered blue; every swipe of the cleaning rags was revealed, every attempt to destroy blood evidence was placed on display.
    But no bodies.
    That’s where I came in.
    Ivory essence … sandy texture … my special gift.
    I see the hidden; I see the shine, every touch, every footfall, every cheek on a pillow, every hand on a wall. Some might call it an aura, I just call it life energy; either way it leaves its soft glowing trace on everything we come in contact with, radiating even from the blood we leave behind. Sometimes it’s chartreuse with a wispy texture, or muddy mauve, or flaming coral, or a crimson baked-earth. Every shine is different and specific to a person, like fingerprints or eye scans or DNA.
    This time it had an ivory color—what I call essence —and a sandy texture.
    Landing at SeaTac, Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, Jimmy leads the way to a waiting car driven by an FBI staffer from the Seattle office, who takes us directly to the King County Courthouse.
    We’re still early, so we kill some time in the cafeteria. The Quillan case was more than a year ago, so I review my notes for the third time before handing the file back to Jimmy. He stuffs it into his Fossil soft-side portfolio briefcase as I say a prayer that I’ll never have to look at it again.
    *   *   *
    The courtroom is similar to others I’ve had the ill fortune to attend, though without the individual theaterlike seating found in newer buildings. Instead, family members, observers, and reporters sit upon hard church-type pews, lacking only hymnals and prayer kneelers.
    The jury box sits at the front of the room on the right side: twelve overstuffed chairs, six to a row, with the back row elevated slightly above the front, surrounded by hard oak railings stained in dark cherry. At the front of the room, elevated above all others and brooding over the courtroom, stands the judge’s bench. Made ornate with carvings and a marble top, it, too, is dressed out in undergarments of oak with a handsome, silky suit of dark cherry stain draped over the top.
    My place is less ornate …
     … and not so high.
    Taking my seat in the witness box to the judge’s left, I shift on the hard chair and try to find a comfortable position; it’s not to be had. Perhaps it’s just me, but I find witness chairs to be strikingly similar to the medieval Judas Chair, or Chair of Torture, a terrible invention embedded with a thousand or more piercing spikes rising from the seat and the armrests and protruding from the back. Its singular purpose, like the witness chair, is to encourage one’s tongue to flap about in a productive fashion. Though in the Middle Ages the truth was less relevant than the confession.
    I glance at the jurors and envy them their stuffed chairs. They look to be a decent group, with not a mouth-breather or drooler among them. The oddest of the lot is an older woman in a lime-green suit, big-framed glasses, and a 1950s-style beehive hairdo.
    Seriously, I don’t know if she’s going for the retro look or if she just came