[Georgia 03] Fallen

we’ve got a wounded man out there, blood type B-negative.”
    Charlie was ahead of her for once. “I already put a be-on-the-lookout at all hospitals within a hundred miles for a stab wound of any kind—male, female, white, black, orange. We’ve already had three rule-outs from domestics just in the last half hour. More people get stabbed than I’d realized.”
    Mittal made sure Charlie was finished, then pointed to the blood smeared across the floor. “These shoe prints are conducive to a struggle between a small woman and a medium-sized man, probably around seventy kilos. We can tell from the variation of light to dark in the print that there is a medial roll to the foot, or supination.”
    Amanda stopped the lesson. “Take me back to the stab wound. Are we talking fatal?”
    Mittal shrugged. “The medical examiner’s office would have to give you their opinion. As was stated earlier, there’s no blood spray on the walls or ceiling, from which we can posit that none of the arteries were damaged. This spatter, then, could perhaps be the result of a head wound, where one would find a fair amount of blood with minimal damage.” He looked at Charlie. “Do you concur?”
    Charlie nodded, but added, “A gut wound might bleed like this. I’m not sure how long you could last with that. If you trust the movies, not long. If a lung was punctured, then he’d have an hour, tops, before he suffocated. There’s absolutely no arterial spray, so it’s a seeping wound. I don’t disagree with Dr. Mittal about the possibility of a head wound.…” He shrugged, then disagreed anyway. “The blade was coated tip to hilt, which might indicate that the knife plunged into the body.” He saw the frown on Mittal’s face and backpedaled. “Then again, it could be that the victim grabbed the knife, which cut his hand and coated the blade through transfer.” He showed his hand, palm up. “In which case we’d have a B-negative out there with a wounded hand as well.”
    Amanda had never embraced the equivocations of crime scene science. She tried to sum it up in absolutes. “So, bad guy B-negative struggles with Evelyn. Then I suppose we bring in the second man, the Asian in the Hawaiian shirt, who later ended up dead in the bedroom. They managed to subdue Evelyn and take away her gun. And then there’s a third man, Ricardo, who was a hostage at one point, and then became a shooter, and then, thanks to Agent Mitchell’s quick action, became dead before he could injure anyone.” She turned to Will. “My money is on Ricardo being hooked up in all of this, torture or not. He pretended to be a hostage to try to leverage Faith.”
    Mittal looked uncomfortable with the finality in her tone. “That is an interpretation.”
    Charlie tried to smooth things over. “There’s always the chance that—”
    There was a sound similar to the rush of a tropical waterfall. Mittal unzipped his clean suit and felt around in his pants pockets. He pulled out his cell phone and said, “If you will excuse me,” before heading back into the garage.
    Amanda turned to Charlie. “Brass tacks?”
    “They’re not giving me full access, but there’s no reason for me to disagree with what Ahbi’s said so far.”
    “And?”
    “I don’t want to sound racist,” Charlie began, “but you don’t often see Mexicans and Asians working together. Especially Los Texicanos.”
    “Younger kids aren’t as hung up on that sort of thing,” Will offered, wondering if that could be called progress.
    Amanda didn’t acknowledge either comment. “What else?”
    “The list by the phone.” Charlie pointed to a piece of yellow paper with a bunch of numbers and names. “I took the liberty to call the number for Zeke. I left a message for him to get in touch with you.”
    Amanda looked at her watch. “What about the rest of the house? Did forensics find anything?”
    “Not that they’ve told me. Ahbi’s not being overtly rude, but he’s not going out of his way to volunteer anything, either.” Charlie paused before adding, “It seems obvious whatever the bad guys were looking for wasn’t found, otherwise they would’ve cleared out the minute Faith pulled up.”
    “And we’d be planning Evelyn’s funeral.” Amanda didn’t dwell on the fact. “Whatever they were searching for—what would you guess the size of this mysterious item to be?”
    “No telling,” Charlie admitted. “Obviously, they were looking everywhere—drawers,