The Mephisto Club

Latin. She read the splatters, saw the arcing droplets left by arterial spray. “Before he killed her, before he slashed her neck, he took the time to decorate these walls.”
    “The question is,” said Jurevich, “did he write these words while she was lying here, waiting to die? Or was the room already prepared as a killing place before the victim even arrived?”
    “And then he lured her here?”
    “There’s clearly evidence of preparation.” Jurevich pointed to the wooden floor, where blood had dried in a frozen pool. “You see the nails there? He came equipped with a hammer and nylon cord. That’s how he immobilized her. He tied the cord around her wrists and ankles. Nailed the knots to the floor. Once she was restrained, he could have taken his time.”
    Maura thought of what had been carved into Sarah Parmley’s flesh. Then she looked up at the same symbols drawn on the walls in red ocher. A crucifix, turned upside down. Lucifer’s cross.
    Sansone said, “But how would he lure her up here? What could possibly have drawn her to this house?”
    “We know that a call came in, to her motel room,” said Jurevich. “It was the day she checked out. The motel desk clerk transferred it to her room.”
    “You didn’t mention that,” said Jane.
    “Because we’re not sure it’s significant. I mean, Sarah Parmley grew up in this town. She probably knew a lot of people here, people who’d call her after her aunt’s funeral.”
    “Was it a local call?”
    “Gas station pay phone, in Binghamton.”
    “That’s a few hours away.”
    “Right. Which is one reason we discount it as coming from the killer.”
    “Is there another reason?”
    “Yes. The caller was a woman.”
    “The motel clerk’s sure about that? It was two weeks ago.”
    “She doesn’t budge. We’ve asked her several times.”
    Sansone said, “Evil has no gender.”
    “And what are the chances that a woman did this?” said Jane, pointing to the wall, to the bloody handprints.
    “I wouldn’t automatically reject the possibility it’s a woman,” said Sansone. “We have no usable footprints here.”
    “I don’t reject anything. I’m just going with the odds.”
    “That’s all they are. Odds.”
    “How many killers have
you
tracked down?” shot back Jane.
    He regarded her with an unflinching stare. “I think the answer would surprise you, Detective.”
    Maura turned to Jurevich. “The killer must have spent hours here, in this house. He must have left hair, fibers.”
    “Our crime-scene unit went over all these rooms with ALS.”
    “They couldn’t have come up empty.”
    “Oh, they came up with plenty. This is an old house, and it’s been occupied on and off for the last seventy years. We turned up hairs and fibers all over these rooms. Found something that surprised us. Let me show you the rest of the house.”
    They went back into the hallway, and Jurevich pointed through a doorway. “Another bedroom in there. Lot of dust, plus a few cat hairs, but otherwise nothing that caught our interest.” He continued down the hall, past another bedroom, past a bathroom with black-and-white tiles, giving the rooms only dismissive waves. They came to the last doorway. “Here,” he said. “This turned out to be a very interesting room.”
    Maura heard the ominous note in his voice, but when she stepped into the bedroom, she saw nothing at all alarming, just a space devoid of all furniture, with blank walls. The wood floor here was in far better shape than in the rest of the house, its boards recently refinished. Two bare windows looked out over the knoll’s wooded slope, which swept down to the frozen lake below.
    “So what makes this room interesting?” asked Jane.
    “It’s what we found on the floor.”
    “I don’t see anything.”
    “It showed up when we sprayed it with Luminol. The crime-scene unit surveyed the whole house, to see where our killer might have tracked blood. Whether he left traces that we couldn’t see in other rooms. We found his footprints in the hallway, on the stairs, and in the foyer, all of them invisible to the naked eye. So we know he did try to clean up as he exited the house. But you can’t really hide blood. Spray it with Luminol, and it’ll light right up.” Jurevich looked down at the floor. “It sure as hell lit up in here.”
    “More shoe prints?” asked Jane.
    “Not just shoe prints. It was like a wave of blood had washed through this room, splashed on the wall. You