Worth More Dead

detectives and crime-scene specialists walked into the two-story home. It looked neat enough, although it had a stale smell of trapped air, a house left empty of its occupants for a long time. Bob Durall and his children had been living at his mother’s house in Seattle while he waited for word of Carolyn.
    They were armed with a search warrant signed by King County District Court Judge Robert McBeth that allowed them to search the Durall home, the Aerostar van, and the Nissan Pathfinder for cell phone records, weapons, trace evidence (which included blood, hair, fibers, latent prints, financial records, correspondence, diaries, journals, notes, calendars, computers and their electronic files, floppy discs, hard drives, etc., answering machines, and chemicals or appliances that might have been used to clean the vehicles or the residence). There were no signs of disarray in the downstairs portion of the house; the rooms looked as if someone had simply stepped away for a moment or gone to work, expecting to be home for supper.
    They moved upstairs and into the master bedroom. It looked normal, too. But the carpeting under the bedside tables looked peculiar. The wall-to-wall carpet and the pad beneath had been cut out then patched with rectangles of the same color and weave. When they looked into the children’s playroom, they saw that a piece of furniture was placed at an awkward angle. They lifted it and found bare subfloor; clearly, this was where the patches came from.
    They returned to the master bedroom. Without speaking, they pulled up the patched section. Now they could see the reason for the repair job; the plywood subflooring was stained a dark mahogany, the color of dried blood. The crime lab technicians did a test on the spot and found the stain positive for human blood. Obviously, there had been so much blood that it soaked through the carpet and the pad and into the plywood beneath.
    Next, they scanned the walls and saw almost invisible spots and streaks. By spraying the walls and baseboards with a substance called Luminol, crime-scene investigators can bring out bloodstains. Reacting to the chemical, every drop, streak, or swipe of blood glows blue-green. Even when someone thinks he has scrubbed all vestiges of blood away, it isn’t really gone. Luminol will detect a tiny scintilla of blood.
    The investigators counted more than a hundred blood spatters. The stains were not in a spray pattern, which would have indicated the victim had been shot; it was medium-velocity blood that had probably flown out from someone’s body or, more likely, head, after they had been struck by a heavy object. Tediously, they drew a circle in pencil around each drop that sprinkled the bedroom wall and attached a numbered sticker.
    They found more stains and streaks of blood leading from the bedroom to the bathroom, mostly along the baseboards. Someone had been dragged from the bedroom to the bathroom. More blood streaks appeared when Luminol and special bright lights were used as the investigators worked from a doorway of the house into the garage.
    Several sections of the Duralls’ home were actually sawed away so that they could be used as physical evidence if a trial ever took place.
    There was no bedding on the bed in the master bedroom. When Denise Jannusch and Linda Gunderson heard this, they had an eerie premonition. About a week before she disappeared, Carolyn had told them that she had purchased a lovely new matched set of linens: bedspread, pillow shams, and sheets. None of them were found in her house.
    The blood in her home was Carolyn Durall’s type and, if necessary, DNA testing could be done to absolutely ascertain that it had come from her. If she were still alive, which was increasingly unlikely, she had lost so much blood that she would have been critically injured when she was taken away. She would have needed to be in a hospital ER, so paramedics would have been called by anyone who cared about her. But there were no Jane Does in any area hospital or at the morgue in the Medical Examiner’s Office.
    After the lonely green house on Hoquiam Court had been searched, tested for physical evidence, and cleared for the family to take possession, several of Carolyn’s friends moved slowly through it. What they had not wanted to accept, had fought to deny as impossible, was all too clear to them when they viewed the disfigured walls, the cut-up carpeting, the faint blood spots marked by stickers. They had