Page 11 of Psychic Obsession
Okay."What does that have to do with rugs?"
"Vacuuming when there are rugs on the floor takes longer.I have a doormat.Nothing else on my floors."
"Huh."
"You have a living room rug?"
He did.A thick white rug underneath the coffee table."I do, but not in the middle of the room."
Isaac pursed his lips, and he waved his forefinger at him."How often would you say people have a rug in the middle of the room?"
Nikolai was no interior designer."I guess it depends on what else they have in the room, the placement of furniture and so on."
"True, but did the rugs match the rest of the room?"
Nikolai pushed out of the chair at the same time as Isaac walked closer to the whiteboard.They stood shoulder to shoulder as they studied the photos of the sprawled women.
"It's hard to tell."Isaac rubbed his neck."There is too much blood, I'm not sure what colors they were before they were soaked, much less if they matched the rest of the interior."
Nikolai studied the edges of the rugs while trying not to give in to the chill wanting to unfurl in his gut."Would you say it's normal with no dry spots?"
"What?"
"There's about a gallon and a half of blood in a human being, right?"
Isaac looked a little green."Sounds about right."
"If you slit the jugular, you bleed out pretty fast; the majority of the blood will be spilled?"He hadn't meant to turn it into a question, but he wasn't sure how much of it would remain in the body.The blood would continue to drain from the body for as long as the heart pumped.But for how long?Did most of the blood trickle out, or only about half of it?Was it dependent on the placement of the body?
He shuddered as an image of a slaughterhouse pushed away everything else from his mind.When you slaughtered animals, you hung them upside down to get the blood out.
Looking at the rug underneath the first victim, he scrunched his nose.Had she been moved after the murderer had slit her throat?
Maybe they should ask the ME?Zachary Mallon?There were so many names he had yet to learn.
"Yeah."Isaac dragged it out as if he wasn't sure what Nikolai was asking.He wasn't entirely sure himself.The bloodstain pattern analysis would show if there was something off.
"Right, but wouldn't the bloodstain patterns be similar?"
Isaac looked at the photos again."They've all been stabbed in their stomachs and torso, so I assume their blood would've spilled from several sources.Maybe the fabric of the rug would soak it up."
"Would it?From edge to edge, corner to corner, or should there be a dry corner here?It's not a paper tissue.How absorbent is a rug?"He reached out and tapped his finger on the corner farthest from the first victim's head.Isaac looked at the other two photos.
They were all placed similarly.The body sprawled, feet outside the edge with the rest of the body on top of the rug, face angled away from the entrance of the room.
"Who would know?"
"I don't know."Nikolai frowned at the photos.
"Fuck."Isaac spun away and paced along the wall."Are the rugs in evidence?"
Nikolai nodded, though he doubted the latest one was dry enough to store.
"Okay, so what do we do?"
"We look at the rugs.We figure out where they were bought, see if we can get any information about how long they've had them, and I guess...we find out if the bloodstain pattern is correct."
"Correct?"Isaac's incredulous tone made him smile.
