Page 61 of You'll Be Sorry

“So, the photo experts I told you about.”

She nodded.

“Got the initial report.” Adams pulled out the bottom image, which contained one of the broader room shots, but this one came with three color-coded looping overlays. It took only a second for Mandy to realize the blue dashed lines followed one path, red solid line a second, and deep purple a third. Three different patterns, for three different levels—X, Y, and Z.

Adams had his laptop booted up. “Look, here’s a working model.”

He loaded the program, which offered an animated rendition, showcasing the first frantic line of bloody footprints, topped shortly by the second go-round, then finished with the top layer of madness.

“It’s like Wile E. Coyote,” she exclaimed. “Looking at all these randomly looping tracks, my father was absolutely correct. No way this makes any kind of sense.”

“It gets more interesting,” Adams said. He clicked several more screens. Mandy’s eyes widened.

“Fuck me.”

“Yeah, this kind of analysis wasn’t done back then. Cuz now, seeing this…”

“Fuck me,” Mandy repeated.

As the layers were peeled back one by one, a fourth, previously undiscernible pattern emerged. A faint trail of considerably larger footprints leading from the back door into the dining room, where they tapered out.

“That’s not an average-size adult female or young male,” Mandy stated.

“Men’s size eleven,” Adams confirmed.

“Dave Dixon?”

“No. Size ten.”

Of course it wasn’t that simple.

“Two sets of footprints,” she murmured. “Two separate individuals.” Her mind was whirling. “So, subject A, an adult male, enters the house from the back door in bare feet, ostensibly injured, and heads into the dining room.”

“That’s what the model suggests.”

“Then…someone else, subject B, possibly/probably a female, ends up covering up those footprints with her own.” She sighed heavily. “Dear Lord, unless there’s like an unknown femoral vein somewhere in our big toe, no way anyone can magically bleed this much, this evenly. They’re less footprints, more…”

“Foot stamps?” Adams offered helpfully.

“Fuck.” Honestly, she did know more words than this, but at the moment, they all escaped her. “My father and Betty were right. This whole scene was staged. One person intruded. Then a second person covered it up.”

She glanced at Adams and suddenly didn’t feel so good again. “The DNA sample.”

He nodded, face inscrutable. “First time around it was declared inconclusive.”

She waited.

“Thirty years ago, plenty of reasons why a sample could be ruled inconclusive. Including mixed donors.”

“As in multiple people?” She frowned. “But the testing revealed only one blood type.”

“Which means there was only one bloodtypepresent—not that there was only one donor. Welcome to the weakness of that analysis. Also, the result was O-positive, which is the most common.”

“So same blood type, but two different donors.”

“Three, actually.”

“Three? But, but…There are only two different footprints.”