Romanski frequently woke up screaming too, his husband shaking him awake from the same nightmare: that he was tied up at the Neander altar, about to be burned, human heads on spikes around him. But no way was he ever going to tell anyone at work about that. Never.
Reno said, “The FBI seems to have dropped the ball. And then all these crazy pro-and anti-Neander protestors? Holy fuck, the world’s gone mad.”
“They’re getting a new special agent in charge,” said Romanski. “And they’re gonna bring CBI back in, they say.”
“No thank you. I don’t want back in.”
“I’m not sure we have a choice,” Romanski said, feeling jumpy in the dark lab.
“Sure you don’t want me to stay, boss?” Reno asked, pausing from unbuttoning his lab coat.
“Naw, Cash’ll be here soon,” Romanski said. “Get out of here before you grow fangs and start hissing at sunlight.”
Reno brought the right unbuttoned side of his lab coat across half of his face like a cape. “There are bad dreams for those that sleep unwisely,” he intoned in a fake Hungarian accent.
Romanski gave a chuckle.
Reno gathered his belongings and paused, silhouetted in the doorway from the hallway light. “Hey, Romanski, thanks for checking in on me. You’re a decent boss… and also a friend.”
Romanski watched the door close behind Reno, leaving him in the silence of his lab. He fiddled with his Bluetooth speaker, and soon Etta James’s crooning broke the stillness. Feeling a little better, he resumed typing his report.
About an hour later, the thermal cycling was complete. Romanski pipetted the samples into individual wells of the gel box and ran the gel with electrophoresis—the electric current would move the DNA molecules through the gel, allowing the bands of DNA to be seen under a UV light. That process would take an additional hour.
To pass the time, Romanski took out a sketchbook and began drawing his next sculpture. In a junkyard, he had found a pair of rustedboilers, some condensers, warped springs, a crate of angle iron, and a large box of gears. He had previously decided to make a giant head out of it. But seeing Willy Grooms’s creations had given him inspiration to make something different, something creepy. Maybe a winged creature—with bones of angle iron and torn cloth for wings. He began to draw in confident strokes as the electrophoresis worked the DNA through the gel in the background.
Another hour passed, and the gel was done—the DNA had been mapped. Where that would lead, who it might connect to, would come later. Just as Romanski was finishing up, he heard Cash’s light knock on the door window, causing him to jump. He let her in, noticing she looked different from her usual getup, having donned sweatpants and a wrinkled Red Sox T-shirt. Dark circles ringed her eyes, auburn hair uncombed. She didn’t look good. Probably working too hard, Romanski thought.
“Burning the midnight oil as usual?” she said, putting on a disposable lab coat, hairnet, gloves, and a mask. She sat at one of the center tables as Romanski collected and stacked the reports.
“You’re also up past your bedtime,” Romanski remarked.
She ignored his quip and gestured at the reports. “Can you summarize those for me—and mind if I record? I need to play it back for Colcord tomorrow.”
“Go ahead.”
She placed her cell phone on the table and pulled out her notebook.
“I’ll make it quick, ’cause it’s late,” said Romanski. “I’ll start with fingerprints. We found a bunch of latents, mostly Willy’s and Margie Brooksfield’s. A few old latents from Samuel Grooms, Willy’s son. He has a short rap sheet for drunk and disorderly and a DUI in his twenties, which is where we got the hit from the database.
“There were glove smears in the kitchen, bedroom, and living room,” Romanski continued. “Whoever killed Willy Grooms was wearing gloves. There was a thorough cleanup. Serology kit showed there was a wipe-down using bleach, peroxide, and two professional crime-scene-cleaning enzyme solutions. Spotless. These folks were professional and organized.” Romanski paused for dramatic effect; one of his favorite parts of the job was presenting his findings. “But we managed to get three partial printswith a plastic casting kit outside the cabin and four latent prints in one corner of the victim’s bedroom. The floor of the cabin appeared to have also been cleaned thoroughly, but they missed the spot where we found the latents. Footprints showed us there were at least three individuals of varying shoe sizes walking around the cabin wearing identical, almost-new hiking boots, and two of those individuals’ footprints were also found inside the cabin. They matched the prints we collected at the Brooksfield Ranch.”
Cash whistled. “Nice work. I needed some good news about the case today.”
“Why? What’s wrong?” Romanski asked.
“I called a priest a sexist prick.”
Romanski leaned back in his chair and cackled. “Get out! Really? That’s awesome.” His face grew more serious as he saw that Cash wasn’t sharing his mirth. “Does Holmes know?”
“She will.”
“You’re gonna get spanked.”
“Yeah, yeah. Soak it up while you can. He deserved it, but still.” Cash rubbed her temples. “All right, what else?”
Romanski pulled up a picture on his laptop and slid it over so Cash could see. “Bloodstains and patterns in the kitchen indicate Grooms was tortured on the table. Traces of formaldehyde, glutaraldehyde, methanol, and other solvents were found around the table, indicating that Grooms was probably also killed in the same place, through embalmment, as
Dr. Huizinga noted in his initial examination. Objects had been carefully moved and replaced. Vegetation had been flattened. The area had been thoroughly and carefully searched—inside and out.”
