Chapter 58: Not a Crime Scene
I sat on the coach-house floor from five o’clock until nine deciding whether to telephone her, with the phone on the boards in front of me.
I wrote the arguments out, because that is what I do instead of deciding.
Against: she had told me that morning not to bring her a theory.
For: Dr. Moreno had said not to tell anybody inside that building, and she is not inside that building. She is a police officer of the State of Illinois and she is outside all of it.
At a quarter past nine I called the number on her card and she picked up on the fourth ring.
There was a television behind her and somebody turned it down, and a chair went back, and she carried the phone into another room.
“Miss Carter.”
“I’m not bringing you a theory,” I said. “I’m bringing you an object and a place.”
There was a pause of about two seconds.
“Go on.”
I gave her ninety seconds and I had rehearsed all of it.
A cool-mist humidifier on a shelf in the corner of that nursery. A four and a half liter tank. A lid that lifts in one second.
A timer that starts it at six in the evening and runs it until it is dry.
Two deposits inside it, at two different heights, and only one of them looks like scale.
And a corridor outside the door that six people walk down every night of the week.
She let me finish. She did not interrupt once, and I have always given her credit for that.
Then she asked four questions and they took the floor out from under me in the order she asked them.
“Is the humidifier yours?”
“No.”
“Whose house is it in?”
“Victor Blackwood’s.”
“Can Victor Blackwood consent to a search of his own house?”
“Yes.”
“Then that is your route, and you already know why you have not taken it.”
I said that the moment he knows, six other people know inside the hour.
“Yes,” she said. “That is the actual problem and it is not a legal one.”
I asked about a warrant.
“Then let me tell you what a warrant application looks like at eleven o’clock tomorrow morning.”
“I would be asking a judge to authorize the seizure of a household appliance.”
“He asks me what offense. I say I don’t know yet.”
“He asks me what the evidence is. I say a mark inside a plastic tank.”
“He asks who observed it. I say a suspended employee, alone, unsupervised, who was wrong about something else this morning in front of five witnesses.”
“He says no. He says it in about eleven seconds and he is right to.”
I said that I needed the water tested to get the warrant.
“And you need the warrant to get the water tested. Yes.”
“That is exactly the shape of it and I am not going to pretend to you that it isn’t.”
I asked her whether there was any way in at all.
She was quiet for a while and then she gave me three things, and they were all she had, and I have used every one of them since.
“One. Do not touch it again.”
“If it ever turns out to be something, the first question in the room is who had access, and today you added yourself to that list.”
“Two. If you ever get five milliliters of that water lawfully, telephone me before you drive anywhere with it.”
“Not after. Before. There is a form and it has to be started at the tank.”
“Three. Write it down. All of it, with dates, in ink, and keep it somewhere that is not that property.”
I said she had already told me that in October.
“I am telling you again because people stop doing it in November.”
“Who is it for?”
“Not for me,” she said. “For whoever gets this after me. There is always somebody after me.”
I said thank you and I meant it, and I was crying by then, quietly, in a way I do not think she could hear.
Then she said one more thing and it was almost an afterthought.
“Miss Carter. Who fills it?”
I opened my mouth to answer.
And I did not have an answer, and I had been in that house for fourteen months.
I knew the make of the machine and the hour the timer starts and the depth of the water to the centimeter.
I did not know whose hands put the water in it, or at what hour, or out of what container, or how often.
There was a silence, and I could hear her deciding not to say the obvious thing.
“Find that out,” she said. “That’s a fact. That one you can actually get.”
She hung up at 21:41 and I wrote the time on the sheet, because it was a fact and I could get it.