Answering God's Call - Chapter 10

Anyone could see it was the trace of an attack. Standing beside Tatyana, who looked like she had expected this, he muttered as if organizing his thoughts.

“I heard Jennifer Fleming and Samuel Gilmore from finance had been absent without leave, so I vaguely thought they’d run off together with classified material….”

“Are you trying to say they ran away for love?”

“Well, Gilmore’s wife filed for divorce a month ago, they’re about the same age, and they worked on the same floor… to the people involved, an affair can feel like desperate love.”

In truth, on the way to Vandenberg, when she read the operation planning report, Tatyana had thought much the same, so she had nothing to counter with. But now, it seemed that assumption needed some correction. With the sharp smell of blood hitting her nose from the moment she entered the kitchen, the outcome was obvious….

Since they’d found something, they should confirm it properly.

Tatyana rummaged through the egg basket she had set down by the door and pulled out a small spray bottle from the bottom. Ruslan recognized the reagent in the translucent plastic bottle and his eyes lit up.

“Is that—”

“Yes, a blood detection reagent.”

It wasn’t at a level for commercial use, nor was it cheap enough to mass produce, but it was used by intelligence or federal investigative agencies to detect bloodstains that couldn’t be seen with the naked eye or had been scrubbed away.

“I heard it’s quite expensive. And importing the raw materials from Dochen isn’t easy. How did you get it?”

“…I stopped by a lab and borrowed it.”

“Borrowing implies you’ll return it.”

“Does this count as repayment?”

Before he knew it, Tatyana held up Ruslan’s wristwatch. So she lifted it rather than borrowed it. Ruslan let out a short laugh at the flawless sleight of hand and took the watch back as she handed it over. Leaving the disheveled bed and Ruslan behind, Tatyana headed to the bathroom next to the bedroom.

The blood soaked into the mattress was proof that the bedroom was the primary scene. If someone had collapsed bleeding and needed to erase the traces, they wouldn’t have laid them on a troublesome bed.

They would’ve gone to the bathroom where there was water first….

“Ah, that’s bright.”

As soon as she sprayed the reagent onto the easiest target, the sink, the view brightened as if a lightbulb had dropped onto it. At the immediate reaction beyond what she had imagined, Tatyana’s eyes widened. Watching her, Ruslan carefully took the spray bottle from her hand.

“It’s not good if it gets on your skin. Step back.”

“It’s not good for your body either, Father….”

“Do as I say.”

Ignoring Tatyana’s protest and sending her back, Ruslan sprayed the reagent here and there around the bathroom. Wherever it touched, a fluorescence close to blue burst out. It shone so brightly that the longer you looked, the more your eyes quickly grew tired. As he examined the bloodstains, Ruslan eventually frowned.

“I’ll look by myself, so it’d be better if you cover your eyes….”

Turning toward Tatyana, who was standing right behind him, he let out a dumbfounded laugh. Tatyana was looking up at him, wearing sunglasses neatly fitted on her face. When did she even take those out?

Biting his lip slightly, Ruslan asked in a voice laced with amusement, “You’re well prepared.”

“Want to borrow them?”

“No thanks. They won’t fit me.”

“By the way, this is human blood, right?”

“…It’d be stranger if someone butchered an animal here.”

“True, that’s fair.”

As the places where blood had splattered or flowed were scrubbed hard, the smeared traces reacted to the reagent and were laid bare vividly. Scratching at her brow, Tatyana lowered herself.

She had assumed the attack started in the bedroom. But seeing even the bathroom floor light up, not just the sink….

The sequence was completely reversed.

Tatyana rubbed the bathroom tiles with her finger, which were easier to wipe clean than a mattress that soaked up blood. Aside from the bloodstains reacting to the reagent, small scratches on the tiles tickled her fingertips. Finding more scratches of the same size, Tatyana’s face sank.

Maybe not only the sequence changed….

Instead of Ruslan, who was looking with the naked eye, Tatyana closely observed the glaring bloodstains and pointed to the bathroom threshold. When Ruslan sprayed the reagent at the spot she indicated, she confirmed the reaction, and when he sprayed again around it, she checked again….

From the second floor down to the back door of the kitchen, the trail of blood continued, and Tatyana and Ruslan looked at each other. Without saying it aloud, they exchanged glances as if they knew exactly what the other was thinking.

It had been five days since Jennifer Fleming and Samuel Gilmore disappeared.

From the reagent reaction alone, they couldn’t tell whose blood it was or if it belonged to both, but whoever it was, they were unlikely to be unharmed. Assuming the worst, and considering the southwestern weather growing warmer by the day, decomposition would already be well underway.

After examining the shapes of the bloodstains that shone as soon as they met the reagent despite being scrubbed until invisible, Tatyana pushed her sunglasses up onto her head and smiled faintly. In response, Ruslan shook the spray bottle, which didn’t have much left.

“There’s a little reagent left. Should we use it up?”

“We can just borrow more later, so spray it all. Let’s see how far it goes.”

“Next time, take plenty for my share too.”

“I said I borrowed it.”

“Let’s say you did.”

At the slightly sullen glare, Ruslan let out a small laugh and sent Tatyana behind him again.

“Alright. Let’s see how far it leads.”

***

As expected. They found a body in the backyard.

More precisely, in a shallow pit Ruslan dug up with a shovel, wrapped in a blanket.

Pulling the bloodstained blanket open to either side, Tatyana asked, “Father, do you still think Fleming and Gilmore ran off together for love?”

“Running away for love might’ve been better.”

Ruslan, who had placed the long fascia over his knees, bent down. As he brushed away the dirt with his hand, Jennifer Fleming’s face, with dried blood clinging to it, was revealed.

Tatyana gazed quietly down at the woman’s body buried in the shallow pit, then touched her forehead, chest, and both shoulders, making the sign of the cross. At the rather nun-like gesture, Ruslan’s expression turned curious.

“Do you believe in God?”

“No? Why would I?”

Why would I? Why believe in something that doesn’t even exist? Her voice, which treated God like some trivial object as if she hadn’t just carefully made the sign of the cross, sounded quite irreverent.

“I don’t believe, but Fleming might have. It’s not hard to make the sign of the cross for her. Why, Father, do you believe?”

“If I did, I wouldn’t be doing this.”

It wasn’t something to say while dressed head to toe in a devout habit and priest’s cassock, with a silver rosary ring on his finger and a cross hanging from his neck. Slowly straightening up, Ruslan rested his arm on the shovel planted deep in the yard.

“At least we’ve found Fleming….”

“Do you think Samuel Gilmore did this?”

“Hard to say.”

Answering vaguely, Ruslan frowned slightly as if troubled. Gilmore was the most likely, but it was hard to be certain. They couldn’t rule out the possibility that he had been frightened by a third party’s attack and fled.

Tatyana, crouching down, reached into the pit and examined Fleming’s body again. Ruslan blinked at the sight of her handling the fairly decomposed corpse without hesitation.

Whether he was silently surprised or not, Tatyana’s hands, checking the marks left on the neck, the conjunctiva, the presence of petechial hemorrhages, and the severe depression in the skull at the back of the head, suddenly paused as if they had caught on something.

Frowning as if she couldn’t believe it, as if she must be seeing things wrong, she reached in and pulled something out.

“…What is that?”

“Two photographs.”

Two crumpled photographs had been stuffed into Jennifer Fleming’s mouth. As Ruslan stared blankly, genuinely at a loss for words, Tatyana clicked her tongue at the absurdity even as she checked them again, spreading them out as much as she could.

They were crumpled enough to be forced into someone’s mouth, and something she didn’t even want to identify was smeared across parts of them, but it was still easy enough to recognize Samuel Gilmore in the photos.

In one, Gilmore was drawing something on the wall of a mailbox, leaving behind a suspicious mark. In the other, Gilmore was walking side by side with a woman in the city.

The woman linked arm in arm with him couldn’t be seen clearly, but she definitely wasn’t his wife, Nicole Gilmore. The woman in the black-and-white photo had dark hair with heavy shading, while Nicole Gilmore was a bright blonde.

Glancing at Jennifer Fleming’s brown hair buried in the dirt, Tatyana compared it with the woman in the photograph. The color and length were similar, but she could tell instinctively.

The woman in the photograph was not Jennifer Fleming. Sensing Ruslan studying the photos over her shoulder, Tatyana held them out as if telling him to stop frowning and take a closer look if he wanted to see them properly.