traveled to the dark patch. Right where the engine would be if the car were pointed to the east. Careful not to impact the tread mark, he squatted, touched the liquid. Warm. Oil. Recent. The perimeter cop? Probably. If so, where was he?
He moved swiftly up to the front door, noted the broken glass. He slipped on his shoe covers. The front door was locked but it wasn’t a deadbolt. It took him all of three seconds.
He moved forward, shining his light around with one hand, the other gripping his front-side M11 pistol.
Puller figured you go into a house where four people had been murdered and the guard who’s supposed to be out front isn’t, certain possibilities come to mind. He reached the living room and his light hit them.
On the couch.
Lined up in a row.
Four bodies, the weight of one holding up its neighbor.
He holstered his weapon and, keeping well back, spoke into the mic, recording everything he was seeing.
Dad to the far right, teen daughter to the far left. Mom and brother in the middle. Mom next to Dad. He hit the carpeted floor in front of them with the Maglite. No blood spatters. He glanced up, aimed his beam at the heads.
Dad had taken a heavy ordnance load right in the face; a near contact wound.
Mom’s face was relatively intact but her torso was destroyed. Puller glanced down at the dead woman’s hands and saw that they were nearly obliterated. She’d held them up, he surmised, right before they shot her. The hands had no chance of protecting her from the blast, but it was just instinctive to block whatever part of the body the gun was aimed at.
The two teens’ kill wounds were not evident. Maybe they’d taken it in the back. The parents had not been killed here. The spatters would have covered the room. Killed somewhere else in the house, moved here, lined up like a family watching TV together.
Pretty sick. But then you had to be pretty sick to take out a family.
Sick or a professional without a conscience.
And maybe it was the same thing.
He drew closer, careful not to step on anything marked with an evidence number on the carpet. Dad was in his old green Class Bs that could be officially worn for a few more years. The right side of his face was mostly gone, his spine exposed through the gaping wound in the neck. Bone and a hollow eye socket looked back at Puller. No wounds in his torso. He’d taken it all in the face and neck at close range.
A shotgun was pretty much the only firearm that did damage like that.
He could see bits of white in the wound tracks. Wadding from the shell. Hopefully they’d be able to tell the gauge from measuring the diameter of the wadding or by the name of the maker on top of the wad, if it was still readable.
Mom’s eyes stared back at Puller. For an observer given to melodrama it would have appeared that the woman’s look was pleading.
Find my killer.
Puller illuminated her chest with the Maglite. Dozens of punctures, randomly distributed. Shotgun as well, but different in the way it had been deployed.
He drew a ruler from his pocket and measured the distance between the punctures on Mrs. Reynolds’s blouse that had once been white but was now mostly crimson. He did the calculation in his head and put the ruler away. He felt the man’s arm and then the woman’s. Still in rigor, though it was well on its way down and the muscles were relaxing. The bodies were the temperature of the room or lower. He pulled his air thermometer and took a reading. Blood had pooled to the lower extremities. Bowels and bladders long ago emptied. Skin greenish blue, rotting smell, faces dissolving. In death everybody was ugly.
He turned his attention to the teens.
Then he stopped, swiveled. A noise. From somewhere in the house.
Apparently he wasn’t the only living person in here.
CHAPTER
8
THUMP-WHOOSH-THUMP. Thump-whoosh-thump.
Down the stairs, basement level.
Of course it is.
Puller eased to the doorway.
He sniffed the air. The scent of decomposing bodies was heavy, but Puller was not focusing his nose on that. He was trying to detect something else. Sweat. Cologne. Cigarettes. The molecular signature of bad breath. Anything that would give him an edge.
Nothing.
He moved the door open with his foot. The passageway down was dark.
Of course it is.
Thump-whoosh-thump.
“Federal agent.”
He eyed the wall. Concrete. If it were wood or drywall he would have fired some shots through it, to get the attention of anyone on the other side waiting to ambush him. With concrete his rounds were more than likely going to ricochet ri
ght back at him.
“Slide any weapon out, then follow it with hands on head, fingers interlaced. I count to five, noncompliance will get you a flash-bang right up your ass.”
He counted off, wishing he had a flash-bang with him.