Nikki snorted. “I bet that went over well,” she said. “I love the ‘I’m a taxpayer and you work for me’ speech.”
Baker shrugged with one shoulder. “As speeches go, hers was pretty uninspired. I think she was headed off to raise some hell, though, so I’d get in and get out while you can.”
She gave him a two-finger salute and Baker backed away from the car, moving over to the gate to unlock it and let us in.
We entered the house single file, Nikki handing out booties for us to put on in the front foyer.
The house was brightly lit with late-morning sun bouncing off the gleaming white walls. Well, the sections of wall where no fingerprint powder had been brushed on. There was a stillness here too; it mirrored the one from the other day when Candice and I had first gone inside, before we’d discovered the bodies up the stairs. But this silence was almost . . . peaceful.
It was odd, because I didn’t expect that. I expected instead to feel the violent energy echoing and reverberating off the walls that had all but assaulted me when I’d first entered the house a few days earlier.
But it’d dissipated. Significantly. Which was good, because it meant the structure had hope. To recover. To not be so scarred by the events that’d taken place inside the walls that it was forever cursed to make anyone who entered here feel unsettled. Uncomfortable. Unsafe.
“You okay?” Candice whispered, as she was putting on her booties.
“Fine,” I said, squeezing her arm to let her know I really was. Then I squared my shoulders and said, “I’m going to let my radar guide me. You guys can follow me, or look around yourselves.”
Candice, Oscar, and Nikki all exchanged a look, and no one needed to speak to know that they’d all arrived at the same conclusion. Candice would go with me, and Nikki and Oscar would stay in the foyer, supportive, but out of the way.
I turned to the stairs and got on with it, moving slowly through the foyer along the very same path that I’d moved with Candice the previous Sunday. Heading up the steps, I braced myself when I entered the central second-story corridor. It was a good thing I did. On the floor was a large, deep, rust-colored stain.
Rosa’s body had obscured the extent of her blood loss. It was so upsetting because, judging by the size of the stain, her heart had continued to pump well after she’d been shot. I’ve seen a lot of crime-scene photos, and it’s never hard to tell who died within moments of being stabbed or shot, and who’d continued to suffer until they’d bled out.
I had no idea of the full extent of her suffering, but I did know it’d been a terrible thing to endure. Moving to just the edge of the stain, I knelt for a moment and closed my eyes, sending up a small prayer to her. It just felt right to pay homage before continuing forward.
Candice put a hand on my shoulder, and when I glanced behind me, I saw that her eyes were also closed. My dear friend understood.
Moving into the master bedroom after that was . . . hard. The sense of peace that’d begun to take over the house again ended at the foot of the door leading into the master suite.
The second I was past the threshold, a wave of nausea hit me like a punch in the gut. I even grunted from the impact.
“Abs?” Candice asked, and once again I felt her hand on me, gently placed on my lower back to steady me should I need it.
“It’s fine,” I said, straining to speak. “But, sweet Jesus, it’s thick in here.”
“We can leave, you know.”
“No,” I said, forcing myself to move into the room. The chaos of energy only got worse. It was like being in the middle of a barroom brawl. The crisscrossing of panic and violence and hatred and anger coalesced into one large swarm of horribleness. It was hard for me to breathe. To see. To remain standing. It just assaulted me from every angle.
“Dammit,” I said through clenched teeth.
“Talk to me, Sundance,” Candice said, that hand on my back never wavering.
I blinked several times, and took deep breaths, but I couldn’t seem to shut out the barrage of energy swirling and battering against me. “I’m fine,” I said, my voice even more strained.
Pressing forward another couple of feet, however, I was stopped dead in my tracks. Ahead was the safe room that Dave had built for the Roswells, and straight ahead of where I stood was a full-length mirror much like the one from my vision. A flood of images and emotions pretty much overwhelmed me in that moment. “I need some air,” I said, and bolted from the room.
Tearing down the hallway and the steps, I heard Candice’s footfalls behind me, but I didn’t pause or wait for her. Instead I went right down the stairs, turned the corner somewhat blindly, and entered the kitchen. Ahead was a door leading to the outside, and I rushed to it. Twisting the dead bolt and yanking the door open, I dashed through to the outside.
For a minute all I could do was try to take in oxygen and have it stay in my lungs. This proved challenging, so I started walking forward, attempting to calm the hell down. Man, it was tough. Tears leaked out of my eyes and I wiped at them in annoyance. “Hey,” Candice said when I’d stopped at last to bend at the waist and rest my elbows on the tops of my knees. “Sundance, what can I do for you?”
I wiped my eyes again. “I’m okay,” I lied. “I was just trying to . . .”
“I know what you were trying to do,” she said kindly. “And I have no idea how someone as sensitive to energy as you are could find the courage to walk into a room that’d recently been filled with that kind of violence, and remain sane.”
I stood up and took one last deep, cleansing breath. “Who’re you calling sane?”
“Not you,” she said, a relieved smile appearing on her lips. “Obviously.”
I wiped my eyes one last time with my sleeve. “Yeah, not one of my brighter moves.”
“Did you get anything?”
I shook my head. “No. It’s a mess up there. All I could feel was their panic, fear, and pain with an extra layer of hatred hanging in the ether, and that was all before I felt the violence of the bullets hitting their targets. It’s overwhelming.”
Candice’s eyes pinched with sympathy. “Let’s get out of here,” she suggested.
“Okay,” I agreed. I was ready to quit this house forever. But then I realized where we were and looked around. “Hey,” I said when I saw that Candice had already begun to walk her way to the back door.
“What’s up?”
I pointed to a flattened section of grass right in front of a tall grouping of shrubs. There was some crime-scene litter on the ground too. A pair of black gloves. The backing to an evidence label. And the noticeable presence of black flies. Which is always, by far, the creepiest thing about crime scenes. The first and last on scene are always the flies.
“This is where Tremblee was murdered, right?”
Candice came back over to me and stepped back a pace or two. “I think so,” she said.
In my mind’s eye I remembered the last part of my vision, where the key had come out of the mirror, past me, and had gone back out the front door of Dave and Gwen’s to disappear around the corner of the house.
To the backyard.
It suddenly dawned on me that in bringing me here, maybe my intuition was trying to get me to this exact spot.
But why?
“What’cha thinking?” Candice asked as I simply stood staring at the flattened piece of grass.
“Why was Mario killed?” I said. Candice didn’t answer me at first, so I turned to her and repeated the question.
“Gudziak and Hekekia got rid of all the witnesses,” she said simply.
I pivoted back to the flattened patch of grass. I could just make out the faint outline of a body there. I went back over the details of his murder as I remembered them. He’d been shot once in the back of the head with a forty-five caliber. He’d died with his earbuds in.
A
nd that’s the part of the scenario that wasn’t working so well for me, because as much as I wanted to imagine it differently, what I kept seeing in my mind’s eye was this young man trimming some shrubs while someone snuck up on him and shot him at point-blank range assassination-style.
Either the gunshot should’ve alerted the people inside that someone was outside shooting off a weapon, or Mario should’ve been alerted to the sound of gunfire from inside the house and he should’ve gone for help. At the very least, he should’ve run away as fast as he could.
Then again, what if the volume was up so loud on the earbuds that he couldn’t hear the noise from the AR-15 going off inside? That seemed unlikely, though, given what I know about the sound an AR-15 makes.
“How high was the volume turned up on his earbuds?” I asked Candice.
“What?”
I tore my gaze away from the ground to look at Candice in earnest. “Do we know how loud the gardener’s music was when he was murdered?”
She eyed me quizzically. “That’s a question for Grayson, I think.”
“Yeah,” I said, leaving the trampled grass to head back toward the house.
We found Nikki and Oscar talking quietly together still in the front foyer. “Hey,” I called to Nikki.
“You done?” she asked when she saw us.
I ignored her question and went for the one I needed answered. “How loud was the gardener’s music turned up when he was shot?”
She blinked at me a couple of times, probably not understanding the context of my question. “I don’t know,” she said. “Need me to find out?”
“Yes,” I said, my radar humming, as if I was on the trail of something big.
Nikki took out her cell and said, “Give me a minute.”
We waited in silence until Nikki came out from the kitchen where she’d made her call, an odd expression on her face. “Okay, so it’s weird that you should ask that, Abby, because Sienna says that Tremblee’s music was actually up to almost full volume when he was shot. His phone had died, but she was able to plug it in, using her own charger, to see how high the volume was, and it was nearly at max.”
“Wow. That’s loud,” I said. I often wore headphones when I did housework at home, and I could never take the volume much past a low setting.
“Maybe he had a hearing issue,” Candice said. We all looked at her. “He was a landscaper, right? He would’ve been around loud mowers and leaf blowers all the time.”
I nodded, something sliding into place in my head. That made sense.
“Why was that important to know, though?” Nikki asked me.
I frowned. “I’m not sure yet. It’s just one more thing that’s a little off about this case. There’s something I can’t quite put my finger on, and it’s bothering me. The fact that Tremblee’s music was at max volume and he probably couldn’t have heard the commotion from inside is bugging me.”
“Why?” Nikki pressed.
“Because there was no reason to kill him,” I said. “And yet, he was shot execution-style, in the back of the head. He wasn’t corralled into the safe room like Andy and Robin. He wasn’t shot in the hallway like Rosa. He was shot outside, where the sound of the gunshot would’ve carried and maybe even been reported by neighbors.”
“It actually was reported by a neighbor,” Candice reminded me. “The guy with the video camera that caught Dave’s truck cruising by said he heard a firecracker going off and complained to the neighborhood association about it.”
I pointed to her. “Exactly. In other words, it was super risky to murder him.”
“But what does that tell us?” Candice said.
“Again, I don’t know. Still . . .” I looked over my shoulder back toward where Tremblee had been shot, and my radar just didn’t want to let go of the man’s murder. My intuition was practically insisting I look into him. “I want to do a little digging into his background.”
“Tremblee’s?” Oscar asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Okay,” said Candice. “I’m game.”
I turned my attention to Nikki, but she seemed troubled. “I’m going to drop you guys back at your offices. There’s a lead that came in that I need to follow up on.”
“What’s that?” Candice asked.
“It’s connected to the Roswells,” she explained. “I should turn it over to one of the guys still assigned to that case, but I think I want to check it out first.”
“What’s the lead?” Candice repeated.
“I put a monitor on all of the Roswells’ accounts to alert me in case one of their credit cards was used.”
“You got a hit?” I said, surprised.
“Yeah. Twenty minutes ago Robin’s Amex card was used to ring up a hundred twenty thousand dollars in merchandise.”
My eyes widened. “Whoa! A hundred and twenty grand?”
“Where?” Candice asked.
Nikki shook her head. “That’s the part I’m not sure of. The code on the transaction is weird, so I’ve got to head back to the substation and do some research.”
“All right,” I said. “Go. But take Oscar with you. He’s good with stuff like that.”
Nikki’s brow lowered a little, and I could see that she was about to tell me she could handle it just fine when Oscar said, “Detective, can I buy you lunch while we track this new evidence down?”
Nikki appeared a tiny bit flustered by his sudden proposal. “Um . . . okay,” she said, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “I guess. I mean, we’ve gotta eat, right?”
“We do,” he said pleasantly.
“Lunch sounds good,” Candice said, and I wanted to slap her.
“I’m not hungry,” I said loudly. Everyone looked at me. No one believed me. Clearing my throat, I added, “What I mean is that I’m anxious to get to the investigation into Tremblee. I don’t think we have time to eat, Candice. Or at least not a sit-down meal. We should grab a to-go order from someplace. Maybe there’s a salad food truck you can find for us.”
Candice rolled her eyes and turned her head away from Nikki and Oscar to whisper in my ear, “You need to stop meddling in other people’s love life.”
I beamed innocently at her. “Fat chance of that ever happening.”
She shook her head and muttered under her breath as she walked away.
• • •
Nikki and Oscar headed to the substation after dropping us at our offices, and I bought Candice lunch before she lectured me again about meddling. The ploy worked, and she didn’t bring it up again. Maybe she was also happy to see the bud of new romance, especially for Oscar.
Anyway, we started our new investigation by setting up a little experiment; Candice and I went to the outdoor shooting range, where she got to target practice and I wore my earbuds with the volume turned up as loud as I could stand it. “Did you hear the shots?” Candice asked me after she’d killed about five paper posters.
“Not well,” I admitted, twirling the earbuds in my fingers. “These things work pretty effectively if the volume’s turned way up.”
“So what does that tell us?”
“I think it tells us that Tremblee probably didn’t hear the Roswells being murdered.”
“I doubt anyone heard them being murdered,” Candice said.
“What’s that mean?”
“The acoustics in that safe room are solid. The walls are thick as hell and I doubt a lot of sound came out of there. Certainly not enough for a neighbor to hear.”
“But wouldn’t he have heard Rosa Torrez being murdered?”
“Maybe. But she was only shot once or twice, right?”
“I don’t remember,” I said, tucking the earbuds into my purse as we got into the car.
“I think the report said something like that,” Candice said. “Anyway, my point is that she was shot
once or twice in an interior hallway of a house with good insulation and the closest neighbor a half acre away. Probably nobody heard her murder except for the people inside at the time.”
“God, this is a depressing topic,” I said. Poor Rosa. Nobody should have to die like that.
“It is, but we have a chance to bring some justice if we can figure out how these puzzle pieces fit together. Now, to your point about why Tremblee was murdered, it might have something to do with the fact that he was part of Murielle’s staff that went with Robin when she left.”
“We know that for sure?”
“No, but that’s my theory and one that I think we should follow up on.”
“Where do we start?”
Candice zipped up the case she used to carry her gun and tucked it under her seat. “I’ve been thinking about that, and I’ve decided we should start by treating Tremblee’s murder as a separate event from the others. You keep singling him out for some reason, and I think that’s your intuition telling you to do that.”
“I love that you get me.”
She laughed, and pulled her laptop out of the backseat. “Okay, so let’s look him up and see if he had any relatives in the area that we can talk to.”
Using her phone as a hot spot, Candice conducted a few searches before she said, “Got him. Mario was sharing a residence with a Walter Abbott, age fifty-two, on the east side.”
“Father?”
“Don’t think so. He’s got a different last name. Let’s go check it out.”
• • •
We arrived at the address Candice had looked up and were surprised to discover how lovely the home was. A sloping roof angled down to offer plenty of shade to a wide front porch that extended the length of the house.
Two flowering trees stood sentinel in the front yard, and between them, perfectly framed, was a porch swing with several colorful pillows and a side table ready for a pitcher of iced tea or lemonade.