“Anything?” Candice asked me. She knew I was trying to feel Dave’s imprint in the ether.
I shrugged my shoulders. “Not much here,” I said.
“Okay, let’s keep going.”
We arrived at Roger Mulligan’s place just over ten minutes later. His home was stately and tasteful, and there was a large modern sculpture on the front lawn. The backyard was partially visible from the road, and when I got out of the car to get a feel of the place, I could see three youngsters running around the backyard boisterously with two enormous Great Danes trotting along beside them.
Candice took off her sunglasses and peered at the yard next to me. “There’s a couple that have their hands full,” she said.
“I think what you meant to say was, ‘Yikes.’”
“Definitely,” Candice said, donning her sunglasses again and motioning with her shoulder for us to head back to the car.
We hopped in and she said, “Anything?”
“Not really,” I said again. “I can feel him, but it’s subtle.”
“Well, let’s hope it gets more clear as we go along,” she said.
I admired her optimism.
We stopped next at Sylvia Ramirez’s home, which was smaller than most of the other mansions around, but maybe only by two thousand feet or so. Still, the estate was on a large plot of land with a sizable stable and a large garden. There were people all over the property, coming and going, and several cars parked in the driveway. Candice and I didn’t get out of the car here, because we didn’t want to spook anybody by standing at the foot of the entrance and looking around. “Should we keep going?” Candice asked after a minute or two of sitting off on the shoulder.
“Yeah,” I said. “There’s nothing here.”
Ten minutes after that, we arrived at Chris Wixom’s place. There were no visible cars parked in the driveway, and all the blinds were closed. “Is he traveling?” I asked. The house had that shuttered feeling.
“Don’t know,” Candice said. “Dutch talked to him, I think.”
I frowned, feeling uneasy. Something was bothering me, but I couldn’t put my finger on it other than a sense of urgency had just settled into the pit of my stomach. “Let’s keep going,” I said.
Finally we arrived at the last stop on Dave’s list. It was only about three miles away from his previous stop, and we pulled up to the front gate, which was formed out of solid metal and offered no view of the home or the surrounding grounds. “These guys really like their privacy,” I said.
Candice surprised me by ignoring the shoulder and pulling forward into the driveway right up to the call box.
As she rolled her window down to get to the button on the box, I said, “We’re going to talk to them?” We hadn’t bothered any of the other clients.
“Brice never got ahold of them, remember? And they would’ve been the last people to have seen Dave. He might’ve mentioned where he was going after he left them.”
“Right,” I said. “Good point.”
While we waited for someone inside to pick up, I leaned back in my seat and sighed. I’d used a lot of effort to keep my intuition up and running all morning. It was draining stuff and I needed a break soon or I’d get a nasty headache. In fact, I had one already starting. Thinking I might need some Excedrin, I opened my eyes to reach for my purse, where I had a bottle of the painkiller, when my breath caught. My gaze had landed on something that made me forget all about my headache.
“Candice?” I whispered.
She was busy craning herself out the window to press the call button again. “Yeah?”
“I don’t think anyone’s going to answer.”
She pulled her head back inside the car and looked over at me. “Your radar telling you they’re not home?”
“Oh, I think they’re home. Or they were when that went down.” Raising a shaking hand, I pointed through the windshield to the front gate.
Candice’s gaze shifted accordingly. “Holy shit!” she exclaimed. “Is that . . . ?”
“A bloody handprint? Yeah. I think it is.”
For a moment we sat there frozen and mute. And then Candice reached under her seat, withdrew her gun, and was out of the car and moving toward the gate faster than you could say, “Annie Oakley.” I followed right on her heels.
“Call nine-one-one,” she said over her shoulder as we trotted forward.
My hands were trembling and I fumbled the effort of pulling my phone out of my pocket, but managed it just as Candice pushed the butt of her gun against the metal panel of the gate. It swung inward a few inches.
“Shit!” I said just as the 911 operator came on the line.
“What’s your emergency?” a woman’s voice asked.
I stared at that bloody handprint, which was already a rusty brown in places, and my mind went blank. For several seconds, I couldn’t seem to articulate in my mind what the emergency actually was. “We’re . . . we’re . . . at this house, and something bad has happened.”
“What is your location, ma’am?” the operator asked.
Candice waved at me to get behind her while she pushed the security gate open a little more to reveal the concrete driveway leading to the house. On the pavement were small droplets of dried blood. “Oh, sweet Jesus!” I whispered. “Candice, that’s bad!”
She looked back at me and motioned with her free hand for me to continue on with the call. “Ma’am?” the operator said again. “I need your location, please.”
“I’m at . . . ,” I began, only to realize that I didn’t have a clue where the hell we were. “Hold on,” I told her, then pulled up my own maps feature and focused on the blue blinking dot on the screen. “We’re at seven-five-six-three River Run Lane.”
“What seems to be wrong there, ma’am?”
“There’s blood,” I told her, inching closer to Candice, who was now tiptoeing forward through the gate. “There’s a lot of blood.”
“Where are you?” she asked.
“I’m in the driveway.”
“Can you see if anyone is hurt?”
I looked around the front yard with tense anticipation, expecting to lay my eyes on a dead body or two at any moment. “Uh . . . not that I can see.”
“Can you see inside the house?” she asked next.
Candice was still moving forward, and I was right behind her. We were edging close to the home, which was a beautiful modern structure of stucco, wood, and glass. “Not quite yet,” I said. I was trembling now in earnest. The energy all around the house was radiating violence—as if all the blood hadn’t already spoken to that.
“Okay, ma’am, I’m going to ask that you stay where you are and wait for the police. I’ve already dispatched them, and they’re on their way to you.”
“O-o-okay,” I stuttered. I was scared shitless.
Candice had now reached the front walk, which led to an oversized wood door with a big metal handle. The door had more blood smeared on it and it was partially open.
That’s when the acrid scent hit me. Blood has a very distinctive smell. It’s part metallic, part organic, part stomach turning. For it to have reached my nose from out on the front porch, there must have been a lot of it inside, and I shuddered anew.
Candice must’ve picked up on the scent too, because she turned to look back at me, her lips pressed tightly together and her eyes narrowed. “I think we’re too late.”
“We should wait out here,” I whispered.
She shook her head. “If there’s even a chance that someone’s still alive in there, I gotta go see,” she said softly.
And then, there was a question in her eyes, and I knew what she was asking. She wanted to know if I was coming with her, or staying out on the porch.
I badly wanted to run back to the car and stay there with my fingers in my ears and my eyes tightly closed, beca
use I knew there was no unseeing whatever horror lay past that front foyer.
But Candice would never have let me go inside alone. That is the sole reason why I nodded to her that I’d have her back.
We proceeded cautiously, but not exactly slowly; stepping very carefully over the droplets of blood, we kept to the edges of the entryway and then the front hall. In front of us was a large spiral staircase, and the droplets appeared to have originated up the steps.
I bit back the bile forming in the back of my throat as we climbed them one stair at a time, me wondering why I hadn’t heard the sound of sirens yet.
At the top of the stairs, lying on the threshold to the hallway, we found the first dead body.
I clamped my hand over my mouth when I took in the petite woman with silver hair, dressed in a gray smock with a white apron. She was slumped against the wall and there was a large bloody smear mark directly behind her. She was pale and stiff, and clearly dead, but Candice paused to put her fingers against the woman’s neck anyway, feeling for a pulse.
She rose only a second or two later, turned to me, and shook her head.
Tears stung my eyes and my knees were shaking so hard I didn’t know if they’d hold me up. I felt a wave of sadness for this poor woman who’d been here innocently working her job when she’d been gunned down. She looked like someone’s mother. Or grandmother. I wondered, who at home was worried for her well-being? Who would soon learn that today would forever be the worst day of their life?
Candice reached out and squeezed my arm, calling my attention back to her. “You okay?” she mouthed.
I shook my head, the tears spilling out onto my cheeks. “Yes,” I whispered, because I knew I had to be.
Her expression turned sympathetic, but she motioned over her shoulder with her gun. We had to continue to check for victims who might be alive, and clear the house if we could.
I nodded and we continued forward while I sent out a small prayer to the deceased woman behind us. I didn’t know her name, but I hoped very much that she’d managed to cross over to the other side and was free from the horror of this home.
Candice led the way to the the open door of what I thought might be the master bedroom. We entered and I was so tense that I couldn’t seem to take more than a shallow breath. The room was dim, but not dark, made so by the cocoa-colored paint on the walls and the partially drawn drapes.
It was a big room with thick wool carpeting and an enormous headboard that rose from floor to ceiling. At first, no one appeared to be in the room, but then I saw that the door to the closet was wide open, the interior lit.
Candice advanced and very faintly I heard the first sound of approaching sirens. It seemed like forever ago that I’d called for help, but realistically it’d probably been closer to three or four minutes. I almost turned back then, because help was almost here, but Candice continued to advance like she had to know what was in that closet, and I didn’t think I could abandon her now.
We came to the doorway together and as we took in the sight, a small, horrified gasp escaped my lips.
A couple, quite probably Mr. and Mrs. Roswell, had died in each other’s embrace. They were riddled with bullets, rendering their faces all but unrecognizable, but they’d gone down holding on to each other to rest in a heap of tangled limbs and so much crimson.
There was so much blood, in fact, that I couldn’t escape the smell, and I turned away from the scene and fled. I didn’t stop until I was outside, close to the car, and that’s when I lost my cookies.
For an hour or so after that, I wasn’t able to take anything else in.
Chapter Five
Dutch squatted down in front of me. “How you doin’, dollface?”
I wiped my eyes and sniffled. “Shitty. You?”
“Not quite as bad as that, but getting there,” he admitted.
“Did you see the crime scene?”
His gaze fell to the ground and he nodded. “Yeah. Grim stuff.”
I worked to swallow past the lump in my throat. “They were butchered. I’ve never seen anyone cut to ribbons like that.”
“Assault rifles will do that,” he said. “Which means that whoever did it was playing for keeps.”
I looked over my shoulder at the half-dozen police vehicles and all the responders currently gathering evidence. There was a crime tech carefully photographing the bloody handprint on the security gate, which I hoped would yield the perfect set of fingerprints to nail the son of a bitch who’d committed such carnage.
“Have they confirmed that it was the Roswells?” I asked next. The murdered couple upstairs in the house were unrecognizable, and while I strongly suspected it’d been the homeowners, I wasn’t certain.
“It looks like it,” Dutch said. “Their fingerprints match those found most consistently all over the house on several personal articles. The coroner will have the final say, but nobody here thinks it’s anyone different.”
“What about the woman on the stairs?”
“That was Rosa Torrez,” Dutch said with a sad sigh. “She was the Roswells’ live-in housekeeper. I met her when I first came out here to do the estimate. Really nice woman. APD found her green card in a purse located in one of the back bedrooms that appears to be hers. APD is working to locate her next of kin.”
“Anybody know what the motive was, yet?” I asked.
Dutch rubbed the back of his neck and adjusted the lanyard that held his FBI badge. “Definitely a robbery, but we’re not sure yet if the murders were premeditated,” he said. “There’s cash and a laptop missing. The safe in the panic room was also breached, but I think that Andy Roswell might’ve opened it himself.”
I studied the house with my intuitive senses in silence for a moment. The energy surrounding the home was thick with violence and tragedy. I hate lingering at crime scenes for that very reason. “The scene is all wrong,” I said to him. “Why weren’t any of the alarms triggered?”
“I can’t say for sure, but it looks like they’d been disabled. There’s a panic button in the security room, but it was never triggered. My guess is that the Roswells turned off the alarm during the day, and only set it at night, so the home would’ve been vulnerable if the home invasion happened after about nine a.m. And it looks like the motor to the panic room door still wasn’t working, which means they were even more vulnerable to an attack.”
There was a pause between us and I wondered if Dutch was feeling as infuriated as I was about the replacement kits for the motor to the panic room doors not working. If Dave had been able to fix the door when he was here, maybe the Roswells would still be alive.
“Was there any security footage?” I asked.
Dutch stood up from his squatted position to kick at a pebble. He didn’t answer me right away and there was a tense set to his shoulders, and a look on his face I didn’t at all like. He seemed riddled with guilt. And even though the malfunction with the door wasn’t in any way his fault, I suspected he was blaming himself for it regardless.
“Babe?” I asked.
Rubbing his neck again, he said, “The cameras were disabled. There’s no footage.”
My brow furrowed. “Wait, if the cameras were disabled, wouldn’t you still have access to the feed right beforehand? Doesn’t that get routed to some security center somewhere?” I could’ve sworn I remembered Dutch talking about how, during a home invasion scenario when a client was sealed inside one of the panic rooms, a video camera would automatically route the feed directly to a monitored hub, and police would be alerted while someone in a remote location kept in communication with the homeowners.
“I’ve checked, Abs. The surveillance cameras were taken off-line sometime within the past couple of days.”
“So, whoever breached the house knew about the cameras and somehow took them off-line right before the house was breached?”
Dutch clear
ed his throat. “Yeah.”
An unsettling feeling planted itself in the center of my chest. “How could someone do that?”
He shook his head. “It would’ve required some extensive casing of the house. Which means that a lot of thought and effort went into this home invasion, and it wouldn’t have been random. Someone targeted them, learned their habits, took out the security cameras, might’ve even known about the malfunctioning door to the panic room, and waited to hit them at exactly the right time when they’d be the most vulnerable.”
Again I looked toward the house and this time I shuddered. I felt so strongly that what we’d discovered inside was only a piece of a larger puzzle. There was more information to come that would have an even bigger significance in some way.
Brice walked up to us with Candice at his side. “Hey,” he said by way of greeting before focusing on me. “Cooper, are you okay?”
“I’m fine, Brice, thanks,” I said, standing up from my seat on the curb. While I was grateful for his inquiry, I seriously wished people would stop asking me that. The truth was, I wasn’t fine, but the more attention that was called to me, the less focus went to what was important—namely, the murders of the Roswells and their housekeeper. “Did you guys learn anything?”
I knew that Dutch, Brice, and Candice had been busy talking to different law-enforcement individuals at the crime scene, hoping to gain as much information as possible from all the sources available. The murders weren’t FBI jurisdiction, but because Candice and I had been first on the scene, and Dutch and Brice were head of the company that provided a security room for the couple, and all four of us were connected to the FBI, there was information to share and to glean.
“There’s a fourth victim,” Brice said with a grimace. “They just found another of the Roswells’ staff in the backyard.”
I sucked in some air. “Who was it?”
“Looks like a groundskeeper,” he said. “A man with a set of pruning shears still in his hands was shot in the back of the head at point-blank range. He was wearing earbuds and his music was turned up, so I doubt he ever knew what was happening inside the house before he was killed. There was ID in his pocket, and APD is working to notify his next of kin along with everyone else murdered here.”