smarter than us. It was what it was and it never lied.
Chapter Seven
When I was assigned to the Dallas office, we lived in a new subdivision that must have been landscaped with a steamroller, it was so?at. Half the families that lived on our block were with the Bureau, some of the agents buying their houses from the agent they were replacing, knowing they would sell it to their replacement a few years down the road. We knew each other’s spouses, kids, and dogs. Everyone looked out for everyone else, watching each other’s houses when someone was away for the weekend. The level terrain and the absence of trees more than eight feet tall made it easy to see everything.
We were watchers, noticers, detail people. Something strange, someone new, something that didn’t look or feel right, we picked up on it. It was what we were trained to do.
Frank Tyler lived three houses down from us. He was a computer programmer, worked out of his house, jogged every morning, waved to me when I drove Kevin and Wendy to school. Every year he dragged his Weber grill to the end of the street for the Fourth of July block party, grilling hot dogs and making balloon animals for the kids.
I must have seen his face a thousand times. Brown, welcoming eyes pinched at the corners; they always seemed to me to be from laughter and sun. A once-broken nose, crooked enough to make his face slightly off-kilter in an interesting sort of way. His mouth was full, his smile quick and easy. He wore his dark hair in a casual cut, angling across his forehead. That’s all I saw. It wasn’t enough.
Joy always picked the kids up from school. One day, she had car trouble. Frank worked at home and she asked if she could borrow his car. He told her that he had some errands to run and would be happy to swing by the school and pick up the kids. Wendy had Girl Scouts that afternoon. Kevin was the only one who would be coming home. She called the school to let them know that Frank would pick him up.
When Frank didn’t come back, Joy called the school. They told her that Frank had been there, shown identification, and signed the form confirming that he was taking Kevin as she had authorized. One of the teachers remembered seeing Kevin get in the car with Frank.
Worried, Joy went to Frank’s house, knocked, and went in when she found the door unlocked. She walked through the house, stopping in the den, where she found stacks of child pornography on a coffee table. That’s when she called me.
Today it’s called an Amber Alert. Back then we didn’t have a name for it. We didn’t need one. All agents dropped what they were doing to find Kevin. The Dallas police scoured the streets. A highway patrolman spotted Tyler’s car southbound on I-35 between Austin and San Marcos a few hours after he’d taken Kevin. The chase lasted thirteen minutes. It ended when Tyler ran over spikes the patrol had spread across the interstate to puncture his tires, the car swerving into the concrete median barrier. I was in a helicopter heading for the scene when Tyler shot Kevin and then put the gun under his chin, blowing up the face that had fooled me.
I thought about Kevin each time I stepped into a crime scene, promising him I would get it right this time, that I wouldn’t let him down and be deceived again by a friendly smile, an anguished cry, a poker face, or any of the other masks people wore.
I learned to trust hard facts, lab work, and the polygraph. My jury consultant friend, Kate Scranton, was different. She was all about behavioral clues-leakage, she called it-the face more than the body, the heart more than the mind. I wanted proof beyond a reasonable doubt. She wanted the truth, saying they weren’t always the same thing.
I stood in the doorway, absorbing the scene, letting the dead and the details talk to me, comparing the images with the hours of surveillance tape I had watched. I recognized the card table Marcellus used to conduct his business and the Louisville Slugger standing in the corner that had earned him his reputation. Plastic sandwich bags containing crack were scattered across the table’s vinyl surface, all of it probably worth less than ten thousand dollars on the street. It may have been enough to kill five people for, but at least for this killer, it wasn’t enough to steal after they were dead. That didn’t mean the murders weren’t about drugs. It only meant that the murders weren’t about
The walls were bare. No pictures, no mirrors, no clocks. The hardwood?oors were warped, a dimension I couldn’t see on the video; an upturned box of Chinese leftovers sat in one corner, a trail of fried rice littered across the?oor. The only other furniture was two folding canvas chairs. This was a place of business, not a home, the old television in the corner the only concession to comfort.
The bodies rested in pools of blood beneath where they’d fallen. I’d let the crime scene specialists find the bullets, calculate the trajectories pre- and post-entry, but it wasn’t hard to pin down the basics.
Marcellus was on his back, his shoes less than five feet from the door, closer than the Winston brothers by several feet, the difference enough to make him the first victim the killer had confronted. That fit with me hearing him yell “what the fuck?” the instant before I heard gunfire. The entry wounds on Marcellus’s body were in his gut and chest, the volume of blood indicating that at least one bullet had hit an artery, probably causing him to bleed to death.
The Winston brothers were slumped on the?oor on either side of the television. Rondell had taken a round in the belly and a round in the groin. DeMarcus was hit in the left thigh and the neck.
A professional would have put all his rounds in the killing zone-the center chest, making sure with a final round in the back of the head after his targets were down. This looked like the work of an amateur who had gotten lucky, except amateurs weren’t likely to use night-vision goggles. That wasn’t the only mixed message.
The killer was organized, turning off the power, using night-vision goggles, picking up his shell casings. Organized killers were the most difficult to catch because they left so little evidence at the scene.
But then there were the bloody footprints. The killer had stepped in Marcellus’s blood, leaving dark red footsteps going up the stairs. He’d stepped in the blood a second time, leaving another set of footprints from Marcellus’ body to the back of the house. I couldn’t be certain about which set of footprints came first, but my sequence made the most sense. Kill these three, then do Jalise and Keyshon, then out the back door.
I followed the second set of prints through the kitchen and turned on the back porch light. The rain had washed out any other footprints, though I hoped the crime scene people would find trace amounts of blood in the concrete. I walked back to the stairs, reassessing a killer who had been good enough to shoot three men in the dark and who had been organized but careless enough not to wipe his feet.
Someone on the SWAT team had also stepped in the blood, proving that it was easy to do. His ridged boot prints were easily distinguished from the?at, rounded prints left by the killer. There were a few partial prints that were clear enough to indicate the surface of the sole. It didn’t have a pattern like an athletic shoe and it didn’t have the smooth, even appearance of leather shoes. And it was wider than a normal shoe, like it was made by something that had been slipped over a shoe. Maybe the killer had worn galoshes so he wouldn’t get his shoes wet in the rain or bloody in the house.
I hesitated before going upstairs, turning toward the front door, conjuring the killer as he entered the house, testing another assumption I’d made. There had been only one killer. If there had been more, there likely would have been another set of footprints that didn’t match those left by the SWAT team.
The smell of blood and bodies hit me as I climbed the stairs. It had been there all along, but I’d been too focused on the scene to notice. It was a too familiar stench, but I never got used to it. My stomach was churning as much from the pungent odor as the anticipation of what I would find in the bedroom.
The clothes hanging in the closet had been swept to either side like a parted curtain, exposing where Jalise Williams had been hiding. She was on her knees, bent over her child, the back of her head a pulpy mess, with two more entry wounds in the middle of her back. Keyshon’s hand was wrapped tightly in his mother’s hair, the rest of him hidden.
I crouched next to her, my chest trembling, the shakes waiting to be let loose and wanting to touch the boy’s hand. I searched for a glimpse of his face, finding it buried against his mother’s neck, and wondered in a fanciful moment if our two sons-hers and mine-would somehow find each other on the other side. Mine was not a conscious faith, born of study and contemplation. I had more hope than belief that pain and suffering and good deeds would be rewarded in some afterlife. I accepted the notion of free will but had seen enough to doubt the wisdom of a God
