the middle of the living room with Joe and looked around. The scream was here with us, but I couldn’t see anyone. It seemed to be coming from the couch, but the couch was empty.
I stepped over to the big blue couch, grabbed one end with my free hand, and tugged it away from the wall.
A young blond girl, maybe fifteen, was cowering behind the couch. She was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, her knees pulled up to her chest, protecting her. Her face was paler than the cream-colored wall behind her head, and her eyes were like nothing I’d ever seen before, not even in my days as a narcotics detective when I’d been face- to-face with people in the throes of drug-induced convulsions and fits. Her eyes held nothing but terror, and I was so frozen by them that I didn’t even realize she was fixated on the knife in my hand until Joe took it away from me and threw it across the room.
“Stop,” he said to the girl.
I don’t know how he did it with just one softly spoken word, but she stopped. The girl went silent and stared at us, her chest heaving, and only then did I notice the blood on her shoes.
It was fresh, still sticky, but only on the ends of her shoes, as if she’d dipped her toes into it, like someone testing the temperature of water in a swimming pool. Joe saw it, too.
“Where is he?” he asked, understanding something that I hadn’t begun to consider yet.
She didn’t speak—couldn’t speak, probably—but she lifted a shaking hand and extended her index finger, pointed it at the floor.
“Basement,” Joe said, and stepped away. I went with him.
There was an open door at the other side of the living room, beside a staircase that led up to the second level. Once we were closer, we could see carpeted steps leading down. I noticed a few tacky crimson smears on the carpet. She’d come up this way.
Joe went down first. I followed, wishing he hadn’t taken the knife from me. My heart was thumping, my hands clenched into fists, my muscles tense. We reached the bottom of the steps and came out in a finished basement room with another couch and television, a bookshelf on the wall. Everything looked normal. Joe was still looking in that direction when I turned right and went around the wall.
There was a pool table there, and a dead man beneath it. The body was slumped on the floor, the legs exposed and the torso shoved under the table. Blood was pooled around the body, more of it on the wall behind the pool table, along with bits of flesh and tissue, splattered remnants of a large-caliber gunshot blast.
I opened my mouth to say something to Joe, but he was already beside me, inhaling a long, sharp breath between his teeth.
“The girl,” I said. “Get back upstairs. Get an ambulance down here, a doctor or therapist or someone to help her.”
He turned and went up the stairs, his footsteps loud, the wall beside me trembling as he hurried back up to the living room.
I moved forward.
The blood was still wet in the center of the pool, sticky at the edges. It had puddled against the man’s legs, and a coppery smell was heavy near the body. I dropped to one knee beside his legs, and as I did, the smell came up stronger, overwhelming me, and I gagged. I leaned forward, lifting a hand to my mouth as I choked, thick bile rising in my throat. I fought it down, closed my eyes, and covered my mouth and nose. I was not a homicide detective, and while I’d seen bodies before, I hadn’t seen so many that my brain and my body were trained not to react. I took a few seconds with my eyes closed, concentrating on a slow, shallow breaths, and then I felt ready. I opened my eyes and leaned under the pool table.
It was Larry Rabold. Three-quarters of his face was visible, but the upper left corner, beginning above his cheekbone and extending to his eye and temple, was gone. Blown away. A bloody mess of pulp left in its place, no skin or bone visible.
He’d been shot once in the face, a close-range shot with a high-caliber gun. I’d seen small-caliber gunshot wounds before, and this was not one of them. The close range was obvious both from the extent of damage and from a speckling of tiny hemorrhages on his cheek and jawline. That’s called stippling or tattooing, and it’s the result of burned powder and fragments driven into the skin. You don’t get those marks when the gun is held far away from the victim.
When I could finally bring myself to look away from his face, I realized he’d been shot twice more. There were large holes torn through his torso, one in the chest just above the heart, another in the stomach. Blood still leaked out of the chest wound, and a part of his insides, some thin black organ, ran through the mess. I felt the rise of vomit again, but then I realized the black strand I was looking at wasn’t part of his body, at all. It was a wire.
I leaned forward, the desire to understand what I was looking at overriding the nausea, and then I noticed that half of Rabold’s shirt had been pulled free from his pants. He’d had it tucked in, but the right side was free.
There was a ballpoint pen in my pocket. I took it out and reached out to Rabold’s body, gingerly slipped the tip of the pen between his shirt collar and his neck, and pulled it back. The collar slid away from his neck only an inch or so, but it was enough. Clipped to the inside of Rabold’s collar was a seed microphone—an extremely tiny, extremely sensitive microphone that is used for covert recording. Son of a bitch.
I moved the pen away and let Rabold’s collar fall back in place, then rocked onto my heels and thought about it. A seed microphone like that could be outfitted with a wireless transmitter that sends the conversations to an off-site recorder, but those units were sophisticated, rare, and damn expensive. Far more common was a setup where the microphone ran back to a tiny digital recorder, some of them as small as a nine-volt battery, concealed somewhere on the body.
Sticking the pen out once again, I slid it beneath the free end of Rabold’s shirt and lifted. The bottom of his shirt rose a few inches, and I cocked my head, straining to see. There, against Rabold’s pale, fat belly, was the end of the microphone cord, leading to . . . nothing. At the end of the wire a bit of bare copper was exposed. The wire had been cut, and whatever recorder it had led to was missing.
The proximity to the corpse got to me then, in a sudden, overwhelming wave. I slid back out from under the pool table and stood up. I made it three steps toward the stairs before my vision blurred and it seemed my heartbeat was suddenly coming from my temples. I put my left hand out and found the wall, leaned up against it, and bit down hard on my lip. The burst of pain cleared my head.
I kept one hand on the wall while I went up the stairs, my knees unsteady until I was near the top. When I came out into the living room, Joe was sitting on the floor beside the couch. The blond girl was still curled up, breathing in ragged gaps. I couldn’t see her face, just the jerking rise and fall of her chest. Joe’s hand rested gently on her knee. Her own hand was wrapped around his wrist, painted fingernails biting into his flesh.
I stood and stared at Joe. His eyes were distant. Cop eyes. Cop mode, now. I needed to get back into it, myself.
“You make the call?” I said.
He nodded, said, “Is it . . . ,” but didn’t finish the question, because he didn’t want to say Rabold’s name. Not with the girl who was probably Rabold’s daughter a few feet away.
“Yeah,” I said.
I couldn’t look at the girl anymore. I walked away from them, to the front of the room, and peered out the window, waiting for the police. I stayed on my feet. Somehow, it felt stronger than sitting. I needed to feel strong, right then.
CHAPTER 16
By the time Cal Richards got there, we’d learned Rabold’s daughter, Mary, had probably been home for almost thirty minutes before we’d arrived. A neighbor remembered seeing her drive in, alone, and told the cops this in a high, hysterical voice that Joe and I could hear plainly from where we stood beside one of the squad cars. When
