I heard my friend respond, “Yeah. You Sergeant Madden?”
By the time Felicity and I came around the front of the vehicle to join him, Ben was facing a sprightly, uniformed woman with a shoulder length shag of medium brown hair. She was resting one forearm casually atop her high-riding sidearm with the thumb of her other hand hooked into her belt. Being of average stature like the majority of the people on this planet, she was forced to look up at the tall Native American cop in front of her.
They had dropped their voices back down to a normal level, so the ambient noise of radios and other officers kept us from making out their conversation until we drew close. We probably hadn’t missed much, but when we were only a few steps away, the first intelligible thing we heard was the tail end of a sentence from Madden. “…still inside. I’ll warn you, it’s not pretty.”
“It never is,” Ben sighed.
“These two with you?” Madden asked, leveling a stone-faced gaze on us as we stopped near Ben.
He nodded. “Yeah. They’re consultants for Major Case.” He wagged his index finger between us. “Rowan Gant, Felicity O’Brien. This is Sergeant Madden, Overmoor Police.”
“Sergeant,” I said, reaching out and briefly shaking her hand. Felicity did the same.
Madden lowered her forearm back to its waist level prop then jerked her head toward the house. “I’m not sure what kind of consultants you are, but I was just telling Detective Storm it’s definitely not for the squeamish in there.”
“Unfortunately we’ve seen our share,” I replied.
“Sorry to hear that.”
“So, how many?” Ben asked.
“Two that they’ve found, and that’s counting the one Captain Albright shot,” she replied, focusing back on him. “Both of them are in the basement. The upstairs is pretty much empty, but they’re going through it again just to be sure.”
“Was it a clean shoot?”
She shook her head. “I’m not the one to ask. It was already going down when SWAT made entry. We heard two shots coming from the interior. Sergeant Gordon was first in, and from what I understand, he saw what was probably a muzzle flash light up the stairwell. But he was still in the hallway and hadn’t made it to the basement door yet.”
“Same weapon?”
She shrugged. “One of the vics has two holes in him, center mass. Two shots, two holes, so that’s how it looks.”
“He have a weapon on ‘im?”
“That’s being determined,” she offered carefully, glancing at us then back to him. “We’ll know more as soon as they talk to Captain Albright.”
“Yeah,” my friend muttered in response to the veiled comment. “I got ya’… So how is Albright doin’ anyway?”
Madden shook her head. “I’m not really sure. Physically she looks fine, but she hasn’t said much. Just surrendered her weapon, flashed her badge, and then sat down in a corner. They’re working on bringing her out right now.”
“Yeah, well I’m sure ya’know one of the vics is prob’ly one of ‘er relatives. Her…” He gave a barely perceptible pause as he caught himself and then quickly finished the sentence with, “Niece.”
“Would that be Judith?”
“Yeah.”
Madden shook her head again. “Then I don’t think so. That’s about the only thing she has said so far. Where are you, Judith?”
“Hmmph,” he grunted as he furrowed his brow. Then he asked, “So, you okay with us goin’ in?”
“Let me check with the crime scene guys just to be sure,” she said. “The scene is pretty straightforward as far as the physical evidence goes, so I doubt there will be a problem.”
The sergeant left us and engaged in a short conversation with someone who appeared to be the technician running the scene. He glanced up in our direction as she pointed at us and then gave her a quick nod. A few seconds later she returned, pausing briefly to point us out to someone else.
“Sign in with Officer Fisk,” she told us, gesturing in the direction of the uniformed man she had most recently spoken with. “He can give you shoe covers and gloves too.” Then she leveled her gaze on Felicity and me. “Are you two really sure you want to go in there?”
“I never want to,” I sighed through a heavy frown. “But I do my job.”
“Yeah…” She nodded. “I hear you on that one.”
“Ya’know, this is pretty much over,” Ben said, looking over at us. “You can prob’ly skip it… I don’t think anyone’ll blame ya’, and you’ve already done what the brass asked ya’ to do.”
“No,” I replied. “I’m going to need to go in.”
“TZ?” he questioned.
I didn’t miss the inherent meaning behind the initials. “Yeah. Pretty much.”
He shot a glance at my wife. “Firehair?”
“Aye,” she said with a slight nod. “I need to be there for Rowan.”
“You gonna need any salt?” he asked.
Sergeant Madden cocked an eyebrow and gave Ben an odd look.
Felicity nudged me, so I glanced at her then shook my head.
“No,” she replied. “Not here.”
“Yeah, okay…” Ben said with a nod. “Then let’s get this over with.”
I could feel Sergeant Madden’s curious gaze burning into our backs all the way to the door.
The upstairs interior of the house was just as I had earlier described it. What I had seen of it in the vision, anyway. The basement itself was no more and no less than I expected. It was in large part barren. Little more than a low-ceilinged rectangular room with pock marked cement walls and peeling paint-and of course, the two slowly cooling bodies that occupied it.
I had seen worse, but that didn’t make the garish scene any easier to look at. The first horror to befall us when we reached the bottom of the stairs was the nude corpse of a young woman, hanging upside down from the rafters. Her flesh was pallid and so devoid of color as to appear ghostly, just as we had seen before. Her arms were bound tightly behind her in such a way as to bend her shoulders back into what had to be a painful curve. As with the two victims resting in metal drawers downtown, a starkly defined swan tattoo stood out on her right upper arm.
The odor of the musty basement mingled with the smell of old smoke from the fire that had partially destroyed the upper level. A sharp note of urine pierced through the aged funk, most likely where one or both of the victim’s bladders had evacuated upon death. As bad as it was, the intermingled malodor was an almost welcome change to the sickening stench permeating the atmosphere upstairs. It turned out that my stomach-churning ethereal brush with improperly prepared liver was nothing as compared to how it truly smelled in this plane of existence. I was beginning to think I would have to swear off the dish for some time to come.
Bright flashes from a camera strobe burst every now and then as a crime scene tech documented the sadistic tableau. I flinched upon the first then barely noticed when the second and third erupted to cast harsh shadows across the walls. Albright had already been taken out of the house by the time we entered, so it was just the corpses, him, and us down here. However, in some odd sense I felt all alone.
I stood motionless for a full minute, staring at the woman hanging from the rafter above. The crown of her head was only inches from the floor, her blue-black, stringy hair hanging down and splayed out behind her across the filthy cement like the strands of an old cotton mop tossed carelessly aside.
Still mute, I continued slowly around the suspended corpse. As I reached her left side, a plastic tube came into view. It was taped against her neck where it terminated in what appeared to be a large gauge needle piercing a vein. The opposite end was still dangling inside the mouth of a glass gallon jug, which was almost half full of red fluid. It didn’t take deep thought to figure out exactly what it was.
