flashes of light. Someone was taking photographs.
“How bad is it?” I said.
“As bad as it gets. Walk through the trees to the left or the right. Don’t walk on the road. They’re making casts of foot- and tire prints.”
As I made my way through the trees, I noticed a full moon creeping up behind a hill to the northeast, almost as though it was afraid of what it would see when it cleared the ridge. When I got to within twenty yards of the flashlights, I could hear muffled voices. I yelled out, “Lee Mooney!”
“Over here,” a voice called in return.
“Can I walk on the road?”
“Stop where you are,” Mooney said. “I’ll come to you.”
I saw the beam of a flashlight making its way towards me. I assumed it was Mooney. I waved my light at him. He stopped about thirty feet away and said, “Walk straight to me.”
I nearly tripped in a small ditch and came up on the road. It was a little bit gritty and somewhat soft, made of a mixture of soil, sand, clay, and chat.
“Welcome to hell,” Mooney said. He was wearing an overcoat and gloves and he was shivering. When my flashlight hit his face, he looked as pale as the moon that was coming over the horizon.
“Do I want to go back there?” I knew perfectly well that I didn’t.
“Depends on the strength of your stomach. Worst I’ve ever seen.”
I’d seen dead bodies before, but it was long ago and far away. My experience defending murderers had sometimes required me to examine gruesome photographs, but I knew this would be different. I shrugged my shoulders.
“We’ve got four shot to pieces,” he said. “Man, woman, and two children. They’re all dead.” His voice had a higher pitch than normal. In the cold darkness, it sounded almost as though it were being piped in over a transistor radio.
“What can I do?” I said.
“Just come on back here with me and take a look around. Maybe you’ll spot something we’ve missed.”
Mooney told me to walk directly behind him. We rounded a slight bend and I could see a man kneeling and gingerly picking up objects from the ground and placing them in an evidence bag. As I got closer I could see that he was picking up shell casings. A lot of shell casings. Another officer with “CSU” on the back of his jacket was pouring liquid plaster into a footprint on the ground. Others were searching the surrounding area with flashlights. A photographer was kneeling over something a few feet away. A light flashed.
I suddenly noticed two pairs of legs protruding from the ditch onto the road beneath the photographer. One pair of legs was longer than the other and covered with what appeared to be slacks. There were brown shoes on the feet. The shorter pair of legs was bare. The right foot was wearing a black pump. The left foot, like the legs, was bare. I noticed something else: The bottom half of the legs were bent at a grotesque angle.
I stopped cold.
Lying across the legs at right angles were the blood-soaked children, both facedown. The smaller child was on top of the longer pair of legs, the larger child on top of the shorter pair. I stared at them, momentarily unable to think.
“Somebody placed them like that after they were shot,” Mooney was saying. “And there’s something else-you see how the bottoms of the legs are bent? The sonsabitches ran over them when they left. Shot them point-blank and they fell straight back into the ditch. Shot the kids and placed them facedown on top of the parents. Then they ran right over their legs. They’re broken to hell.”
“Sonsabitches?” I said. “There was more than one?”
“At least two. Maybe more.”
“How do you know?”
“There are footprints all over the place, but it’ll take a while before we can sort it all out. The crime scene guys tell me it looks like they came in one vehicle, a large one, van or truck maybe. They drove down the road a ways and turned around. There are footprints around the tire tracks where the vehicle stopped. They lined them up next to the ditch and executed them.”
“How’d we find out about it?”
“Somebody heard gunshots and called it in. Young deputy, only been on the job four weeks, came out here and found them. He’s sitting in a cruiser over there. I tried to talk to him, but he’s too upset right now. He’s just sitting there in a daze.”
I could smell blood in the air. There was a lot of blood on the children, but I couldn’t quite see the adults. The prurient in me urged me to move closer to the bodies, to take a look at their faces. I hesitated, and Mooney sensed what I was feeling.
“You don’t want to look,” he said. “The man and the woman were both shot at least six times. Both of them were shot in the right eye. So were the children. I wish I hadn’t seen that little boy…”
His voice trailed off. I remembered that Mooney and his wife adopted an infant a few years ago. A little boy. Must be three or four years old now.
“Do we know who they are?” I asked quietly.
“We know who the man is. His name is Beck, Bjorn Beck. Thirty years old, Johnson City address. They left his wallet in his pocket. It had thirteen dollars in it.”
“Nothing on the woman?”
“Not yet. I’m assuming she’s his wife until somebody tells me otherwise. We’ve got TBI agents in Johnson City checking out the address right now. We should know something soon.”
I began to rock back and forth and stamp my feet. Even though I couldn’t see my breath, the cold felt as though it had penetrated the marrow in my bones.
“Cold, isn’t it?” Mooney said. His voice was trembling slightly.
I didn’t say anything, but I looked at him. When he looked back, I could see fear in his eyes.
“It wasn’t this cold when I left the house,” he said. “Seems like the temperature dropped twenty degrees when I got here.”
“Yeah, I felt it, too.”
“You ever hear or read anything about evil?”
It was a strange question, one that I pondered briefly. Of course I’d heard of evil. Of course I’d read about evil.
“Ever read anything about Catholic priests performing exorcisms?” Mooney continued. “They say they experience a sensation of coldness, just like this.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“What happened here was evil. The cold-blooded execution of an entire family. They didn’t take his wallet, so it wasn’t a robbery. All of them shot in the right eye. Running over their legs after they were dead.”
I looked down at my boots for a moment. I’d noticed the drop in temperature. I’d noticed the reaction of my dog. I felt the presence of something I’d never felt before, but I didn’t want to admit it or discuss it. All I wanted was to get the hell out of there.
Mooney turned towards me again. His eyes were moist, his voice still shaky. “You have to promise me something,” he said. “You have to promise me that when we find the sick bastards who did this, you’ll see to it that every one of them gets the needle. No screwups. No deals. Whoever shot those two children needs to be removed from the gene pool.”
The words hit me like scalding water. I’d spent a good portion of my legal career trying to keep the government from executing people, and now there I stood, in the dark, cold woods, listening to a man tell me I must promise to use my newly acquired power to make sure someone died. I looked at Mooney again. He was nearly in tears.
“I’ll do what’s right, Lee,” I said, “as soon as I figure out what it is.”
PART II
