*
The phone at the police station in Belle River rang six times before someone picked up.
‘How old did you say the case was?’ The man had a smoker’s gravelly voice.
‘August 1977.’
‘Hang on a sec.’ He muffled the phone to shout something, before coming back on the line. ‘Name of the perpetrator?’
‘Timothy Warren Stern.’ She paused. ‘He murdered his mother and two sisters.’
‘Stern? Oh, sure,’ he said. ‘I heard about that case. Long before my time, though. Not much in the way of violent crime around here, so a case like that sticks in your head.’
‘If it’s possible,’ Erin said, ‘I’d like to speak to the officer in charge of the case.’
‘Don’t know what he can tell you that’s not in the police report, but I’ll have someone dig up the name for you. Call back tomorrow. I should have it by then.’
*
The punishing Florida sun glittered in a flat blue sky. After driving for an hour through an unending stream of salt flats and housing developments, the taxi pulled up to a gated community on the water, home of Harry Talbot, the detective on the Stern case. At the gatehouse, a guard checked Erin’s name against a list before waving her through. Masses of pink and white flowers from the oleander hedge lined the driveway. On the clipped lawn, date palms were arranged in mathematical precision. Crouching low to the ground, a crew of groundskeepers worked their clippers amongst the foliage, decapitating weeds and snipping errant blades of grass.
In less than a minute, her blouse was damp, her loose cotton trousers stuck to the back of her thighs. She followed the numbered arrows to a lime-green bungalow set on a postcard-sized lawn of prickly grass. It was a long way from the salt-pocked granite and pine forests of Belle River. Her sandals crunched along a path of crushed coral and broken shells that led to the front door. Before she could press the bell, a man with a shock of white hair and a deeply lined face stepped onto the porch. His yellow polo shirt and khakis were rumpled, as if he’d just woken from a nap.
‘Come on in out of the sun. It’s a sizzler today, isn’t it?’ He ushered Erin through a tiled foyer and into the living room. White plantation shutters filtered the sun’s rays. ‘You must be about ready to melt. Not used to this kind of heat, are you? I can crank up the air con if you’d like.’
She shook her head. The room was as frigid as a meat locker. Erin slipped her arms into her linen jacket as Talbot crossed into the open-plan kitchen.
‘Would you like a glass of iced tea? Adele made a fresh pitcher this morning.’
‘Thank you, that would be lovely.’
She perched on the couch upholstered in pale peach fabric.
On the wall, a clock in the shape of a pelican ticked away the minutes. Talbot returned with a tray and handed Erin a glass before lowering himself into an easy chair. His right hip seemed to be bothering him, but his eyes were lively, with the keen glint of a cop back on the beat.
‘You’ve come a long way to pick the brain of an old man.’ He rattled the ice cubes in his glass before taking a sip of his drink.
Outside, a lawnmower started up, slicing through the stillness. ‘I’ve read the police report,’ Erin said, setting her glass on the table. ‘It was very thorough, but what I’m really interested in is your impression of the case.’ She struggled to sit up straight on the slippery fabric. ‘Whatever you can remember.’
‘Well, when it comes to the Stern case, my memory’s as sharp as a tack. Though sometimes I wish it weren’t so good,’ he said, rubbing his eyes. ‘The scenes in that house will stay with me to the grave.’ He plucked his glasses from a shirt pocket and settled them on his face. ‘Where do you want me to start?’
‘From the beginning, if you don’t mind.’
‘That would be when the call came in,’ he said, scratching his jaw. ‘I was on desk duty. Just after ten it was, when the neighbour called, a widow living on her own. The Stern’s dog had been barking all morning, so she walked to the mailbox at the end of her driveway, where she had a partial view of the Stern home. The front door was ajar, that’s what she noticed first, and Mrs Stern’s car, a blue Pontiac sedan, was parked in the driveway. But there was no one out front, so she waited for a minute or two, assuming that Mrs Stern or one of the children had gone inside to fetch something and would come right out. But no one did, and the dog was still barking like crazy.’
Talbot hauled himself from the chair to close the slats on the shutters. ‘When nobody appeared,’ he said, running his finger along the sill as if checking for dust, ‘she went over there and called out from the front yard. But no one answered, so she looked through the window. That’s when she saw the blood splashed all over the walls and fled back to her house. The poor woman was hysterical. I jumped into an unmarked car with a uniformed cop named Danny Calhoun and hightailed it out there. No lights, no siren. We didn’t want to alert the perpetrator, in case he was still inside. Hot as Hades that day. I can still remember how the steam was rising off the roads in the sun.
‘I was a beat cop in Brooklyn for ten years, and saw plenty of things to keep a man awake at night, but I’ve never seen so much blood as I saw in that house. Mrs Stern was lying face down in the doorway to the kitchen. I didn’t bother to check if she was
