Venice wondered if the police had connected the same dots that she had, that the suspected child abuse call from the previous night was linked to this incident.
If so, it hadn’t gone up on ICIS yet. She assumed that she was ahead of the police, at least for now. The thought brought her comfort, if only for the bragging rights.
In her ear, she heard Jonathan’s voice say, “The security plan is hot now.” Without looking, she tapped the button on the top of the digital timer that would count down seven minutes.
She keyed the mike on her radio. “Speak up, Big Guy.”
“Right here.”
She turned back to her computer screens while Digger and Boxers discussed the logistics of their entry plan. First, she pulled up the police report from the suspected pedophile incident to verify the room number where it occurred. She wasn’t sure yet what to do with that tidbit of information, but she’d learned over the years that information collected one tidbit at a time eventually combined to be a chunk of useful stuff.
The news feed on her other screen had settled down to something viewable. She saw two SUVs arranged in a kind of haphazard formation in the middle of the motel’s parking lot. Their doors were all open, and bodies lay on the ground next to the vehicles. As was frequently the case with the early moments of video news collection, the camera operator zoomed in as tightly as he could on the faces of the victims and their wounds. These were the more prurient details that the general public would never see, and she wondered if newsroom personnel secretly grooved on the gore.
Venice had hoped that the location of the victims relative to the PCs’ motel room would provide some insight, but that turned out to be a disappointment. The layout of the place was such that about half of the rooms were all more or less equidistant from any one spot in the parking lot.
So, she thought, what could she do with the room number before the police could? What would they want to check? Obviously, they’d do all the physical forensics stuff — fingerprints, DNA, et cetera — but that had to be done on-site. What could she do from—
“The phone.” She said it aloud and grinned. She could check the phone records! Okay, it was a long shot because they’d be out of their minds to use a hotel phone. But in the years she’d worked with Jonathan, she’d lost track of the number of forehead-smack dumb things people had done. There was always a chance.
Accessing said records could be a challenge, but what was life without the occasional challenge?
Jonathan didn’t even bother with the knob. He knew at a glance that the lock was demolished, that the door was held in place only by inertia. With his weapon poised, he gently shouldered the door open and let it drift in of its own momentum. Elsewhere in the house, presumably from somewhere in the back, he heard a giant crash and knew that Boxers had taken a less subtle approach.
“I’m in,” Big Guy said in Jonathan’s ear.
“Me, too,” Jonathan said. “Report everything you see.”
“How about what I smell?” Boxers said. “I don’t see any flies yet, but they can’t be too far behind.”
Jonathan smelled it, too, and it was a stench unique to death. Sweet in the most awful, perverted form of the term — like rotten meat, but with hints of shit and piss. To the uninitiated, it was a smell that triggered a gag reflex. Sadly, Jonathan thought, he’d smelled it often enough that it was no more offensive than charred wood, gun oil, or any of the dozens of other pungent smells that were part of his professional world.
Dead was dead. If no one touched a corpse, it would eventually turn to dust right where it lay, never posing another threat to anyone. What was a threat, however, was whatever person or thing had caused the dead person to die.
Jonathan knew that the bad guy was already gone in this case. The strength of the death smell made it certain that the killings had occurred hours ago. Still, he refused to lower his guard. In his experience, complacent operators died younger than paranoid ones.
The house showed no sign of violence, at least not yet. The owner of the place was clearly of significant means, though the interior was far more impressive than the exterior. Somehow, what appeared to be maybe twenty-five hundred square feet from the outside felt more like five thousand once he was in. Maybe it was all the marble and polished wood. Certainly, this was not the home of a man who wished to fly under the radar. In Jonathan’s world, plain vanilla equated to survivability.
“The foyer is clear,” Jonathan said as he swept the area with his pistol. Without looking, he used his foot to push the front door closed again. Behind closed curtains, the lights were on, so the main floor remained brightly lit. Did that mean that the violence here happened at night?
“I’m stepping into the main hall,” Boxers said. Jonathan heard it simultaneously over the radio and through reverb against the walls. That was Big Guy’s way of making sure Jonathan didn’t shoot him.
“I’m checking the front rooms,” Jonathan said. The first room to the left off the marble circle was the dining room. Keeping his weapon in play, he stepped in and pivoted like a gun turret, his .45 poised and ready to shoot. No targets showed themselves. “Dining room’s clear,” he said.
Beyond the dining room lay a butler’s pantry and beyond that, he assumed, a kitchen. He heard Boxers moving around in there, so Jonathan stayed to the front and crossed the foyer to what he imagined they called a living room. Maybe a parlor in this part of the world. A sofa and two chairs flanked a very traditional fireplace. It, too, was clear, and he announced it as such right after Boxers declared the kitchen to be clear of bad guys.
Jonathan returned to the central hallway to head deeper into the house. “I’m coming your way, Big Guy,” he said.
The death stench skyrocketed as he passed the massive stairway to the second floor, causing him to pause and look around more. Where the hell was it coming from? He saw no blood on the floor, no signs of a struggle.
He moved on. Past the stairway, the foyer gave way to a cross hall, where Jonathan and Boxers joined together to clear a warren of rooms that showed no signs of people or violence. As time went on, Jonathan felt progressively safer. He didn’t reholster the .45, but he eased his stance to low-ready.
“I believe this is what we call a McMansion,” Big Guy said. “Or what you would have called the servants’ quarters growing up.”
They found a back stairway to the second floor, climbed it, and explored the bedrooms.
Up here, things turned ugly. There were no signs of struggle in the master bedroom, but the other two bedrooms were wrecks. Both bore the standard décor and detritus of mid-grade children, one a boy and one a girl. Covers were strewn across the floor, as if their occupants had been dragged out of bed. In the boy’s room, the entire contents of the top of the dresser — a lamp, a television, a bunch of action figures — had been pulled to the floor. In Jonathan’s mind, he could see a kid trying to grab hold of the dresser and being pulled along anyway.
Boxers made a growling sound.
“Yeah,” Jonathan agreed.
Beyond the signs of violence, and a couple of spots that might have been blood on the walls and the carpet, the second floor was empty. They holstered their weapons more or less in unison and headed back to the first floor via the main stairs. Here, the putrid smell was at its worst.
Jonathan stopped. “Where’s the basement?” he asked. “I never saw steps to the basement.”
“Maybe there isn’t one,” Boxers said, though clearly he didn’t believe that to be true.
“Gotta be,” Jonathan said. “I walked on those floors down there. Those hardwoods are not on a slab.”