For a long moment she stared, unable to look away. She was dragged back into the living nightmare, not in the surreal way she’d expected, but in a palpable way. She was there again, standing at the foot of the steps, staring at the unthinkable, gripped by terror and denial. Basement sounds—a clanging pipe, a hissing boiler—drowned out her first cry. And the smell—that awful stench of blood and body waste—it made her gag. She kept gagging as she ran over to them. She tripped a couple of times, once on a bucket, once on a wooden board.
She reached her mother first. She was crumpled in a heap on her side, her white dress soaked with blood, pieces of her insides not where they should be. Her arms were spread out, her face turned away, her eyes open but unseeing.
Morgan called out to her, over and over. Mommy, Mommy…But there was no response. She was afraid to touch her, afraid she’d make it worse. And there was so much blood. A pool of it around her, growing, spreading. Morgan couldn’t fix it. Only one person could.
Daddy. She crawled over to her father. He was lying flat, prone, facedown. His hair was matted with blood, which was still oozing out from two holes in back of his head. His body looked okay, so she shook him. But he felt weird, stiff, and he didn’t move or wake up.
Somehow she knew he wouldn’t.
She crept away, cutting her knees on broken chips of cement, then scrambling to her feet, bumping into an overturned chair, skidding on a stone and nearly landing in a pool of blood. And there were splatters everywhere…and her mother’s purse, contents dumped on the floor, her compact red and sticky…
She started screaming then, screaming their names, screaming for help.
The rest was a blur.
“Morgan.” She was back in Monty’s office, and he was wrapping a fleece blanket around her. He looked worried, as if he wanted to comfort her and didn’t know how. “Are you okay?”
Her face was wet. She tasted the tears, but she didn’t remember starting to cry. And she was trembling, violently. The fleece felt warm, soft, and secure as it absorbed her inner chill.
“Morgan?”
She gave a shaky nod. “I’m fine. I just…I knew it would hit me hard. I expected it. God knows, I’ve relived it a thousand times. But this was different. Staring at those photos—it was like being transported back to the scene, like it was happening right now. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to fall apart.”
His jaw tightened. “You didn’t fall apart. You revisited hell. Do you want to stop?”
“No.” Her tone was adamant. “We’ve come this far. Let’s keep going.”
“Okay.” Monty sucked in a breath. “While it’s fresh in your mind, describe to me exactly what you just relived.”
Insides clenched, she did.
“You said that when you first crossed the room, you tripped over a bucket and then a wooden board.”
“Yes. I assume the bucket and the chair were overturned during the fight between my father and the killer, and the wooden board was the two-by-four my mother swung at the killer to try to save my father.”
“That’s my assumption, too. Do you remember if any of the objects you struck—the bucket, the chair, or the two-by-four
—moved when you tripped on them?”
She considered that. “I don’t think so. They were pretty solid. I remember feeling the sting in my leg and my foot when I collided with them. I was a slight, skinny kid. If anything, those objects moved me, not the other way around.” She paused, and when she spoke again, her voice was an unsteady whisper. “That smell I’m remembering. It was death, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah.” Monty pulled out a few more photos, handing them to Morgan. “You said you walked around your parents’ bodies when you tried to wake them. See if anything in these triggers a memory.” He kept talking, focusing her and bolstering her at the same time. “I know the pools of blood look big, and they must have seemed even bigger to you at the time. But they’re only about two feet in diameter. As for the blood splatter you described, it was used to determine the distance of the shootings. The shots were fired at close range. Death came quickly.”
“And without much pain—that’s what you’re telling me.”
“Exactly.”
“My father was killed execution style, at point-blank range. My mother was shot from what—several feet away?”
“At most. The object you skidded on was a shell casing. We recovered all three of them.”
“Two for my father, one for my mother. I remember the two holes in back of his head.” Morgan swallowed hard. “What about the weapon?”
“It was a Walther PPK. Never found.”
“Another dead end. And obviously, there were no fingerprints at the crime scene.”
“Just your parents’. Primarily your mother’s, on the two-by-four.”