Survivor in Death (In Death 20)

She gestured to a door. “That’s how the witness got up to the second floor. Back stairs. Peabody’s take was that the front steps were closer to the adults’ room, and it’s not implausible. But you know what, it’s a waste of time, steps, and effort.”

“And they wasted nothing. They didn’t know there was a second set of steps.”

“Yeah. But how did they miss that detail when they knew everything else?”

Roarke walked over to the door, ran a hand over the jamb, examined the steps. “Well, they’re not original.”

“How do you know?”

“The house is late nineteenth century, with considerable rehab work. But these are newer. This rail here, it’s manmade material. Twenty-first-century material.” He crouched down. “So are the treads. And the workmanship’s a bit shoddy. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was a home job—something they added themselves without all the permits and what have you. Without filing the work, so it wouldn’t show on any record, any blueprint your killers might have studied.”

“How smart are you? You’re right. They’re not on the on-file blueprints. I checked. Still, that doesn’t mean one or both of the killers wasn’t in the house, wasn’t even a friend or neighbor. This is the domestic’s room, and her stairs.”

“That would, however, go further to eliminating the housekeeper as primary target. And it would be less likely the killers were close acquaintances of hers, or privy to her quarters.”

“She was excess. It was the family that mattered.”

“Not one of them,” he put in, “but all.”

“If it wasn’t all, why kill all?”

She took him back through, following the assumed path of the known killer. “Blood trail from domestic’s, through here, up the right side of the steps. More concentrated blood pattern here, see?”

“And none coming back down the stairs. Removing protective gear here, before going down.”

“Another point for the civilian.”

“I think you should have another term for me. Civilian’s so ordinary, and just a bit snarky when you say it. Something like ‘nonpolice specialist on all things’.”

“Yeah, sure, my personal NPS. Focus in, ace. They’d done the adults before the witness got up to this level. She saw them walking away from this room, then split off. One in each of the other bedrooms. Two more rooms up here—one a home office, the other a playroom deal. Kids’ bathroom, end of hall. But they went straight for the bedrooms. You couldn’t be a hundred percent from a blueprint which room was which up here.”

“No.” To satisfy his curiosity, he walked over, glanced into one of the rooms. Home office—work station, minifriggie, shelves holding equipment, dust catchers, family photos. A small daybed, all coated now with the sweepers’ residue.

“This is certainly large enough to be used as a bedroom.”

She let him wander, watched him step to the doorway of the boy’s room and saw his face harden. Blood spatter on sports posters, she thought, blood staining the mattress.

“How old was the boy?” he asked.

“Twelve.”

“Where were we at that age, Eve? Not in a nice room, surrounded by our little treasures, that’s for bloody sure. But Christ Jesus, what does it take to walk int

o a room like this and end some sleeping boy?”

“I’m going to find out.”

“You will, yes. Well.” He stepped back. He’d seen blood before, had shed it. He’d stood and studied murder when it was chilled. But this, standing in this house where a family had lived their ordinary lives, seeing a young boy’s room where such a tender life had been taken, left him sickened and shaken.

So he turned away from it. “The office has as much space as this bedroom. The boy could easily have been across the hall.”

“So they had to surveil the house—or know it from the inside, enough to know who slept where. If they cased it from outside, they’d need to watch the patterns. Which lights went on, what time. Night vision and surveillance equipment, and they could see through the curtains easy enough.”

She moved to the master bedroom. “Morris tells me the same hand that did the domestic did both males. The other took the females. So they had their individual targets worked out in advance. No conversations, no chatter, no excess movements. Thought about droids, assassin droids.”

“Very costly,” Roarke told her. “And unreliable in a situation like this. And why have two—double the cost and detail of programming, when one could do it all? That’s if you had the wherewithal and the skill to access an illegal droid, and program it to bypass security and terminate multiple subjects.”

“I don’t think it was droids.” She walked out, into the little girl’s bedroom. “I think human hands did this. And no matter how it looks on the surface, no matter how cold and efficient, it was personal. It was fucking personal. You don’t slice a child’s throat without it being personal.”