“I don’t care what dispatch said.” Trey’s voice was quiet, but I’m-not-fucking-around deep. “I told you on the phone. I got this on my own.”
Erika frowned. “FYI, your detective of the month award could get revoked for this kind of scene hoarding—”
“Go home, Erika. I’m telling you, as a friend—”
“Of course, I”—she indicated herself —“have never gotten a collegial award. You want to know why?”
“Wait, what?” her partner said. Like she was speaking a different language.
She dodged around him and spoke over her shoulder as he stumbled over his own feet to turn around. “I’m not a good listener and I don’t like people in my way. That’s why I never get awards.”
Marching up the walkway, she heard cursing in her wake, but Trey was going to have to get over himself—and she was surprised by the territoriality. Usually, the two of them got along great. They’d been assigned together since January, after his first partner, Jose de la Cruz, retired following a long and distinguished career. She had no idea what kind of hair Trey had across his ass about this particular—
“Hey, Andy,” she said to the uniformed cop at the door.
—scene, but she wasn’t going to worry about it.
“Detective.” The uniformed officer shifted to the side so she could pass. “You need booties?”
“Got ’em.” As she slipped a set on over her street shoes, she noted that the hedges around the entrance were all trimmed and a little Easter flag was pastel’ing itself on a pole off to the left. “Thanks.”
The second she entered a shallow foyer, she smelled both vanilla-scented candles and fresh blood—and her brain went to a hypothetical episode of Cupcake Wars where one of the contestants got their hand stuck in a mixer.
Care for some plasma with your Victoria sponge?
Wait, that would be The Great British Bake Off, wouldn’t it.
While her brain played chew toy with all kinds of stupid connections, she let it warm itself up and glanced to the right. The disrupted living room was what she expected in terms of furnishings and decor. Everything was solidly middle class, especially all the framed pictures of two parents and a daughter in the bookshelves, everybody aging up through the years, the kid getting taller and more mature, the parents getting grayer and thicker around the middle.
Those photographs were her first clue as to why Trey had tried to put his foot down.
Well actually… there had been a couple of others when she’d been getting basic details from dispatch.
Ignoring the alarm bells that started to ring in her head, she stepped around a broken lamp. In spite of all the homey-homey, the place looked like a bar fight had gone down in front of the electric fireplace: The flowered couch was out of alignment and its cushions scattered on the rug, one armchair was knocked over, and the cheap glass coffee table was shattered.
There was blood splatter on the gray walls and the low-nap carpet.
The facedown body in the center of the sixteen-by-twelve-foot room was that of an older white male, the bald spot on the back of the head identifying him as the father according to one of the candids taken at a field hockey game. He had one arm up, the other down by his side, and his clothes were vaguely office, a button-down shirt, it looked like, tucked into polyester-blend slacks. No belt. Shoes were still on.
Two long steps brought her in close, and her knees popped as she dropped onto her haunches. The knife sticking out of his back had done quite a bit of work before before being left deep inside his rib cage: There were a good four to five other stab wounds, going by the holes in the shirt and the bloodstains on the cotton fabric.
As she took a deep breath, she had a thought that half the oxygen in Caldwell had mysteriously disappeared.
“Erika.”
Her name was said with an exhaustion she was familiar with. She’d heard that special brand of tired in a lot of people’s voices when they were trying to talk sense into her.
“Frenzied attack.” She indicated the pattern of stabbings, even though it wasn’t like there was any confusion about what she was addressing. “By someone strong. While this victim was trying to run away after they’d scuffled.”
Erika rose up and went farther into the house. As she passed through an archway that opened into a kitchen, she was careful not to step on any bloodstains. The second body was faceup on the wood laminate flooring in front of the stove, the wife and mother sprawled in a pool of her own blood. The victim had extensive head and neck trauma, her facial features totally unidentifiable, the bones all broken, the flesh pulverized. So much blood covered the front of her that it was hard to make out the pattern on her t-shirt, but the leggings had to be LuLaRoe, given the garish repeat of peaches against a bright blue background.