“Bad?” I asked, moving toward him.
“Worse,” Sampson replied. “And you can forget that original body count.”
Chapter
61
Some crime scenes become etched in your mind, unerasable. I knew from the second I walked in that this was one of them. The smell hit you before the scene did, not citrus cleaner but Pine-Sol.
You could see from the front door down a hall past two closed doors on your left and the gourmet kitchen on your right into a luxuriously appointed main room. Blood was visible, streaked and spattered across the butter-colored carpet and up the sides of the mouse-gray drapes, couches, and chairs.
The room held four bodies. A sharply dressed man in his early twenties had been shot in the right eye at close range. He lay sprawled closest to the entry. The others were women, all beautiful, all in their late twenties, early thirties, all in lingerie and negligees. Two of them had died on the couch, shot through their heads and chests. The third was belly-down near a hallway. She’d been shot through the back of her neck. Amber splotches of Pine-Sol showed in and around the bodies. And there were 9mm casings scattered, too, ten of them by my count.
“There’s three more victims down the hall in the bedrooms,” Sampson said. “Two men, one woman.”
Before going back there, I spoke with a shaken Officer Andrea Sprouls, who’d been first on the scene. Sprouls said she’d responded to a noise complaint—loud music and people yelling—from the elderly woman who lived in the condo upstairs. When she arrived, the angry tenant buzzed her in. Sprouls had heard the throbbing hip-hop music immediately.
Officer Sprouls had pounded on the door of the apartment, had gotten no answer, and had tried the handle. The door had been unlocked.
“I called it in based on what I could see from the entryway,” said Sprouls. “Which was more than enough. I…I’ve never seen anything like that.”
“It’s hard every time,” I said sympathetically. “Touch anything?”
“Yes,” she said. “Besides the doorknob, I used my handkerchief to unplug the stereo and upstairs, to check the bedrooms. Then I backed out and waited.”
“You talk to the old woman?” Sampson asked.
The officer nodded. “Mrs. Fields. She didn’t think anybody lived here full-time because they were always so quiet. Which made the loud music strange.”
“Good job,” I said. “Officer, could you wait for the crime unit and show them everything you touched, including the outer door? They’ll need your boots, too.”
She nodded, looked relieved, and left. I followed Sampson down the hall toward the bedrooms. There were three bedrooms, all well appointed. The first one was empty. The second held two victims, a man and a woman, both naked. He lay on his side with a single wound to the side of his head, and she appeared to have tried to scramble forward, only to die from a bullet to the back of the skull. Their blood soaked the silk sheets, and the wooden floor was sticky with drying Pine-Sol.
The third bedroom held a single male corpse, crumpled on his side below a wide-open window. This victim’s feet were bare, as was his chest. He wore pants, but the zipper was down and the belt unbuckled. The killer had shot him three times, twice in the back, once through the throat.
A man
’s shirt, tie, and jacket hung from a stand, shoes and socks below. A black lace negligee was draped over a rocking chair in the near right corner. A shred of black lace about the size of a thumbnail hung from the bottom of the raised window.
“Tell me what happened, Alex,” Sampson said.
I paused, reflecting on what I’d observed so far, then said, “He enters through the front door, so he’s expected, which means he contacted someone, a booker, maybe the dead guy in the main room, or one of the women out there.”
My partner nodded.
“So he comes armed, but not in a way that triggers alarm in whoever lets him in,” I continued. “A lineup of the available women, in this case three, is called. They file into the outer room. The killer stands near the stereo. He twists up the volume. The guy maybe tells him to turn it down. The killer shoots him at close range, then the two women nearest to him. He has to be quick and shoot across the room to get the third woman before she reaches the hallway.”
Sampson thought about that. “Why turn up the stereo?” he asked. “He probably had a suppressor.”
I shrugged. “Maybe he wanted to drown out any screams. In any case, given how the couple in the other room died, we can assume that all they heard was loud music until the killer came in. He shoots that john first, then the girl.”
Sampson gestured at the body in front of us. “And this?”
I chewed my lip a second, letting scenarios play out. “He hears something, or maybe the lady with him hears something, a scream. Whatever. They’re trying to get out through the window. Though she snags and tears her nightgown, she makes it. He doesn’t.”
“I could see that,” Sampson said. “But what if he comes in, shoots the guy trying to get out the window, and takes her like Cam Nguyen?”
“One or the other,” I said. “We’ll know more once Forensics gets in here.”