I leaned in for a closer look at her and all of a sudden felt dizzy. My legs went weak. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
Oh no! Oh my God, no!
I stepped back blindly, my foot hit a slick spot, and I fell. As I went down, I reached to break my fall. My gloved hand smeared deep red across the floor.
Ellie Randall’s blood. Not Cox—Randall!
I knew her—at least I once had.
Long, long ago, Ellie had been my girlfriend when we’d been students at Georgetown. She had probably been my first love.
And now Ellie had been murdered, along with her family.
Chapter 3
ONE OF THE printing techs moved to help me, but I got myself up quickly. I wondered if maybe I was in shock about Ellie. “No harm. I’m fine. What’s the name here again?” I asked the tech.
“Cox, sir. Reeve, Eleanor, and James are the victims in the living room.”
Eleanor Cox. That was right; I remembered now. I stared down at Ellie, my heart racing out of control, tears starting at the corners of my eyes. She had been Ellie Randall when I met her, a smart, attractive history major looking for antiapartheid signatures from Georgetown University students. Definitely not someone whose story would end like this.
“Need anything?” Fescoe was back and he was hovering.
“Just . . . get me a garbage bag or something,” I told him. “Please. Thank you.”
I peeled off my Windbreaker and tried to wipe myself with it, then stuck the coat in the bag Fescoe brought me. I needed to keep moving and to get out of this room, at least for now.
I headed toward the stairs and found Bree just coming down.
“Alex? Jesus, what happened to you?” she asked.
I knew if I started to explain, I wouldn’t be able to finish. “We’ll talk about it later, okay?” I said. “What’s going on upstairs?”
She looked at me strangely but didn’t push it. “More of the same. Bad stuff. Third floor, Alex. Two more kids. I think they were trying to hide from the killers, but it didn’t work.”
A photo flash ghosted the stairwell as we climbed. Everything seemed hallucinogenic and unreal to me. I was outside the scene, watching myself stumble through it. Ellie had been murdered. I tried again but couldn’t process the thought.
“No blood on the stairs, or in the hall,” I noticed, trying to focus on evidence, trying to do the job. It was freezing cold, with a hatch door open overhead. November third, and the forecast was for single-digit temperatures overnight. Even the weather had gone a little crazy.
“Alex?”
Bree was waiting up ahead, standing at the doorway to a room on the third floor. She didn’t move as I approached. “You sure you’re okay to be here?” she asked, speaking low so the others wouldn’t hear.
I nodded and peered into the room.
Behind Bree, the two little girls’ bodies were crisscrossed on an oval rag rug. A white canopy bed was broken into pieces, collapsed in on itself as if someone had jumped too hard on it.
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “I need to see what happened here. I need to begin to understand what it all means. Like who the hell was jumping on that bed?”
Chapter 4
BUT I DIDN’T even begin to understand the horrible murders of five family members. Not that night, anyway. I was as baffled as everybody else about the possible motivation of the killers.
What made the mystery even deeper was something that happened about an hour after I got to the crime scene. Two officers from the CIA showed up. They looked around, then left. What was the CIA doing there?
It was a little after three thirty in the morning when Bree and I finally got back home to Fifth Street. In the stillness of my house, I could hear Ali’s little-boy snores wafting down from upstairs. Reassuring and comforting sounds, to be sure.
Nana Mama had left the h