by B J Bourg
“I’ve been escorting floats across town and I just found out it was Jennifer.” Melvin wiped a rivulet of sweat from his shaved head. His badge and uniform brass sparkled in the light from my flashlight. “I spoke to her earlier, right when the parade was getting ready to roll.”
That got my attention and I turned from the window. “What’d she say? Did she look okay? Was she acting strange?”
“No, she looked normal. She said her brother needed help with something. She said it was an emergency.” Melvin watched in silence for a moment as I went back to trying to see inside the garage. Finally, he spoke again and his voice was somber. “It’s weird how things can just turn bad all of a sudden. One minute you’re fine, the next minute they’re shaving all of your hair off and you’re fighting for your life.”
“Well, look at the bright side,” I said dryly. “At least they wouldn’t have to shave your head.”
He chuckled, but the sound was void of humor. It was more of a grunt, a simple acknowledgment that I’d spoken. I didn’t think it was funny either. We had an officer down and although she wasn’t from Mechant Loup, she was part of our extended family. By God, we were going to find out who did this to her.
“I’ve got it!” Baylor suddenly cried, seemingly surprised. “I unlocked it!”
I was also surprised. We were cops, not safe crackers, and we were better at kicking down doors than carefully manipulating our way through a maze of unseen tumblers.
Baylor was first through the side door to the garage, and Melvin was second. I brought up the rear and nearly ran into the back of Melvin when he pulled up short. I stepped around his thick frame and pursed my lips when I saw both of the cars that were registered to Carl resting quietly in the garage.
“Shit, both of his cars are here.” I aimed my flashlight at the wall, flipped the light switch on. As we all ambled around the garage looking for clues, I asked the obvious question. “If both cars are here, then where’s the family? Wait a minute…”
Melvin and Baylor traded glances and then they both looked at me. I’d stopped moving and had turned slowly toward the open door, staring in the direction of the back patio.
“What is it?” Melvin asked.
Not saying a word, I strode across the garage, through the breezeway, and up the steps that led to the back door of the house. I didn’t try the knob, because I already knew it was locked. I’d checked it a dozen times. I put my shoulder against the center of the door and gave it a shove. It seemed solid.
“Baylor, do you think you can unlock this door?”
He shrugged, pulled out his tools. “I’ll give it a shot.”
I stepped aside and watched as he worked. I kept glancing toward the window, wishing I could see inside. An uneasy feeling was beginning to form in the pit of my stomach. Sure, it was possible Carl and his family had hitched a ride to the parade with someone else, but why hadn’t they come home yet? Melvin said Carl was expecting Jennifer, so why would he even go to the parade in the first place? Of course, now that we’d located both his vehicles, it was quite possible he hadn’t gone anywhere. He might still be inside the house.
I suddenly drew my pistol. “Melvin, why don’t you go around to the front? Just in case he’s in the house and waiting for us to make entry.”
Melvin didn’t hesitate. Once he was gone, I stood to the right side of the opening and trained my pistol on the center of the door, waiting for Baylor to get it open.
“This one isn’t as easy as the garage door,” he grumbled, wiggling the paperclip as he talked. “Want to just kick it open?”
I hesitated, remembering Susan’s warning about not causing too much damage. I would feel like a fool if the family had hitched a ride to the parade or if they had a third vehicle we didn’t know about. “Just keep trying,” I said. “I’ll get a tire iron in case we need to pry the door open.”
Holstering my pistol, I hurried to my Tahoe and grabbed a lug wrench from the back cargo area. As I turned to head back, I saw Melvin in the faint glow of the moonlight. I waved to him. He was standing at the northwest corner of the house where he could keep an eye on the front and northern sides of the structure, and he gave a nod.
When I reached Baylor, he looked up and shook his head. “I can’t get it. My paperclip keeps bending.”
I nodded and handed him the lug wrench. “Use this to pry it open while I cover you.”
He took the tool and shoved the pointed end between the door and the jamb. Bracing his feet, he gave it a tug and I heard a sharp cracking sound. He reset the point and gave it another tug. This time, not only was there a cracking sound, but pieces of splintered wood rained down on the small porch. After prying a third time, the door finally broke free.
Baylor gently set the tool down and drew his own pistol. Always one to assume the most risk—after all, it was my case and my responsibility—I stepped through the threshold first and motioned for Baylor to fan out to the left. It was black as coal in the house. Thanks to all the shades being drawn, we didn’t even have the benefit of what little moonlight was shining outside.
Keeping my flashlight hand extended in front of me to feel for walls, I inched one foot forward at a time. I could hear Baylor’s heavy breathing from somewhere to my left, could almost smell his adrenalin in the air. A muffled thud and a whispered curse told the story of Baylor running into something, probably a wall. I, myself, had come upon a wall and I moved toward my right until I felt empty space again.
“This way,” I whispered to Baylor. His boots shuffled in my direction. When he was directly beside me, I stepped through the opening and continued inching forward. I had probably gone ten or twelve feet when the toe of my right boot made contact with something that didn’t budge. I felt around with the toe of my boot and realized it was a narrow object. My best guess was a chair or table leg.
I reached straight out with my left hand, but didn’t feel anything in front of me. Before I could do anything else, Baylor bumped into me and pulled up short, mumbling a silent apology.
I lowered my hand and then whispered it was okay, but froze in place when my flashlight bumped into something. I tucked the flashlight under my right armpit and explored the space in front of me with my left hand. I sucked in a mouthful of air when my fingers brushed against a head of wet hair.
The head didn’t respond to my touch and my heart sank. I didn’t know who it was or what it was doing in the middle of the room, but I knew it couldn’t be good.
“Stand ready,” I whispered over my shoulder, removing my flashlight from under my arm and reaching for the switch with my left thumb. I took a cautious step backward to create a little distance and then sent the beam of light in the direction of the head.
“Oh, shit,” Baylor said aloud. “That’s why he didn’t answer the door.”
I wasn’t sure if it was Carl, but a man was slouching in a leather wingback chair positioned several feet from the northern wall of the living room. His chin rested on his chest and the back of his head was a mangled mess of cracked bone, torn flesh, and an empty cavity. My first thought was, Where in the hell is his brain?
“He lost his mind,” I muttered dryly. I glanced down at the dead man’s hands. One was resting on the barrel of a shotgun, just below the muzzle, and the other hung low, inches from the trigger. The contents of his cranial vault that hadn’t been blown out the back of his head appeared to have drained from his nose and mouth, painting his shirt and hands in a thick crimson polish.
I moved the light upward, where blood had sprayed across the ceiling. Tiny pieces of brain matter and bone were embedded in the drywall. A large bullet hole had been punched through the ceiling. Based on the size, I knew it was a one-ounce 12-gauge shotgun slug.
I then moved the light to the floor behind the chair, where more blood, bone, and flesh were speckled on the floor. A large chunk of his brain had flopped to the floor and was resting against the northern wall behind him, and several larger pieces of skull were turned up li
ke bright white seashells on the floor.
“Look,” Baylor said, training his own flashlight on the double-barreled side-by-side shotgun between the man’s knees. The butt end rested on the floor and the barrels were angled upward, the twin muzzles pointing toward his head. My guess was that he’d swallowed the twins and taken one of the loads to the back of the throat, but I couldn’t tell for sure because his head hung low and I was positioned behind him. It was also possible he put it under the chin or against his forehead.
I wondered absently which of the barrels had done the job and I was about to step around the chair to get a better look when my flashlight illuminated the opposite side of the room.
“Oh, God no!” Baylor cried out at that exact moment, scrambling backward as though he’d stumbled into a nest of rattlesnakes.
As for me, I just stood there staring, my heart and brain numb. I could feel my own chin resting on my chest, but I didn’t have the energy to put it back in place. I’d seen a lot of death and destruction in my law enforcement career, but I’d never seen anything like this.
CHAPTER 12
When I flipped on the light switches inside the living room of Carl’s house, Melvin, Baylor, and I took the full force of the scene on our chins. Baylor had lost some friends in Afghanistan, but—swaying on unsteady legs—he acknowledged it was nothing compared to what he was now witnessing. Melvin had seen many dead civilians of all ages, but he also claimed this was the worst.
I frowned, shoved my flashlight into my back pocket. I didn’t say anything for a long moment. For me, the worst ever was watching my daughter, Abigail, being shot to death, but I’d definitely never seen anything like this before.
On the sofa, across from the dead man in the chair, were four people. To the far right, a young adult woman, probably in her early thirties, was slumped onto her side, resting against the plush arm of the sofa, her eyes wide and unseeing. There were two large holes to the front of her blouse, a few inches apart. I’d worked shotgun murders before and I knew what kind of damage a one-ounce lead slug could do to a mortal human, but this woman had absorbed two ounces of the heavy metal. What? I thought wryly, glancing over my shoulder toward the man in the chair. Did you not think one was enough?
To the woman’s left, and leaning against her, was a young girl. A child. No more than ten. As I studied her, I gritted my teeth so hard that I thought I’d chip one. The girl’s eyes were closed, but her mouth was open and there was the same double-slug pattern to her chest.
Baylor coughed and I wondered if he was about to lose his dinner. I turned my reluctant eyes to the next victim. This one was a young boy, probably four or five. He was beside the girl and had suffered the same fate. He didn’t look old enough to commit a sin yet. His eyes and mouth were open, his face frozen in perpetual terror. I found myself wondering what in God’s name had prompted someone to take this innocent kid’s life.
An elderly woman was to the boy’s left. Her head was thrown back and cocked to the side at a strange angle. Her face was twisted in shock. The pair of bullet holes was higher on her torso, and one of the slugs had struck the lower part of her throat, no doubt severing her spine.
Each of the victims had twin waterfalls of blood that extended from where the dime-size wrecking balls had sprung leaks in their rivers of life down to their laps. All of their hands were out of sight behind their backs. I was confident that once we moved the bodies we’d discover they had been tied up. Bound, marched downstairs, and positioned side-by-side to each wait their turn to be executed. I shook my head. What a horrific way to go.
“What…what the hell happened?” Baylor’s voice was raspy. “Did he kill his family and then kill himself?”
I scanned the floor, where eight shotgun hulls—also known as spent shotgun shells—were scattered about. While, at first blush, Baylor’s suggestion seemed a likely scenario, I wasn’t ready to declare this a murder-suicide, at least not until I had processed all of the evidence.
“It’s important to keep an open mind when you first approach a crime scene,” I explained absently, turning to face Baylor. It sounded like my head was in a bucket. I was on auto-pilot. “If you offer an opinion early on, before waiting for the evidence to speak to you, there might be a tendency to try and force that same evidence to fit your own narrative.” I shrugged. “But as long as you’re smart enough to go where the evidence takes you and you’re flexible enough to change your mind when the evidence proves your idea wrong, then it’s okay to theorize.”
“So…?” Baylor lifted his eyebrows.
“So, yeah, it looks like the man in the chair murdered the people on the sofa and then killed himself, apparently all with the same shotgun.” I went on to explain that once we finished processing the scene, we’d have to check the shells in the shotgun to make sure they’d been fired, and then we’d have to send all of the hulls to the crime lab to make sure they were fired from the same gun.
“And what would happen if all of those hulls weren’t fired from that shotgun?” Baylor indicated with his head toward the shotgun resting between the man’s knees. “What then?”
“It would mean that more than one weapon was used to commit this crime.” I glanced around the room. “Once we toss this house, we’ll know if there are other shotguns lying around.”
“And what if both rounds in the shotgun are still live?”
“Then we’d have a real problem,” I turned to watch Melvin. He had picked his way to the back of the sofa and was now staring at the floor behind it. His expression was curious, so I asked, “What is it?”
He pointed to a place I couldn’t see. “There’re eight holes in the floor. If we want those slugs, we’ll have to crawl under the house and dig them out of the ground—like a treasure hunt.”
“Well, thankfully, the slugs are big enough to leave a mark. They should’ve punched a large enough channel for us to follow.” I sighed and pulled out my cell phone as I made my way toward the back door. I needed to get my gear and I needed some fresh air. I called Susan.
“I was just about to call you,” she said, her voice somber. “It’s not good, Clint. Jennifer is in a medically-induced coma while they try to combat the swelling in her brain. They…they shaved her head and had to cut out a piece of her skull to make room for the swelling. The doctors say her odds are not good.”
“Have you gotten in touch with her family?”
“Earlier, I got through to a captain in the detective bureau at La Mort PD and he said they would notify her family and then head this way. Last I heard, the sheriff is on the way with the chief deputy and Jennifer’s parents.”
“Well, when her parents arrive, I think you’ll have to make a death notification.”
“Don’t say that, Clint,” Susan scolded. “She’s not out of the woods yet, but she still has a fighting chance—”
“I’m not talking about Jennifer,” I interrupted. “It’s her brother, Carl. I think he killed his family and then killed himself. We still have to process the scene, but if the dead guy inside is Carl Duval, then you’ll have to make the notification.”
“Wait—are you saying there are dead people in the house where Jennifer was attacked?”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. The whole damn family was murdered. There were no survivors—well, except for the dog, Coco. Everyone else was cut in half with twin barrels from a twelve-gauge shotgun. One-ounce slugs. It ain’t pretty, Sue. Ain’t pretty at all.”
CHAPTER 13
Eight hours later…
I sat in my Tahoe and stared straight ahead, unseeing and without thought. The sun was trying to burn through the fog that hung over the area like a bad mood, but it wasn’t having much luck. Coco lifted her head up from the back seat and sniffed my neck. An involuntary shudder reverberated through my body. I didn’t know if it was from her cold nose or the pure evil I’d witnessed inside the Duval home.
After finishing up with the scene, I had loaded Coco and Achilles back into my Ta
hoe and buzzed down all the windows to let in the cool morning air.
“Hey, are you okay?”
I turned to see Susan standing there. The sleeves on her uniform shirt were rolled up to her tanned elbows. Her brown hair, which was braided into cornrows and tied off into twin pigtails behind her head, was glistening with sweat as she peeled off her hairnet and face mask.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m just taking a load off the old legs.”
She glanced past me to where Achilles was sitting on the back passenger seat. Normally, his head would’ve been hanging out of the open window, but he was licking the back of Coco’s head. “It looks like he found a girlfriend.”
I frowned. “She’s got nowhere to go today—maybe never. It’ll depend on Carl’s parents, whether or not they want to take her.”
“She can come home with us.”
“Are you sure?”
She nodded. “Hell, yeah. We’ve got the space and Achilles would love it.”
While that made me smile on the inside, my expression remained solemn. When Susan had arrived at the crime scene four hours ago, she’d told me that Carl’s parents hadn’t taken the news well and his mom had been hospitalized with stabbing pain in her chest. Last we’d heard from Takecia, the elderly woman had been admitted and was undergoing a battery of tests to determine if she’d had a heart attack. Carl’s dad was by her side and, through Takecia, had agreed to speak with me later in the day, just as long as I conducted the interview at the hospital.
“You know, what I don’t understand is why Carl would leave Jennifer alive,” Susan said after a moment of silence. “She drives right up to his massacre and he only bumps her on the head and ties her up. Why not drag her inside and kill her like he killed his wife, mother-in-law, and two children? I mean, if he would’ve spared anyone, it should’ve been the kids.”