On the TV monitor, a view of snow-dusted trees appeared. It was a bright day, and sunshine sparkled on ice.
“Nine one one got the call around ten A.M.,” said Wardlaw. “Male voice, refused to identify himself. Just wanted to report that something had happened in a house on Deerfield Road, and that the police should check it out. There aren’t many homes on Deerfield Road, so it didn’t take long for the cruiser to find out which residence was involved.”
“Where did that call come from?”
“A pay phone about thirty-five miles out of Ashburn. We were unable to get any usable fingerprints off the phone. We never did identify the caller.”
On the TV screen, half a dozen parked vehicles could now be seen. Against the background noise of men’s voices, the camera’s operator began to narrate: “The date is January fourth, eleven thirty-five A.M. Residence address is number nine, Deerfield Road, town of Ashburn, Virginia. Present are Detective Ed Wardlaw and myself, Detective Byron McMahon …”
“My partner worked the camera,” said Wardlaw. “That’s a view of the driveway in front of the residence. As you can see, it’s surrounded by woods. No neighbors nearby.”
The camera slowly panned past two waiting ambulances. The crews stood in a huddle, their breath steaming in the icy air. The lens continued its slow rotation, coming at last to a stop on the house. It was a two-story brick home of stately proportions, but what had once been a grand residence was showing the signs of neglect. White paint was peeling off shutters and windowsills. A porch railing tilted sideways. Wrought-iron bars covered the windows, an architectural feature more appropriate to an inner-city apartment building, not a house on a quiet rural road. The camera now focused on Detective Wardlaw, who was standing on the front steps, like a grim host waiting to greet his guests. The image swayed toward the ground as Detective McMahon bent to pull on shoe covers. Then the lens was once again aimed at the front door. It followed Wardlaw into the house.
The first image it captured was the blood-smeared stairway. Jane already knew what to expect; she had seen the crime scene photos, and knew how each woman had died. Yet as the camera focused on the steps, Jane could feel her pulse quicken, her sense of dread building.
The camera paused on the first victim, lying facedown on the stairway. “This one was shot twice,” said Wardlaw. “Medical examiner said the first bullet hit her in the back, probably as the vic was trying to flee toward the stairs. Nicked her vena cava and exited out the abdomen. Judging by the amount of blood she lost, she was probably alive for five, ten minutes before the second bullet was fired, into her head. The way I read it, the perp brought her down with the first shot, then turned his attention to the other women. When he came back down the stairs again, he noticed that this one was still alive. So he finished her off with a kill shot.” Wardlaw looked at Jane. “Thorough guy.”
“All that blood,” murmured Jane. “There must have been a wealth of footwear evidence.”
“Both upstairs and down. Downstairs is where it got confusing. We saw two large sets of shoe prints, which we assume to be the two killers. But in addition there were other prints. Smaller ones, that tracked across the kitchen.”
“Law enforcement?”
“No. By the time that first cruiser arrived, it was at least six hours after the fact. The blood on that kitchen floor was pretty much dry. The smaller prints we saw were made while the blood was still wet.”
“Whose prints?”
Wardlaw looked at her. “We still don’t know.”
Now the camera moved up the stairs, and they could hear the sound of paper shoe covers rustling over the steps. In the upstairs hallway, the camera turned left, aiming through a doorway. Six cots were crammed into the bedroom, and on the floor were piles of clothing, dirty dishes, and a large bag of potato chips. The camera panned across the room, to focus on the cot where victim number two had died.
“Looks like this one never even got a chance to run,” said Wardlaw. “Stayed in bed and took the bullet right there, where she was lying.”
Again, the camera was on the move, circling away from the cots, turning toward a closet. Through the open doorway, the lens zoomed in on two pitiful occupants slumped together. They had crammed themselves into the very back of the closet, as though desperately trying to shrink from sight. But they had been all too visible to the killer who had opened the door, who had aimed his weapon at those bowed heads.
“One bullet each,” said Wardlaw. “These guys were quick, accurate, and methodical. Every door was opened, every closet was searched. There was no place in that house to hide. These victims never had a chance.”
He reached for the remote and fast-forwarded. Images danced on the monitor, a manic tour of the other bedrooms, a race up a ladder, through a trap door and into an attic. Then a jittery retreat back down the hallway, down the stairs. Wardlaw hit PLAY. The journey slowed again, the camera moving at a walking pace through a dining room and into the kitchen.
“Here,” he said quietly, pressing PAUSE. “The last victim. She had a very bad night.”
The woman sat bound by cord to a chair. The bullet had entered just above her right eyebrow, and the impact had shoved her head backward. She had died with her eyes turned heavenward; death had drained her face pale. Both her arms were extended in front of her, on the table.
The bloodied hammer still lay beside her ruined hands.
“Clearly they wanted something from her,” said Wardlaw. “And this gal couldn’t, or wouldn’t, give it to them.” He looked at Jane, his eyes haunted by the ordeal that they were all imagining at that moment. The hammer blows falling again and again, crushing bone and joint. The screams echoing through that house of dead women.
He pressed PLAY, and the video mercifully moved on, leaving behind the bloodied table, the mangled flesh. Still shaken, they watched in silence as the video took them into a downstairs bedroom, then into the living room, decorated with a sagging couch and a green shag rug. Finally they were back in the foyer, at the foot of the staircase, right where they had started.
“That’s what we found,” said Wardlaw. “Five female victims, all unidentified. Two different firearms were used. We’re assuming at least two killers, working together.”
And no place in that house for their prey to hide, thought Jane. She thought of the two victims cowering in the closet, breaths turning to whimpers, arms wrapped around each other as footsteps creaked closer.
“They walk in and execute five women,” said Gabriel. “They spend maybe half an hour in the kitchen with that last one, crushing her hands with a hammer. And you have nothing on these killers? No trace evidence, no fingerprints?”
“Oh, we found a zillion fingerprints all over that house. Unidentifieds in every room. But if our perps left any, they didn’t match anyone in AFIS.” Wardlaw reached for the remote and pressed STOP.
“Wait,” said Gabriel, his gaze fixed on the monitor.
“What?”
“Rewind it.”
“How far?”
“About ten seconds.”
Wardlaw frowned at him, clearly puzzled by what could have caught his eye. He handed Gabriel the remote. “Be my guest.”
Gabriel pressed REWIND, then PLAY. The camera had backed up to the living room, and now repeated its sweep past the tired couch, the shag rug. Then it moved into the foyer and suddenly swung toward the front door. Outside, sunshine glinted off icy branches of trees. Two men stood in the yard, talking. One of them turned toward the house.
Gabriel hit PAUSE, freezing the man where he stood, his face framed in the doorway. “It’s John Barsanti,” he said.
“You know him?” Wardlaw asked.
“He turned up in Boston, too,” said Gabriel.
“Yeah, well, he seems to show up everywhere, doesn’t he? We got to the house barely an hour before Barsanti and his team arrived. They tried to step right into our show, and we ended up having a tug-of-war right there, on the front porch. Till we got a call
from the Justice Department, asking us to cooperate.”
“How did the FBI get wind of this case so quickly?” asked Jane.
“We never got a good answer to that question.” Wardlaw crossed to the VCR, ejected the tape, then turned to face her. “So that’s what we were dealing with. Five dead women, none of them with fingerprints on file. No one’s reported them missing. They’re all Jane Does.”
“Undocumented aliens,” said Gabriel.
Wardlaw nodded. “My guess is, they were Eastern Europeans. There were a few Russian-language newspapers in the downstairs bedroom. Plus a shoe box with photos of Moscow. Considering what else we found in that house, we can make a pretty good guess as to their occupations. In the pantry, there were supplies of penicillin. Morning-after pills. And a carton full of condoms.” He picked up the file containing the autopsy reports and handed it to Gabriel. “Check out the DNA analysis.”
Gabriel flipped directly to the lab results. “Multiple sexual partners,” he said.
Wardlaw nodded. “Put it all together. A bevy of young, attractive women living together under the same roof. Entertaining a number of different men. Let’s just say that house was no convent.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
The private road cut through stands of oak and pine and hickory. Chips of sunlight filtered through the canopy, dappling the road. Deep among the trees, little light shone through, and in green shadows thick with underbrush, saplings struggled to grow.
“No wonder the neighbors didn’t hear anything that night,” Jane said, gazing at dense woods. “I don’t even see any neighbors.”
“I think it’s just ahead, through those trees.”
Another thirty yards, and the road suddenly widened, their car emerging into late afternoon sunshine. A two-story house loomed before them. Though now in disrepair, it still had good bones: a redbrick facade, a wide porch. But nothing about this house was welcoming. Certainly not the wrought-iron bars across the windows, or the NO TRESPASSING signs tacked to the posts. Knee-high weeds were already taking over the gravel driveway, the first wave of invaders, preparing the way for encroaching forest. Wardlaw had told them that an attempt at renovations was abruptly abandoned two months ago, when the contractor’s equipment had accidentally touched off a small fire, scorching an upstairs bedroom. The flames had left black claw marks on a window frame, and plywood still covered the broken glass. Maybe the fire was a warning, thought Jane. This house is not friendly.
She and Gabriel stepped out of the rental car. They had been driving with the AC on, and the heat took her by surprise. She paused in the driveway, perspiration instantly blooming on her face, and breathed in the thick and sullen air. Though she could not see the mosquitoes, she could hear them circling, and she slapped her cheek, saw fresh blood on her hand. That was all she heard, just the hum of insects. No traffic, no birdsong; even the trees were still. Her neck prickled—not from the heat, but from the sudden, instinctive urge to leave this place. To climb back in the car and lock the doors and drive away. She did not want to go in there.
“Well, let’s see if Wardlaw’s key still works,” said Gabriel, starting toward the porch.
Reluctantly she followed him up creaking steps, where blades of grass grew through seams between the boards. On Wardlaw’s video, it had been wintertime, the driveway bare of vegetation. Now vines twisted up the railings and pollen dusted the porch like yellow snow.
At the door, Gabriel paused, frowning at what remained of a padlock hinge that had once secured the front entrance. “This has been here a while,” he said, pointing to the rust.
Bars on the windows. A padlock on the door. Not to guard against intruders, she thought; this lock was meant to keep people in.
Gabriel jiggled the key in the lock and gave the door a push. With a squeal it gave way, and the smell of old smoke wafted out; the aftermath of the contractor’s fire. You can clean a house, repaint its walls, replace the drapes and the carpets and furniture, yet the stench of fire endures. He stepped inside.
After a pause, so did she. She was surprised to find bare wood floors; on the video, there had been an ugly green carpet, since removed during the cleanup. The banister leading up the stairs was handsomely carved, and the living room had ten-foot ceilings with crown molding, details that she had not noticed while watching the crime scene video. Water stains marred the ceiling, like dark clouds.
“Whoever built this place had money,” Gabriel noted.
She crossed to a window and looked through the bars at the trees. The afternoon was slipping toward evening; they did not have more than an hour before the light would fade. “It must have been a beautiful house when it was built,” she said. But that was a long time ago. Before shag carpets and iron bars. Before bloodstains.
They walked through a living room empty of furniture. Floral wallpaper showed the wear of passing years—smudges and peeling corners and the yellow tinge from decades of cigarette smoke. They moved through the dining room and came to a halt in the kitchen. The table and chairs were gone; all they saw was tired linoleum, the edges nicked and curling. Afternoon sun slanted in through the barred window. Here is where the older woman died, Jane thought. Sitting in the center of this room, her body tied to a chair, tender fingers exposed to the hammer’s blows. Though Jane was staring at an empty kitchen, her mind superimposed the image she had seen on the video. An image that seemed to linger in the sunlit swirl of dust motes.
“Let’s go upstairs,” said Gabriel.
They left the kitchen and paused at the bottom of the staircase. Looking up toward the second-floor landing, she thought: Here is where another one died, on these steps. The woman with the brown hair. Jane gripped the banister, her hand clasping carved oak, and felt her own pulse throbbing in her fingertips. She did not want to go upstairs. But that voice was once again whispering to her.
Mila knows.
There’s something I’m supposed to see up there, she thought. Something the voice is guiding me toward.
Gabriel headed up the stairs. Jane followed more slowly, her gaze focused downward on the steps, her palm clammy against the railing. She came to a halt, staring at a patch of lighter wood. Crouching down to touch a recently sanded surface, she felt the hairs lift on the back of her neck. Darken the windows, spray these stairs with luminol, and the grain of this wood would surely light up a spectral green. The cleaners had tried to sand away the worst of it, but the evidence was still there, where the victim’s blood had spilled. This was where she died, sprawled on these steps, this very spot Jane was touching.
Gabriel was already on the second floor, walking through the rooms.
She followed him to the upper landing. The smell of smoke was stronger here. The hallway had drab green wallpaper and a floor of dark oak. Doors hung ajar, spilling rectangles of light into the corridor. She turned into the first doorway on her right, and saw an empty room, walls marked by ghostly squares where pictures had once hung. It could be any vacant room in any vacant house, all traces of its occupants swept away. She crossed to the window, lifted the sash. The iron bars were welded in place. No escape in a fire, she thought. Even if you could climb out, it was a fifteen-foot drop onto bare gravel, with no shrubs to break the fall.
“Jane,” she heard Gabriel call.
She followed his voice, moving across the hall into another bedroom.
Gabriel was gazing into an open closet. “Here,” he said quietly.
She moved beside him and crouched down to touch sanded wood. She could not help mentally superimposing yet another image from the video. The two women, slender arms entwined like lovers. How long had they huddled here? The closet was not large, and the smell of fear must have soured the darkness.
Abruptly she rose to her feet. The room felt too warm, too airless; she walked into the hall, her legs numb from crouching. This is a house of horrors, she thought. If I listen hard enough, I’ll hear the echoes of screams.
At the end of the hall was one last room—the r
oom where the contractor had touched off the fire. She hesitated on its threshold, repelled by the far stronger stench of smoke in this room. Both broken windows had been covered with plywood, blocking out the afternoon light. She took the Maglite from her purse and shone it around the dim interior. Flames had scorched walls and ceiling, devouring sections all the way down to charred timber. She swung the Maglite beam around the room, past a closet missing its door. As her beam swept past, an ellipse flashed on the closet’s back wall, then vanished. Frowning, she swung the Maglite back.
There it was again, that bright ellipse, briefly flickering across the back wall.
She crossed to the closet for a closer look. Saw an opening large enough to poke a finger through. Perfectly round and smooth. Someone had drilled a hole between the closet and the bedroom.
Beams groaned overhead. Startled, she glanced up as footsteps creaked across the ceiling. Gabriel was in the attic.
She went back into the hallway. Daylight was rapidly fading, dimming the house to shades of gray. “Hey!” she called. “Where’s the trap door to get up there?”
“Look in the second bedroom.”
She saw the ladder and scrambled up the rungs. Poking her head into the space above, she saw the beam of Gabriel’s Maglite slicing through the shadows.
“Anything up here?” she asked.
“A dead squirrel.”
“I mean, anything interesting?”
“Not a whole lot.”
She climbed up into the attic and almost banged her head on a low rafter. Gabriel was forced to move at a crouch, long legs crab-walking as he inspected the perimeter, his beam slowly scanning the deepest pockets of shadow.
“Stay away from this corner over here,” he warned. “The boards are charred. I don’t think the floor is safe.”
She headed to the opposite end, where a lone window admitted the last gray light of day. This one had no bars; it did not need them. She lifted open the sash and stuck her head out to see a narrow ledge and a bone-shattering drop to the ground. An escape route only for the suicidal. She pushed the window shut, and fell still, her gaze fixed on the trees.
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