by Steven James
Ellory, Jake, and I entered the home. No sign of forced entry. The temperature in the house was cool. Fiftyish. I set down my computer bag.
To avoid tracking dirt or snow into the house and contaminating the scene, the three of us took off our shoes, or in my case, boots, in the mudroom just inside the entrance. Ellory asked me, “So, you gonna process the scene then?”
“An agent will be here shortly to do that,” I answered. Eight pairs of shoes and boots were positioned neatly against the wall-some men’s, some women’s, two for a little girl.
Lizzie will never use those pink boots again, never again run out into the snow to play.
I looked away, asked Ellory, “Any other officers here? Any other troopers?”
“We tried to keep the scene clear, like they said.”
“What about the sheriff?”
“He’s down with the flu,” Ellory told me.
Down with the flu? With a case this big?
He must have been deathly ill or remarkably negligent.
“So,” Ellory went on, “if you’re not processing the scene, you’re here to…?”
I slid my boots toward the wall and donned a pair of latex gloves. “I’m here to take a look at the temporal and spatial aspects of the crime. See where that leads us.”
He looked at me quizzically.
“I’m a profiler,” Jake offered. “We track violent serial offenders: arsonists, rapists, mostly murderers.”
“So you two hunt serial killers?”
“Yes,” Jake said.
“So you’re like a team or something? Like on TV? Like on Criminal Minds?”
Jake straightened out his shirt. “We work together whenever we’re called upon to do so.” He sounded like he was at a press conference.
“And you think this crime is… that there’s a serial killer?”
“You never can tell on these things.”
“Actually,” I cut in, “at this point we have no reason to believe that the killer or killers are linked to any other crimes.”
Ellory looked at me, then at Jake. “Okay,” he said. “Good.” He indicated the doorway to the main part of the house. “It’s right through here.”
7
The three of us entered the living room.
White carpet. Nicely appointed. The room was color-coordinated in light green, apart from the recliner, which didn’t quite match the walls and couch. The vast, drapeless plateglass window facing the marsh had three spread-out bullet holes with an expansive network of cracks fingering away from each of them. The police reports Ellory had sent us had mentioned these bullet holes but had not included a photo.
Jake glanced around briefly, then headed toward the kitchen, where I noticed a purse on the table.
I studied the scene. No sign of a struggle. Neither room had been ransacked. No disarray of drawers, papers, or furniture that might indicate the killer was searching for something.
Following Jake momentarily, I went through the purse, confirmed it was Ardis’s. Memorized its contents.
A laundry room lay just off the kitchen and contained the side door that, based on the tracks outside, the killer or killers apparently used to exit the premises. I surveyed the room, layering it into the mental map I was forming of the interior of the house, then returned to the living room.
On the east side, a flight of stairs led to the second level. Through the railing I could see Ardis’s body lying grimly on the steps. According to the police reports, her daughter Lizzie had been killed on the second floor landing, in the bathroom doorway.
I felt a wash of nausea. Considering the number of bodies I’ve seen over the years, you’d think I would have gotten used to this by now, but each time I work a homicide, it hurts just as much as it did the last.
Ellory saw me gazing toward the stairs. “They told us you wanted us to leave the bodies alone, so I had one of the guys turn off the thermostat. Figured that’d help keep the bodies cool. Preserve ’em.”
I faced him. “When did you do that?”
“I don’t know. Couple hours ago.”
“What was the temperature set at when you turned down the thermostat?”
Silence. Then, “I don’t know. I don’t think we checked. Why?”
Jake answered from the kitchen. “Knowing the room temperature and the current temperature of the bodies would have helped us narrow down the time of death.”
Ellory looked confused. “But we already know that: 1:48 this afternoon.”
I stared at him. This information hadn’t been in the police reports. “How do we know that?”
“One of the neighbors heard five gunshots and thought it might be Donnie out target shooting.” He gestured toward the window with the three bullet holes. “Turns out he was killing his family instead.”
“Is there any indication that he wasn’t target shooting?”
“That he wasn’t?”
I approached the window. “Yes.” I studied the three bullet holes in the window and the cracks spiderwebbing away from them. The holes were in an off-centered, downward-sloping triangular pattern. The maze of cracks covered at least a third of the window.
Hmm.
I turned and looked at the sight lines to the landing. A five-meter-long open hallway stretched the length of the living room, revealing the three doors on the upper level. From the police reports I knew two of them were bedrooms; the bathroom door lay at the end of the hallway just to the right of the stairs, although from here I couldn’t see Lizzie’s body.
“Well, Mrs. Frasier heard five shots.” Ellory was watching me. “There’s three bullet holes right there in the glass. And each of the two victims was killed with a single shot. That’s five shots.”
“Yes, it is.” I went back to examining the window, thinking about the shot progression.
Timing and location.
Mrs. Pickron is on the steps, her daughter was killed in the doorway to the right of the stairs.
The bedrooms are on the left.
The bullets had traveled through the window as well as the storm window, another sheet of glass several inches away that was meant to seal the room from the cold Wisconsin winters.
This window covered most of the wall and with the marsh outside Someone might have been able to look in and see the killer.
Or killers.
Ellory seemed to read my thoughts. “We figured the perp might have been shooting at someone out there-or maybe someone fired back. We looked for footprints in the snow before you came. Nothing.”
“Always strive to separate evidence from coincidence.” The words of my mentor Dr. Calvin Werjonic echoed in my head. “Truth often hides in the crevices of the evident. Be always open to the unlikely.”
In high-velocity impact fractures, glass on the exit side of plate glass will have a larger opening than the entry side, and I could tell that the bullets had been fired from inside the house. In addition, when fired through plate glass, a bullet will create a cone-shaped fracture called a Hertzian cone that surrounds the hole on the downrange side of the glass. The Hertzian cones for these three holes confirmed that the entry point for all three bullets came from inside the house.
From inside the house.
A bullet passing through glass will cause radial cracks extending away from the entry point, but they’ll terminate when they meet other cracks already present. So when you have multiple gunshot holes, by studying the pattern of cracks you can deduce the order in which the bullets passed through the window. In this case, the webbed cracks in the glass caused by the hole on the far left met the cracks from the bottom hole, but did not pass them. The cracks caused by the remaining bullet hole stopped at the cracks caused by the other two.
This pattern told me that the bottom bullet had passed through the glass first, the one above it to the left had been fired second, and the remaining bullet third.
“There was a pause before the final shot,” I said quietly. “Did Mrs. Frasier mention that?”
“The angles. What did she say exactly?”
“She heard five shots-two in succession, then a pause and then two more. A little bit later she heard the fifth shot. But how did you know?”
“The angles,” I repeated. “She remembered it that distinctly?”
He shrugged. “I guess she’s got a good memory.”
Once again I gave my attention to the web of cracks in the glass.
“What are you thinking, Pat?” Jake asked from somewhere behind me.
“Just trying to compare what we know with what we’re assuming,” I said.
“You said angles.” Ellory sounded confused. “What are you talking about?”
We didn’t have any wooden dowels or laser pointers, but I could use something else to show him. “Do you have a pen?”
He handed me one from his pocket.
Taking a pen of my own and one from Jake, and using a chair so I could get to the holes, I slid the pens into each of the three bullet holes’ entrance and exit holes so that the men could see the angles from which the bullets had been fired.
“When you eye up the angles against the layout of the room, you can see that the last bullet must’ve been fired from somewhere on the landing at the top of the stairs. The other two were fired from the ground floor.”
I headed for the steps.
“What is it?” Jake asked me.
“I need to see the bodies,” I replied softly.
8
Jake said nothing but joined me at the base of the stairs.
Ardis lay sprawled awkwardly a few steps above us, facedown, her head turned sideways toward the railing, her left arm extended above her head in a way that looked like she was reaching forward, almost like someone trying to win a race, lunging toward the finish line. Reaching for eternity.
She’d been descending the stairs when she was killed.
Seeing her corpse brought the harsh reality of death home again.
Right here, lying before me was a woman who, earlier today, had been breathing, thinking, existing-alive-and now she was gone. That quickly.
It struck me that one day I’ll die in the midst of something just as she did-a dream, a hope, a doubt, a relationship. And that’ll be it. Such a simple truth, such an undeniable truth, yet one we desperately avoid addressing in our lives. As one of the mathematicians I’ve studied, the seventeenth-century philosopher Blaise Pascal, bluntly put it, “The last act is bloody, however fine the rest of the play. They throw earth over your head and it is finished forever.”
The last act is bloody.
However fine the rest of the play.
I knelt beside Ardis’s body.
Late forties. Slightly overweight. Blonde hair, now splayed sadly across the steps. She had gentle-looking features, wore jeans, wool socks, no shoes. Earlier, I’d found no phone in her purse. I felt her pockets. Nothing.
The pattern of blood spatter on the carpet confirmed that her body hadn’t been moved. Based on the angle of the blood droplets on the wall and railing, the shooter would have been positioned directly behind her near the top of the stairs when he-or she-fired.
She was fleeing when she was killed.
Her flannel shirt was a mess of blood from the fatal gunshot wound to her back, centered almost directly between her shoulder blades.
From the police reports I knew that Donnie was forty-eight, and, with the age of the couple, I wondered briefly if Lizzie might have been adopted. Something to check on later.
I inspected Ardis’s hands. She had short unpolished fingernails that might contain the DNA of her attacker if she’d been able to scratch him. We’ll see.
No visible defensive wounds on her hands or forearms.
Behind me I heard Jake asking Ellory if they’d moved anything. The deputy said no.
“This is how you found her.”
“That’s right.”
I looked into her unblinking eyes.
Ardis.
Her name was Ardis Pickron.
Anger tightened like a knot in my chest and I was glad. Forget objectivity. I like it when things get personal. I want to feel grief and want it to be like a hot knife inside of me. It keeps me focused on why I do what I do.
I’d been dreading this next part of the investigation ever since Margaret had told me about the crimes.
Viewing the body of the four-year-old girl.
Carefully, I stepped over Ardis. It wasn’t easy because of the narrow staircase and the position in which her body had fallen. Crossing over her like this felt uncomfortably intrusive, and I had the sense that I should apologize, even though there was no one to apologize to.
Still, in my thoughts, I did.
At the top of the stairs I noted the two bedrooms to my left. The door down the hall would be the master bedroom. I would check on that in a minute. The room closest to me was obviously Lizzie’s and looked just as you’d expect a four-year-old girl’s room to look-a pile of stuffed animals on the bed, posters of horses covering the walls, a Dora the Explorer play set in the corner, a stack of Dr. Seuss books on a shelf near the window. A small pile of little girl’s shirts lay folded neatly on the bedcovers, a dresser drawer still sat open.
Lizzie’s body lay in the doorway to the bathroom on my right.
She had blonde hair like her mother’s and wore pink tights and a flowery red dress that didn’t seem quite appropriate, considering the season. Lizzie lay face up, and the front of her dress was stained with blood.
I closed my eyes.
It’s always hardest when it’s children.
Over the years I’ve known more than one street-hardened cop who was assigned to a child homicide case and was never the same again. Some quit. Some ask for transfers to desk jobs. One FBI agent I knew took his own life. It affects you deeply and forever and you’re never the same again.
I took a breath, opened my eyes again, then forced myself to examine the position of Lizzie’s body. Based on the location of the doorway in relation to the stairs and the adjoining walls, the killer would have been on the far side of the landing when he shot her. He hadn’t posed or repositioned her.
The cold, calculated nature of the crime appalled me.
Did your father do this to you, Lizzie? Did he kill you?
Seeing the young girl’s body like this hurt so badly that I had to fight hard to keep from losing it.
A girl. A four-year-old girl.
Could a father really do that to his daughter?
You know he could. You know how often this happens all over the country.
I tried to shake that troubling thought, found it nearly impossible. Finally, I turned away from the girl and went to the far door, the master bedroom.
Staying in the hall, I peered inside.
The bed was neatly made, covered with a checkered quilt. Light purple walls brought a calm mood to the room. The closet door stood slightly ajar. On the bed stand: a Thomas H. Cook novel, and a cell phone charging beside a small lamp.
Closing my eyes again I tried to picture how things might have played out, but I was interrupted by Jake, who’d joined me on the landing. “So that’s the girl.” He spoke softly, with a reverence I wouldn’t have expected.
I opened my eyes. “Yes.”
He was looking at Lizzie. “I hate it when it’s kids.”
For the second time today we agreed about something.
“So do I.”
A small moment passed between us, and I sensed that neither of us could think of the right thing to say.
“All right,” I said at last. “Let’s reconstruct this, try to figure out what happened here at 1:48 this afternoon.”
9
Jake’s gaze moved toward the staircase. “Well, it’s pretty obvious Lizzie was leaving the bathroom and Ardis was on her way down the stairs. Probably fleeing.”
I nodded. “The killer was back here near the master bedroom when he shot Lizzie. I think
Ardis was in Lizzie’s bedroom when he did. Probably putting the laundry away.”
“Why do you say that?”
“The shirt drawer is still open, there are folded shirts on the bed. Someone was interrupted putting them away. And if Ardis had been in the master bedroom and tried to flee, she would’ve had to get past the shooter and most likely would’ve been killed on the landing.”
“Hmm,” Jake reflected. “So the killer ascends the stairs, positions himself where you are, and the bathroom door opens. Lizzie appears. He shoots her.”
“That alerts Ardis”-I was thinking aloud-“who leaves Lizzie’s bedroom, sees her daughter lying in the bathroom doorway.”
It was possible that Ardis had been descending the stairs and the killer shot her first before Lizzie left the bathroom, but it seemed more likely that a child would be frightened by the sound of a gunshot and stay in the bathroom, hoping that her mother would come to check on her. For now, I proceeded as if the order of events was along the lines of what we were thinking. “What’s the first thing you do,” I said, “if you hear a gunshot and then find the body of your daughter?”
“Run,” Jake said. “Call 911.”
I evaluated his answer. “Before that you’d check to see if your child was alive, then you’d look around to see where the shooter is. To see if you’re in danger too. And if you are-”
“You’d run.”
“Or hide.” I was studying the angles of the staircase and the location of Lizzie’s body. Would you respond differently if you knew the shooter? If it was your husband? I imagined you would but thought the specific response would depend on the state of the relationship. At the moment, postulating any further bordered on trying to decipher motives, which is something I try to steer clear of doing. “Remember, it’s possible Lizzie wasn’t dead when Ardis found her.”
Jake looked at me questioningly.
“It seems probable that Ardis didn’t see the shooter or else she would’ve hidden in the bathroom or been killed on the landing rather than making it nearly all the way down the stairs.”
“Okay,” he said. “So the killer steps into the master bedroom, then hears Ardis descending the stairs. He rushes out and shoots her before she reaches the bottom.” He contemplated that for a moment. “So what about the bullet holes in the window?”