The detective shrugged. He offered Glenda a hand first. “I’m Detective Hector Ramirez, the lead on this case. I’m the one who called you in.”
Zach refrained from thanking him for placing that call. Instead, he continued to survey the area. This house was at the end of a cul-de-sac, and it was the home with the most acreage behind a tall stone wall and an electric gate. At the corners of the house, there were small cameras. “You find any security footage?” Zach said, pointing to one of the cameras.
Detective Ramirez grunted and shook his head. “Our running theory right now is that it’s an off-site recording facility. One of our crime scene guys is looking for some sort of bill in the office to figure out who might have any recordings.”
“Seems odd they don’t handle that on the property,” Glenda said. “A house this size, you’d expect there might be some provisioning for on-site security.”
“You’d think,” Detective Ramirez said. “But we’ve been upstairs and down in that place, and there’s no security room anywhere that we can find.”
Zach listened, but he something else caught his attention. Evening primrose carried over from the gardens in the front yard, a haunting fragrance that added to the surreality of the size of the property. The grass was thick and green and surprisingly tall for the size of the house. The flowers too appeared huge—white, red, and yellow roses the size of his fist. Even the weeds that grew in the lawn seemed to have been given free rein to take best in show in a county fair dedicated to dandelions. Maybe their gardener was on vacation. Lucky for him if he was.
Before he started his walk up the front walkway, Zach caught sight of something in one of the windows. A flutter of the drapes like they were pulled back. At first, he figured it was a cop or crime-scene tech checking out the upper rooms. But as he looked again, he noticed it was a woman with light-brown hair who stared down at him, one who didn’t appear dressed as law enforcement.
“Was anyone left alive?” Zach asked as he watched the woman.
Detective Ramirez shook his head. “No one.”
Glenda said, “how about the names of our victims?”
“We’re running them now,” Ramirez said, “but it’s weird.”
Zach turned away from the woman to look at Ramirez. “Weird how?”
“The house is registered to a Robert Graft, but that name doesn’t have any other hits in our database. None of them do.”
“None of them?”
“They all seem to be assumed names. Fake IDs, fake passports. Professionally done too.”
“So maybe it’s organized crime.” Glenda said.
“That’s why we called you guys,” Ramirez said.
Zach turned back to the woman in the window. She was still there. And she was looking their way. No, she was looking at him. At this distance, he wasn’t sure how he could tell, but something in his gut told him her eyes were focused directly on him. Wasn’t this how scary movies started? A strange figure staring out of an upper story window.
“You okay?” Glenda asked him. Zach turned to look at her. When he glanced back to the window, the woman was gone.
“Yeah, I’m fine. Somebody was watching us from the upstairs window.”
She turned to look. “Probably a crime-scene guy,” she said. She was probably right. But Glenda turned to smirk back at him. “You’re not going to get sick, are you?”
Zach rolled his eyes and walked past her. “You do this every time…”
“Really, Zach.” She followed him. “I mean it. If you’re going to get sick, do it in the bushes.”
Zach blew out a frustrated breath. “I’m not…” Sometimes she was like an evil big sister.
She quirked her mouth in a jeering expression. “Just don’t puke all over the evidence, hot shot,” she said, and she trudged up the stairs leading to the double doors of the entry way.
“One time!” Zach said again as she walked away. He followed. His first time out, he puked. Zach caught Detective Ramirez looking at him funny. “Ignore her,” Zach said to him. “It was ten years ago.”
Ramirez grinned as he handed Zach a box of latex gloves. “We’ve all been there.”
“Projectile,” Glenda said as she pulled on a glove. “All over the walls.”
Ramirez chuckled.
“One time. Just one time,” Zach muttered to her. “Do it once and never live it down.” Glenda was the senior agent among the two of them, the one with more experience, even though they were both relatively close in age. Zach stayed on at school to finish up a master’s degree in behavioral psychology at Cornell. Glenda worked up the old way with a bachelor’s degree and solid instinct. But Glenda was also the one who acted like a high-school senior at times. “Come on,” Zach said, and he walked inside.
The entry hall was as big and grand as Zach expected. High ceilings and plenty of natural light to twinkle off the massive chandelier that hung down from above. Wide curved staircases swept up on either side of the marbled space onto a Juliet balcony that overlooked the entry hall.
Like the outside, the plants inside the house were healthy, nearly to the point of overgrown. Potted palms stood off to one side of the foyer, and their fronds dominated much of the room, larger than any palm leaves he’d ever seen before.
The stunning interior paled as soon as they walked inside and Zach saw what they’d come here for: A body on the marble floor.
Zach knelt down for a closer look.
“And that’s just the first one,” Ramirez said.
“Detective?” Two uniformed cops came into the foyer, a stocky guy, mid-30s and a thinner guy who looked about ten years younger. Detective Ramirez gave them a glance. “We gotta go,” the officer said.
“You two got somewhere more important to be?” Ramirez said.
“Precinct called. We’re being pulled.”
Ramirez ran a hand through his thinning hair. “They do know we got a bunch of dead people here, right?”
The officer knew enough to look appropriately sheepish. “Yeah, sorry,” he said. “It’s for well-being checks.”
“You gotta be kidding me. Well-being checks?” Ramirez stared at the two officers, then he waved them off, and they left the house. He glanced back to Zach and Glenda with an apologetic look.
“Go, we’ll just have a look around,” Glenda said to Ramirez. “If we have any questions, we’ll find you.”
He nodded. “I’ll be coordinating the crime scene techs upstairs if you need me,” he said. “Apparently they expect me to be in ten places at once.” Then he made his way up the grand staircase. “A house this big, you’d think the L-T would let me keep a few extra officers.”
When they were alone, Glenda glanced at Zach, and Zach understood. It was always uncomfortable when they found themselves amidst domestic troubles in local PDs. She joined Zach near the body, as close as she could without stepping into the pool of blood surrounding it. “Definitely an aggressive murder,” Glenda said.
Zach moved closer. The throat was cut clean through, the head missing. He glanced back at his partner with a wry expression. “Uncanny conclusive work,” Zach said. “You should be an FBI agent.”
Glenda dismissed Zach with a wave and peered closer at the body.
The body belonged to a male, nice clothes, but the type of clothing that a rich person might lounge around the house in. “So, um,” Zach said. “Where do you think the head is at?”
Glenda looked up at him. “That is one of the questions.”
Right. Zach stood up and went further into the house.
Crime scene techs moved around in a living room that put Zach’s entire house to shame. “You guys detectives?” the crime scene tech said, a guy with glasses and a hair net.
“No, pizza delivery,” Glenda said as she walked up.
The crime scene tech nodded. “Good. I’m starving,” he said.
Glenda smiled and Zach caught her bemused glance. She liked it when somebody played back. Zach was trying to get better at it
. She showed the tech her federal ID, and Zach showed his.
The crime scene tech nodded. “Yuri,” he said with a gloved hand extended that had blood on the palm.
Glenda stared down at it.
Yuri grinned. “Kidding.” He laughed, then he turned back toward the scene in the living room, lots of blood and two more bodies. “I’ve seen some crazy murders in this city, but this is a little out of our wheelhouse. I mean, we get the occasional cartel massacre or a gang shoot up, but those are easy to handle.” He walked toward the two bodies on the floor. Zach and Glenda followed. Yuri stopped and pointed down a wide hallway off the living room. “There are three more in the kitchen, two in an upstairs bedroom, and two more in the gym downstairs.”
“That makes ten bodies,” Zach said. “The news said there were nine.”
“Eleven, actually. When the news first got out, we hadn’t found the two servants.”
“How do you know they were servants?” Glenda asked.
“Their uniforms, mostly.” Yuri pressed his lips together. “Funny thing about them too: They were the only ones with their heads intact.”
Glenda nodded. “How’d they die?”
“Throats cut,” Yuri said.
“Somebody was real busy,” Zach said.
“You’d be right about that,” Yuri said. “Anyway, the ME’s been through here and with the one in the foyer. Liver temp put the time of death at sometime in the early morning hours.”
“How early we talking?” Zach asked.
“She ball parked it at some time between 4 a.m. and 8 a.m.”
So a four-hour window. That was about as good as it got this early, without a full analysis at the ME’s office.
“Come on,” Glenda said. “Let’s go see what else we got.”
They walked through the rest of the house. The furniture inside and the way everything was decorated was a mix of traditional and modern. Clean lines in the furniture were punctuated by ornate wall hangings and the odd chair or armoire or a bar that looked plucked from the seventeenth-century France, and somehow it all worked. Nothing looked out of place. It was a house that Zach would have been in awe of —if it hadn’t been for the grotesque scenes of blood spatter and tacky, dark-red pools in several of them.
Spread throughout in various places were the occasional gold statuette, a painting that Zach was pretty sure he remembered seeing in an art book in college, and lots of other ritzy rich people stuff. All of this was alongside touches of modern technology like state-of-the-art computers, flat-screen televisions. One thing that Zach took note of: Some of the bedrooms had wallets still laid out. Jewelry hung from a stand in one of the bedrooms. It was safe to say that whoever did this didn’t have a monetary motive.
As they made their way through, Zach looked for the woman he’d seen in the window, but there was nobody there that matched who he’d seen. All of the women who worked the crime scene—crime scenes, that is—wore the white jumpsuits that kept their own skin and hair from contaminating the evidence. He was ready to strike that up to a lack of sleep and the stress of the last few days in LA and now this.
After each examination of the bodies, they were still lacking one piece of key evidence: the heads.
“Maybe this guy took them as trophies,” Zach said after they finished examining the two downstairs, a fit guy and an equally fit girl in workout clothing who looked as if they’d been caught in the middle of a workout. Sweat dried in a salty ring on the male’s tank top.
“It’s not unheard of,” Glenda said. “If that’s the case, it means we’re dealing with somebody who is on a spree that he wants to keep going at, or this was a revenge killing of some sort, and the heads were taken as something like proof.”
Zach nodded. Sometimes a severed head was a way to communicate among those crowds who liked to give Facetime a whole macabre new meaning.
He stood, staring down at the dead couple with his hands on his hips. “How do you think he did it?”
“My guess is a long blade of some kind,” Glenda said. The tone to her voice carried a little bit of dry humor as she pointed out the obvious.
“No, I mean all eleven of these bodies are in different parts of the house. You’d think somebody getting their head chopped off would make some noise, right?”
“You’d think,” Glenda said. “I know I’d be screaming my head off.”
Zach grimaced and tried his best not to chuckle. “Hilarious.”
“I try,” she said with a shrug.
“So how does somebody get through the gate security, walk into this house, take a guy down in the entry hall, two more in the nearby living room, then continue to make his way all through the house without alerting everyone?”
They both stood where they were, letting that thought steam through for a bit.
“Agents?” A uniformed police officer stood at the foot of the stairs leading back upstairs. “Officer Lin,” he said with a hand shake. “I think we found something you ought to see.”
“What?” Glenda said. “I hate it when they do that in the movies. Just tell us.”
“We, uh,” Officer Lin gulped. “We found the heads.”
Zach looked to Glenda, and she tilted her head in the direction of Officer Lin as if to say, after you. Zach followed Officer Lin.
They walked up the stairs and down a long hallway to a wing of the house that they’d been in already, but Zach was pretty certain he’d seen no heads anywhere. A turn around a corner, and Zach found himself staring at a dead end. No, not a dead end, but a section of the wall that stood askew and opened outward.
“We happened upon it when one of our crime scene techs noticed this door here wasn’t quite flush with the wall.”
“A god damn hidden passage way,” Glenda said. She shook her head. “Rich people.”
Zach studied the doorway. When he stared into the interior of the passage, something gnawed at his gut. He wasn’t sure what it was, but it made him gulp and shift his weight. “Some kind of panic room, maybe?”
“If it is,” Glenda said, “I don’t think it worked.”
“We never would’ve known it was there, but whoever left, left in a hurry. It was still open a crack,” Officer Lin said.
The three of them went through the open passageway entrance to a set of stairs leading down. The interior of the hidden passageway shared the same tasteful decoration as the rest of the house. The walls of the stairwell were a rich flat-panel wood washed a tasteful eggshell white. Zach wasn’t quite sure what he expected, maybe old torches and walls made of weeping stone. Instead, the secret stairwell was bright and airy.
Pictures hung at various points on the wall on either side of the staircase, old paintings that, Zach guessed, were probably worth something to someone more familiar with art portraits. He stopped at one of the pictures of a stately woman. The brass name plate beneath the picture read Nancy Lynn Stavros. Zach stared up at her. She wasn’t anybody he’d ever heard of before, but apparently she was important enough to warrant a painted picture. He shrugged and moved on. He took note of the other names: Surnames like Corbett, Maystone, Coyle, Penrose. These were like the paintings of presidents in the White House, lifelike to the point that Zach half expected the woman in the picture to blink or watch them. It creeped him out, and he hurried on toward the bottom of the stairs.
At the bottom, it wasn’t any better. Zach’s feeling of unease only increased. Something was off. It hit Zach as a flutter in his stomach. He wasn’t feeling nauseous. This was different. Nerves? Or maybe…excitement? It almost tingled on the skin of his arms, made his skin crawl. The muscles in his neck and shoulders tightened like he prepared to be hit from behind. “Anyone else down here?” Zach asked.
Officer Lin shook his head. “Just us. Crime scene guys found it then cleared out so you and the detectives could see it before they went to work.”
He rubbed his arms. He peered into every corner and into each shadow. There weren’t many, though. The room was well lit, so i
t wasn’t any kind of storage space. Maybe a novelty room, a place to sit and have drinks? It looked like the kind of place for a wine cellar. “What were they hiding down here,” Zach asked. He shivered.
It was an elegant space. The stairwell widened with banisters that finished into intricate volutes on either side, spiraled woodwork that appeared handcrafted. A seating area dominated the space, damask fabric over chesterfield sofas standing back to back. High-backed chairs lined one wall punctuated with wooden Jacobian tables. Along another wall stood a long, padded red-leather bench, ended on either side by large topiary potted plants.
But Zach’s attention was pulled to what seemed to be the centerpiece of the room. A painting took up most of the space of the far wall, this one much older, more elegantly done. Unlike the others in the stairwell, this one depicted a battle scene, a man standing tall with nine generals in front of a field of creatures. It reminded him a little of all the pictures painted about Saint George slaying a dragon, only the creatures weren’t dragons, they were demonic beings with unsettling faces. The tallest figure in the painting held something aloft, and Zach had to peer closer to get any idea of what it was, but he was unable to make it out. There was a brass nameplate beneath this one too, and Zach leaned in: Fionn mac Cumhaill and the Fianna.
The name resonated with him for some reason, and he stepped back from the picture to take it all in. “You know anything about this?” Zach asked.
Glenda moved up beside him and studied the painting. “Not a thing. I slept through most of the required arts courses in college.”
“Through this doorway,” Officer Lin said.
Zach turned to follow. He shivered and rubbed his arms.
Glenda remained staring at Zach. “Cold?”
Zach stopped rubbing his arms. “You don’t feel that?”
“Feel what?” Glenda asked.
He shook his head. “Forget about it. Maybe I’m just weirded out by this whole crime scene.”
“You and me both.”
They walked through the doorway. Here was where it got weird.
Or, well, weirder.
The Stone (Lockstone Book 1) Page 4