I pulled up to the curb, and a frowning uniform ran over. I rolled down the window and leaned across the passenger seat to hand him my Sheriff’s Department ID. “Sorry about the car,” I said, trying to be pleasant. “The official vehicles were already out when I got called.”
The frown smoothed away as he looked at my ID, then handed it back to me. “Give me a second to get the tape,” he told me, then ran over to push it up so I could drive under it and park in the driveway behind one of the cruisers. The tape snagged briefly on my antenna, but then snapped back, wobbling in the mostly-still, cold air.
I parked, then climbed out, wincing as usual as I slid out. I opened the back door, pulling out the gear I needed, starting with the bunny suit. I held it up and looked over at the uniform. “Am I going to need this?” I asked him.
He nodded, his expression grim.
With a sigh, I pulled it on, following it with a mask and gloves before grabbing the giant overstuffed duffel with the equipment I needed to do most of my job—fingerprinting, evidence collection, blood and fluid sampling, and so on. I made sure my ID was clipped to the outside of the suit and made my way up to the door.
It was open, another serious-faced uniform standing halfway out of it, his dark eyes scanning the ID of everyone who approached. He was the only Black officer I’d seen in the Shawano PD. I nodded a hello, and he gave me a nod back,pressing his back against the door frame so that I and my giant bag could get past him.
I stopped about two steps inside.
There was a lot of blood, smeared in streaks down the worn linoleum of the hallway floor, soaked into the fibers of the rag rug that had been shoved up against a wall.
“Mays.” The voice belonged to McKinley, surprising me. I looked up from the blood-streaked floor to find him leaning through the first side door leading off the hallway.
“Detective McKinley,” I replied.
“It’s easier to come through here,” he told me.
I carefully picked my way toward him, avoiding the wide smear of blood just to the left of the door. It looked to me like someone had been stabbed there, fallen, and then crawled or been dragged down the hallway. I studied the smears on the floor. Crawled seemed more likely to me.
I’d come back to that later. I picked my way across the smears to enter the room where McKinley was waiting. He moved out of the way to let me in, and I saw Smith crouched down beside a small crumpled form on the floor.
Oh, fuck. I hated cases with kids. I kept that to myself. Nobody liked cases with kids, and swearing at crime scenes—if you weren’t Hart, anyway—was generally considered unprofessional. You didn’t have tosaythat kid-cases hit you harder, because they hiteverybodyharder. Especially people with kids, which I didn’t have. I wasn’t sure about either Smith or McKinley.
Both detectives wore masks, but the tension evident on their foreheads told me they weren’t any happier about this than I was.
“Detective?” A uniform stuck his head in. Both McKinley and Smith looked over at him. “Detective McKinley,” he clarified.
“Yes?” McKinley asked.
“Gas station attendant called in from the north side. Man matching the husband’s description, right vehicle type. Shirt and pants had dark stains that could have been blood.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing. Bought gas, didn’t go inside. Attendant placed the call while he was still there, but he’d left by the time a patrol car got there. We have people checking the nearest highways in both directions.”
McKinley nodded. “Thanks.”
The uniform bobbed his head, then went back to whatever he’d been doing.
I crouched down next to Smith. “You want me to start here?” I asked him.
“Yes,” he replied, his voice low and serious. “You should be able to clear this room faster than the kitchen.”
Great. I didn’t want to think about what that meant. I’d find out sooner than I wanted to, either way. I nodded to Smith, then got to work.
The kitchen had been worse.A second child, this one maybe a year or two older than the little boy in the side room, and an adult woman, presumably the children’s mother, if resemblance could be trusted. She’d been the cause of the bloody streaks down the hall, if the state of her pants were any indication. If anybody had asked me, I’d have said that she’d been stabbed out in the hall at the first smear, perhaps because she’d heard the younger boy scream and come running.
The killer had left her there, on the floor, and either anticipation or the screams of her older daughter had gotten her to her knees and made her crawl, dying, down the hallway andinto the kitchen. I could only hope that the girl hadn’t suffered as badly as her mother.
I had gotten about two-thirds of the way through cataloging the kitchen when Douglas Borde, acting ME, finally showed up. I heard him before I saw him—or, rather, I heard Smith’s angry voice.
“There was another death tonight,” Borde half-whined. Which was true, although I hadn’t seen him at either of the car accident scenes.
“Of course there was another death,” Smith snarled. “There wereseveral.And our CSI investigator has managed to be atthreein the time it has taken you to attend this one. And he actually does his job thoroughly.”
