Steven James - The Queen

“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?”

“The neighbor heard two initial shots. Those were the kill shots.”

He looked at me skeptically. “And how do you know the shooter didn’t fire the shots through the window first, then kill Ardis and Lizzie?”

“The angle of the first two bullets through the glass shows that they were fired from the first floor,” I explained, “but if the killer fired those before ascending the steps, it would have alerted Ardis and Lizzie, who would have hidden in a room since the only exit route is down the steps. Additionally-”

“He would’ve shot Ardis from the ground floor,” Jake said, tracking with me, “rather than from the landing.”

I nodded. “Yes.”

“Huh.” He gestured toward the plate glass. “You knew all this earlier, didn’t you? Just by looking at the trajectory of the bullet holes and knowing the position of the bodies? That’s why you were so concerned about the angles in the glass when we first got here.” He sounded impressed, but I noted a thread of contempt in his voice. “You knew it already back then.”

Well, I didn’t quite know it.

“I had my suspicions.”

When he replied I sensed that he’d taken offense, as if reconstructing the crime scene had become some kind of competition between us: “So then, after killing them, he fires the shots through the window.” Jake was pretending to take aim at the window, here from the landing.

“First he descends the stairs,” I corrected him. “The single shot fired from the landing was the final one to pass through the glass. He would’ve had to go to the ground floor and fire the two shots through the window first.”

“Why would he do that?”

I shook my head. “I have no idea. But I’m really wondering about that last shot the neighbor heard-the final bullet to pass through the window. The trajectory tells us it was fired from the landing. That means that after coming down the stairs, the killer would’ve had to return to the landing-stepping over Ardis’s body as he did-before firing again through the window.”

Mentally, I played out a few other scenarios, but at the moment I didn’t come up with any other event progression that took into account the timing and trajectory of the shots as well as the location of the bodies and their position.

“When the shots were fired, where Donnie shot ’em from,” Ellory called from the base of the stairs, “what does any of that matter, anyway?”

“Everything matters.” I didn’t like that he was referring to Donnie as the killer.

I pressed the master bedroom door open the rest of the way and stepped inside.

I studied the carpet for any evidence that someone might have entered the room.

“What is it?” Jake asked.

“We have no footprints leading from the front porch to the side of the house where the snowmobile was parked, so, assuming the killer rode it from the scene, he exited the scene through the laundry room. The family left their shoes, not just their boots, near the front door. Neither Ardis nor Lizzie was wearing shoes, so it appears the family habitually-”

“Takes off their shoes in the house.”

“Yes.”

Jake went on, paralleling my thoughts: “And if Donnie was the shooter, he would’ve had his shoes off in the house.”

“It’s likely.”

“However, if someone else was the shooter, he wouldn’t have taken off his shoes. After all, why would he?”

“That’s right.”

“So, mud on the carpet?”

Or water stains or shoe impressions…

It was more likely we’d find mud or impressions by one of the entrances to the home or on the pristine white living room rug. “Maybe.”

I inspected the carpet but couldn’t tell if the shoe impressions I saw were the same size as Donnie’s boots in the mud room. Natasha should be here any minute to process the crime scene. I’d have her check it out.

I descended the stairs, stepping past Ardis’s body as reverently as I could. “We’ll want to check the neighbor’s clock,” I told Ellory. “See if it has the correct time. If we really are talking about 1:48 p.m.”

“I’ll have an officer do it.” He stared past me toward the landing. “You think he forgot something maybe?”

“Who?”

“The shooter. That he might have been on his way out, realized he forgot something upstairs, went back to the landing to get it, and then fired the last shot through the living room window when he got there.”

“I really couldn’t say.”

Jake, who was still on the landing, answered, “That would make sense.”

While Jake came down the stairs to join us, I questioned Ellory about some of the issues that the rather disappointing and incomplete police report had left unanswered.

“Were the lights in the house on or off when you arrived?”

“They were on. All of them, except the study.”

“Were the exterior doors locked or unlocked?”

“The doors were unlocked, but that’s not so unusual.” He said the next few words with uncertainty, as if he’d stopped believing them: “There’s not much crime around here.”

“Appliances. Which were on?”

“You mean like the oven?”

“Yes, and the computer, television, the washer, dryer, a cooking timer-anything.” All of these things tell us what was happening, where people were, what they were doing, or when they were doing it.

He thought. “Not the washer or dryer. Or the TV. We checked the computer for a suicide note; didn’t find one though.”

“The computer is in the study?”

“Yes.”

I retrieved my laptop from the mud room. “Do you by any chance know the last webpage that was opened?”

He was looking increasingly disappointed in himself the more we spoke. “I didn’t look.”

“It’s okay. Thanks.”

In the small office nook attached to the living room I clicked to the internet history while Ellory asked Jake, “You’re a profiler. What’s your take on this?”

The web history was password protected. The Bureau has ways past that, however. I surfed to the Federal Digital Database and entered my ID number.

“Rage,” Jake said. “Donnie’s-or whoever committed these crimes-their behavior exhibits uncontrollable rage. We find this type of thing with people who snap. Something pushes them over the edge-job loss, marital problems, the death of a child.”

I downloaded the program I needed, and a few seconds later, using a 32-byte MD5 hash, I’d cracked the password and I was in.

Jake continued, “Almost always in cases like this, we find what we call a trigger event or a precipitating stressor. Do we know if there was any sudden trauma in his life recently?”