Steven James - The Queen

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.”

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?”

Ellory was staring at me. “How did you know?”

“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.