Nick Stone: The King of Swords

Max picked up a spent shell casing from its chalked circle, numbered with a marker on the floor and compared it to a blown-up photograph of one of the casings found at the Martin/Morales murder scene. Same strike marks on the end.

'Six bodies. Twelve shots fired-at least,' Max said, holding up a glassine evidence bag with a fragment of the shell that had been dug out of the windowsill. As with his previous two murders, Preval had used hollow-points on his family-bullets with quartered tips, which fragmented on impact, flying off at four different angles, causing maximum damage. Back in patrol Max had known a cop who'd been shot in the kneecap with a hollow-point. It had blown his lower leg clean off. 'Someone musta heard something.'

'These houses are too far apart.'

'He killed his whole family, Joe, with a.38. That's a lotta noise.'

'Then there's the time of day this happened. Late enough and everyone woulda been sleepin'. Dunno 'bout you, but when I sleep, man, I sleep. I'm Lazarus. Take Jesus himself to rouse me.' Joe looked out of the window at the activity in the driveway-paramedics with stretchers, uniformed cops keeping back a news crew, curious neighbours.

'What about the guard? What they pay him for?'

'Keep the bad guys out,' Joe said.

Lacour had been as systematic as he'd been merciless. He'd killed them anti-clockwise, beginning with the old woman in the black and green dress to his left nearest the door. She'd been sat at the end of the table. He'd shot her twice in the forehead, once from a distance and then the second time from very close up, the muzzle practically touching the skin. Then he'd turned on his two teenage sons, sitting side by side in the middle, their backs to the window. The first-and oldest-had tried to shield his brother and had been shot first in the shoulder, and then executed like the woman he'd been sitting close to. His brother had been grazed in the neck by the bullet fragment Max had found embedded in the windowsill. He'd crawled under the table Max guessed, following the small morse code of bloodstains on the floor. The old man in the wheelchair had then tried to protect him by swinging one of his two thick walking sticks at the gunman. Lacour had shot at the man mid-swing and blown his stick apart. There were splinters and slivers of wood buried in the old man's face, as well as part of a bullet which had entered his head through his eye. He'd then been shot one more time for good measure, before his murderer had dispatched the boy on the floor. Most of the corpses still had the gold cardboard party hats they'd been wearing at the time of their deaths stuck to their ruptured heads.

Apart from the turntable and Max and Joe's whispering, it was utterly quiet in the room. Five forensics staff were working on the scene, scraping, bagging, stoppering glass tubes, lifting prints, lifting hair, lifting lips to look at teeth, lifting hands and legs, lifting bodies to one side, left and right. They measured holes in the wall, distances between bodies, sizes of entry and exit wounds, range of spatter. Everyone worked efficiently and precisely, but also very quickly and without pause, as if they couldn't wait to get away.

The hister beetles were moving freely and unimpeded throughout the room. Once inside the house they'd branched out into two trains, one making for the stairs, the other going into the living room. There, a few feet into the room, they'd forked again, four subdivisions taking a body apiece. They crawled up fingers and feet, shoulders and necks and disappeared under hems and collars, up sleeves, through rips and tears in fabric. Meanwhile, from each corpse, a separate string of beetles exited from another aperture and made its way back across the living room, gradually linking up with other departing bug lines to form a pulsing shiny green caravan out of the house and back to the earth it had come from. From up where Max was standing, the bugs seemed like a network of veins, pumping in and out of the earth, a conduit straight to its deep dark heart. He thought for a moment how he too would one day be reduced to a lump of rotting, seeping meat and this troubled him enough to think of insisting on being cremated. Fuck the headstone.

'I don't get this one, Joe. This-this family, this house, this kinda life-this is something you kill for.'

'That's the second thing I hate about this job.' Joe nodded. 'Shit you never get to understand 'cause the perp took all the answers to hell with him.'

'What's the first?'

'The ones that get away, the ones you never catch, the ones that are still out there, lookin' for the next kill, the invisible monsters.'

'Well, it's like you once told me back in patrol, Joe…'

'Way it is, partner. Do your best and learn to live with it, 'cause it'll always be a lot worse tomorrow,' Joe finished the sentence Max liked to quote back to him, and to every pale-faced rookie who came up to him and asked him for advice after they'd found out what being a cop was really about. Joe hadn't learned those words off anyone. They'd just come to him, the effortless way wisdom does to someone who's had to struggle for everything in his life from the day he was born.

They looked around some more. There was a drinks trolley near the stereo system. On it stood a large punch bowl, part-filled with thick, sticky bright pink syrup. The top was completely covered with a crust of drowned blowflies.

They looked over the eight-foot-long dining table and its white cloth and full dinner service-fine heavy silver cutlery and china crockery, immaculately laid out with small ivory winged rests for the knives, silver rings for the napkins and three different-sized crystal glasses at each place setting. In the middle of the table were uncorked bottles of red wine, a magnum of champagne and, either side of them half-empty jugs of water. A large framed colour photograph stood near the bottles: Lacour to the left, Guy Martin to the right and the mayor of Miami in the middle, beaming. There were thin lines and spots of dried blood all over the table-impact spray from the bullets.

'He killed his own first,' Max said. 'Then he went after the others.'

The two detectives looked at each for a brief moment, one seeing the other's horror and revulsion and the thought that informed the looks: just when you figured you'd seen it all-the very worst thing man could do to his fellow man-something that little bit more horrific came shimmering down the pipe, a big bloody grin on its face. They left the room.

A black, open-toed high-heeled shoe stood upright at the foot of the stairs. It had a diamante pattern of creeping ivy around the heel and diamante laurels around the toe opening. It was surrounded by a chalk mark. There were two more bodies on the hallway stairs, one on top of the other, lying in a wide pool of dried blood, which had soaked the boards and dripped off the side of the steps onto the ground below, some catching on the wall. A woman, shot in the back and then behind her ear, was lying face down on top of a little girl, no more than seven or eight, executed in the same way as the others. The mother had been trying to protect her daughter. Her long black hair partly covered her daughter's face. The beetles were busily working their way through them both.

Lacour's study was next to the living room-a large mahogany desk faced the door as they came in, behind it a plush leather reclining chair and lampstand. On one wall hung a crude painting of giraffes in a dense forest, while on another was a large posed family photograph in a gilt frame. All the victims were there. Lacour was in the middle of the second row, his hands on the shoulders of his two teenage sons, beaming proudly. His wife sat in front-a good-looking, if slightly plump dark-skinned woman smiling an unforced, good-natured smile. Next to her was the old man in the wheelchair. Max guessed, from the strong resemblance, that he was Lacour's father. He was holding a baby in his lap. To his left, was his wife. Lacour's young daughter was sitting up on the floor between them.