David Baldacci: Zero Day

Puller eyed the wheelchair ramp. Matthew Reynolds was in his late forties and in good enough shape to be in the Army. His wife was five years younger with no health problems. Her insurance records were clean. The kids were sixteen and seventeen with clean health records. They weren’t using the ramp. This wasn’t their house. They were here for another reason. A reason that might have cost them their lives.

He studied the tread mark on the shoulder again, and then his gaze traveled to the dark patch. Right where the engine would be if the car were pointed to the east. Careful not to impact the tread mark, he squatted, touched the liquid. Warm. Oil. Recent. The perimeter cop? Probably. If so, where was he?

He moved swiftly up to the front door, noted the broken glass. He slipped on his shoe covers. The front door was locked but it wasn’t a deadbolt. It took him all of three seconds.

He moved forward, shining his light around with one hand, the other gripping his front-side M11 pistol.

Puller figured you go into a house where four people had been murdered and the guard who’s supposed to be out front isn’t, certain possibilities come to mind. He reached the living room and his light hit them.

On the couch.

Lined up in a row.

Four bodies, the weight of one holding up its neighbor.

He holstered his weapon and, keeping well back, spoke into the mic, recording everything he was seeing.

Dad to the far right, teen daughter to the far left. Mom and brother in the middle. Mom next to Dad. He hit the carpeted floor in front of them with the Maglite. No blood spatters. He glanced up, aimed his beam at the heads.

Dad had taken a heavy ordnance load right in the face; a near contact wound.

Mom’s face was relatively intact but her torso was destroyed. Puller glanced down at the dead woman’s hands and saw that they were nearly obliterated. She’d held them up, he surmised, right before they shot her. The hands had no chance of protecting her from the blast, but it was just instinctive to block whatever part of the body the gun was aimed at.

The two teens’ kill wounds were not evident. Maybe they’d taken it in the back. The parents had not been killed here. The spatters would have covered the room. Killed somewhere else in the house, moved here, lined up like a family watching TV together.

Pretty sick. But then you had to be pretty sick to take out a family.

Sick or a professional without a conscience.

And maybe it was the same thing.

He drew closer, careful not to step on anything marked with an evidence number on the carpet. Dad was in his old green Class Bs that could be officially worn for a few more years. The right side of his face was mostly gone, his spine exposed through the gaping wound in the neck. Bone and a hollow eye socket looked back at Puller. No wounds in his torso. He’d taken it all in the face and neck at close range.

A shotgun was pretty much the only firearm that did damage like that.

He could see bits of white in the wound tracks. Wadding from the shell. Hopefully they’d be able to tell the gauge from measuring the diameter of the wadding or by the name of the maker on top of the wad, if it was still readable.

Mom’s eyes stared back at Puller. For an observer given to melodrama it would have appeared that the woman’s look was pleading.

Find my killer.

Puller illuminated her chest with the Maglite. Dozens of punctures, randomly distributed. Shotgun as well, but different in the way it had been deployed.

He drew a ruler from his pocket and measured the distance between the punctures on Mrs. Reynolds’s blouse that had once been white but was now mostly crimson. He did the calculation in his head and put the ruler away. He felt the man’s arm and then the woman’s. Still in rigor, though it was well on its way down and the muscles were relaxing. The bodies were the temperature of the room or lower. He pulled his air thermometer and took a reading. Blood had pooled to the lower extremities. Bowels and bladders long ago emptied. Skin greenish blue, rotting smell, faces dissolving. In death everybody was ugly.

He turned his attention to the teens.

Then he stopped, swiveled. A noise. From somewhere in the house.

Apparently he wasn’t the only living person in here.

Thump-whoosh-thump. Thump-whoosh-thump.

Down the stairs, basement level.

Of course it is.

Puller eased to the doorway.

He sniffed the air. The scent of decomposing bodies was heavy, but Puller was not focusing his nose on that. He was trying to detect something else. Sweat. Cologne. Cigarettes. The molecular signature of bad breath. Anything that would give him an edge.

Nothing.

He moved the door open with his foot. The passageway down was dark.

Of course it is.

Thump-whoosh-thump.

The mechanical nature of the sound did not cause Puller to relax.

If he were leading someone to his death he would employ deception. In fact, in Iraq and Afghanistan he’d done it many times, just like the other side had been trying to do to him.

He pulled a pair of night optics from his knapsack, slipped them on his head, flipped down the eyepiece, and fired them up. The tunnel of darkness immediately flamed to life, albeit a green, somewhat hazy life. He squatted and pulled his other pistol from its holster. Both handguns were double-single action, racked and ready. Ordinarily he would not use two pistols at the same time, for the simple reason that his aim and accuracy could be diminished if he fired at two targets simultaneously. However, in a contained space like this, where accuracy was not so critical, he needed as much firepower as possible.

Two of the main differences between MPs and CID special agents were that MPs carried their weapons without a round chambered. CID agents went through life with racked guns at all times. MPs turned in their weapons when their shift was done. CID agents didn’t draw a breath without their guns in easy reach.

When Puller applied twelve pounds of pressure on the trigger and fired, the slide would push the hammer back and his weapon would become a single-action pull. Twenty-round mags, so forty shots total, though he normally only needed one. He had never been a spray-and-pray kind of guy. But he could empty both pistols in about ten seconds if need be and lay down a man-sized target at fifteen meters with no problem. Now he just needed to acquire a target, preferably before it acquired him.

With his silhouette narrowed and lowered he began to proceed down the carpeted stairs. He squinted along the iron sights of the right-hand pistol. He did not like being in an enclosed space. The “fatal funnel,” the Army called it. He had decent firepower, but they might have more.

Thump-whoosh-thump.

Mechanical. But someone had to hit the start button.

The file had mentioned a dog. Cole and her folks had to have confiscated the animal. They wouldn’t have been so stupid as to leave a dog alone to mosey through the crime scene, particularly with bloody dead bodies around. Dogs, though domesticated, were carnivores after all.

Thump-whoosh-thump.

He hit the bottom step and crab-walked over to a far corner and did a recon.

Unfinished space.

Poured concrete floor, both studded-out and concrete foundation walls, exposed ceiling. Wires snaking up the naked walls. Mildew hit his nostrils. It was far better than the smell upstairs.

Against one wall he saw the marks. And on the floor in front.

Blood. The killing had been done down here. At least for Mom and Dad.

Thump-whoosh-thump.

He scanned the area once more. The room doglegged at the other end. There was a space he couldn’t see because of a jutting concrete load-bearing wall.