Chris Mooney - The Dead Room

Darby turned on her flashlight and made her way to the edge of the lawn to examine the driveway. Bloody footprints gleamed in the bright beam of light. She placed evidence cones next to one.

'Don't bother,' Banville called from the porch. 'The EMTs left them on the driveway, the walkway and the front steps.'

Must be a hell of a lot of blood in there, Darby thought. She placed her kit on the grass and, watching where she stepped, made her way to the garage.

No cars inside, just mountain bikes and a John Deere ride-on mower. Dark stains on the floor. Motor oil, she thought, until she moved the beam of her light and saw bloody footprints. A single set made by a narrow shoe – a sneaker or running shoe, judging by the shape of the tread marks.

In the back of the garage she found blood smeared against a set of wooden steps leading up to a door.

'When the queen shows up,' a man said from behind the fence, 'are we supposed to bow down and kiss her ass?'

'When you get a good look at her you'll want to do more than kiss her ass,' a different male voice replied. 'You'll want to bury your face between her thighs and not come up for air. You ever see her up close?'

'I've seen her on the news a few times,' the first man said. 'Looks like that English actress that always makes my pecker stand up at full attention and bark – the one from those Underworld movies, Christ, what's her name?'

'Kate Beckinsale.'

A snap of fingers. 'That's the one,' the first man said. 'The McCormick broad is the spitting image of her but has that nice dark red hair. Wouldn't mind running my fingers through that while she's on her knees giving me a blow-e.'

Laughter all around.

Darby shrugged off the comments. She had learned early on that a good majority of men viewed women as nothing more than sexual objects – receptacles solely designed to satisfy a biological urge and nothing more. Pump em and dump em was the phrase she'd overheard around the station, when her male counterparts thought she was safely out of earshot.

'Listen up, boyos.'

Artie Pine's voice sounding older, deeper and raspy – a voice ragged from too many cigars, too many late nights and booze. Hearing it brought her back to the long Saturday afternoon barbecues her father had thrown every other weekend right up until he was shot a few months shy of her thirteenth birthday. Pine, a big bowling ball with feet, would sit in a lawn chair and smoke what her father called 'fives-and-tens' – cheap dime-store cigars rolled into thin wrappers the size of a pencil, the odour so bitter and pungent it scared away the mosquitoes after the sun went down. Pine would sit in the chair all day, smoking and drinking and telling stories to an audience that always ended with wild eruptions of knee-slapping laughter. He'd ask kids to fetch him another beer from the cooler and always gave them a folded dollar bill.

'That's Big Red's little girl you're talking about,' Pine said. 'When she gets here, make sure you show her the proper respect.'

Darby shut off the flashlight. She made her way back to the front and saw bright camera lights from far across the street. Belham police had corralled the small media crowd behind sawhorses.

Coop stood on the porch talking to Banville. Darby examined the bloody footwear impressions on the blue-stone walkway. Two different sets of footprints. They matched the ones on the driveway.

She joined them and said, 'The footprints on the walkway and driveway are different from the single set I found inside the garage.'

'I'll get to work on it,' Banville said, picking up his camera equipment. 'I've already photographed the foyer and kitchen. Before you two head in, you're going to need to change into one of these fabulous bunny suits.'

'Awesome,' Coop said. 'It's not like I'm sweating my balls off already.'

'One other thing,' Banville said. 'The front windows facing the street? The shades and blinds were drawn when I got here. The windows facing the backyard, and the sliding glass door in the living room – none of those shades were drawn. That's what we call a clue, Coop.'

'Good to know.'

Darby grabbed the suits from the hatchback. They slipped into them while flashbulbs popped over her shoulder. She put on a pair of clear glasses, walked back up the lawn and eased open the front door.

The foyer looked as if it had been hit by an earthquake. All the pictures had been removed from the walls and smashed. An old wooden secretarial desk lay on its side, its drawers pulled out. Papers, family pictures and shards of glass covered nearly every inch of the tiled floor. Bloody footprints stretched across the foyer and back into the kitchen. Broken plates and glasses covered the brown-granite worktops. The cupboards – at least the ones she could see – had been opened, each shelf emptied.

Darby looked at Coop. 'Did Pine tell you about this?'

Coop shook his head. 'If he had, I would've called the Wonder Twins and asked them to meet us here. We can't process this by ourselves – not unless we want to be working around the clock for the next week.'

Darby unzipped her suit, took out her phone and dialled the Operations Department in order to request the services of Mark Alves and Randy Scott. The dining room, she saw, was right off the foyer. What looked like a china cabinet and sideboard had been overturned. All the drawers had been pulled out, the contents dumped on an oriental rug covered with shattered glass.

'Let's go through the dining room,' she said after hanging up. 'Looks like the easiest route.'

Carefully navigating her way through the dining room, she smelled cordite and, lurking underneath it, blood – a strong, coppery odour that always made her eyes water.

An archway led into the kitchen; to her left was the living room, where she went first. A flat-screen TV and console had been thrown against the floor. Muddy footprints on the beige carpet led away from a sliding glass door of shattered glass. She spotted a few of the same muddy prints on a redwood-stained deck and wondered if one of the responding officers had left them.

When she reached the archway, she turned the corner.

Darby saw the woman's fingers first. The ones still attached had been broken backwards and were now splayed at odd angles. Thick duct tape bound the woman's wrists and forearms to the armrests of a kitchen chair. More tape, strips and strips of it, had pinned her ankles against the chair legs. Her throat had been slashed from ear to ear, the cut so deep it had nearly decapitated her. Her eyes were taped shut and her severed fingers – three of them – had been stuffed inside her mouth.

'Jesus,' Coop said behind her.

Darby broke out in a cold sweat despite the A/C. Pools of blood had collected underneath the chair and stretched like fingers across the white tiles. A second chair covered with cut strips of duct tape lay sideways. One of the cut strips fluttered from the cold air rushing through a vent.

Bloody footprints covered the floor. Two bright red trails of blood stretched across the floor and down the hall leading to the door for the garage. A black handbag lay on its side, its contents scattered across the tiles.

Every inch of the long, wide kitchen had been ransacked. Every drawer had been pulled out. The refrigerator door hung open; the shelves had been wiped clean. The oven and dishwasher doors were open; the grills had been pulled out. The kitchen island had been unbolted and overturned. The bloody footwear impressions in the hall led back and forth. Someone had made several trips between the garage and kitchen.

Coop swiped the back of his arm across his forehead, his face as white as a sheet.

'Go outside and get some air,' Darby said, making her way to the living room. 'I'll go talk to Pine.'

Darby's gaze swept across the bare white walls covered with an arterial spray of blood. She forced her attention back to the chairs and wondered if they had been arranged so that the woman faced her son.