Six hours later nobody - save for the rapidly stiffening corpses of the Burke family - had left the building. Law Danes knew he‘d be busy as soon as he saw the congealing puddles of blood and fluid flooding out the Burke’s living room. The place looked like a bomb full of bright red paint had gone off, spraying and spattering and pooling the thick, rank-smelling mess on every surface in the room. There were family pictures, and a lot of them were so blood-soaked that the faces were hardly visible through the foggy red coating. A piano in one corner had tiny crimson stalagmites hanging under the keys. There were stripes and dots and pools everywhere. Danes sat by a bay window that looked like red stained glass, eyes closed, trying to sell himself on the scenario he’d been willing in his head. Sitting there on the Burke family’s love seat, he ducked his head between his knees, needing and grasping at fist-fulls of his too-long brown hair as he went over what knew and tried to see the next steps.
The problem was the footprints. Everything else hung together and made sense, and then the footprints blew it all to hell. Danes had seen enough slit throats in his time to understand exactly how the Burke family had gone. The blood in the living room told that story in 3D: Murder/suicide. Dad does the three other family members, then jams the blade into his own throat and expires. For about 20 minutes, Danes thought he might get home, if not on time, than perhaps not as late as he might have. Then a last detail declared itself, and Danes knew he was in for the long haul. There was another blood pattern leading clear of the room. At first blush, the gory trail seemed to support the idea of a murder / suicide staring Martin Burke as the principal. A closer look flipped everything over, and Danes was back at square one.
Leading from the Burke family’s living room, LD was just able to barley make out the forward part of a footprint. The heel-print had been swiped into a gooey looking skid-mark about one foot wide. The skid mark got a little wider after that, the next print was also smeared, this time the dragged victim wiping out everything but the very outside edge of a left footprint. The long smear - running about ten feet in length - was what forensics geeks called a drag pattern, and it blew the murder-suicide theory out of the realm of possibility. Now Danes had a new focus. The footprint told a compelling half-story, with detective Danes responsible for the it’s prompt and logically air-tight conclusion.
At the end of the drag pattern lay the twisted corpse of a man, naked and pale as a ghost. He was in a heap there, his throat laid open like the rest of the victim’s throats: a clean, deep gash from ear to ear. The man’s right hand was a still-hardening mess of red fluid and rent flesh, with a cranky looking shard of red-stained glass three feet forward of the corpse and pointing straight out the garage door, as if encouraging a quick exit. Marty Burke’s legs gathered and twisted under him as if the floor had sucked him downward violently, twisting his broken body at improbable angles and a final position only a dead man can assume. Problem was, Mr. Burke hadn’t any other injuries that would have caused he drag pattern. Mr. Burke hadn’t been stabbed or shot, and no man could walk the 15 feet from living room with a slit throat. Danes went back over the drag-pattern. It took minutes. Two toes in the doorway between rooms, a heel in the front hall, and three and a half toes almost directly under Mr. Burke’s body. Clear as day. In addition, there was hardly any blood at all in the room where Burke fell, especially compared with the Jackson Pollock installation in the den.
Forensics cut the swatches of the footprints and the county coroner started removal. Danes moved to the front to the front of the house and prepared to make a department statement. A murder of a townsperson in the town where they reside means State investigators wouldn’t lead the investigation. It was LD’s dance from the jump, so that meant almost daily debriefings to the pencils. His throat constricted at the thought. There were few things Lawson Danes hated more than public speaking, and one of them was speaking to the press.
***
A makeshift pulpit had formed in the Burkes two car garage. There were no cars in it, both Burke vehicles were parked in the driveway. There were - however - lots and lots of unimportant looking crap. Danes had two uniforms clear it out, and was walking out to meet the reporters there when he remembered the old man. All day Law felt something out of place at the site. It was a grizzly scene and certainly not any sort of normal for the town, but Danes had seen plenty worse than this in his previous line of work. The violent ripping of human flesh stopped having any kind of visceral effect on LD a long time ago. Something though, was off, and as he looked out from the garage at the TV and newspaper crews, he realized exactly what it was. He turned heel, hoping none of the reporters had seen his almost-speaking. He grabbed a uniform named Chris Diniccola and the two of them ducked into a Burke Bedroom. The younger girl’s judging by the decor. Hannah Montana on the walls. American Girl dolls scattered all throughout the room. LD closed the door behind them and button locked it. It took him 47 seconds exactly to tell Diniccola what he wanted, and another five seconds for Diniccola to say “Yes”. They both left the little girl’s room at the same time, and broke in opposite directions out the door.
***
“…And so, I’m sorry. Ah ah I mean, we. We, all of us at the East Greenwich PD and Providence County send regards out to the families and we are tracking enough good information right now that I’m sure we’ll have some good news about this case come morning…Thanks…”
Chris turned heal and scurried back inside the house, ignoring the cries of “wait!” and “Officer Dinnicola a question!?”. He had to take a minute to collect himself, and so he retreated to the Burke girl’s room once again. He was about to button lock it when a familiar voice scolded him from the other side:
Dinnicola you sweaty little guinea…
Chris opened the door against his better judgment, cringing slightly at the prospect of facing Watch-Commander Moss's post-lunch breath from danger-close.
What the fuck are you fucking up to with that bullshit presser? And we here’s fucking Danes?
Diniccola gathered himself for the second, before begining the much harder part of the instructions Danes had given. He must’ve gathered too long though, because Sgt. Moss started right up again without letting him talk:
Outta words Cronkite? I’m not, so hear this: LD is the point person on this shit here. I want him in front of camera’s when camera’s are around, and in front of me when I’m around. You tell him the paper better be right, and it better be tonight. You got that woppy?
Woppy?
Yeah. Now go un-fuck this shit. GO.
Officer Dinnicola, though, was already going. He took a sheepish look at his shoes, and made himself small, shuffling past Moss and out of the Burke kid’s room
***
It hit LD and he shivered a little, just looking out at the teaming gaggle of reporters and their various suckerfish. He saw at least 25 crew, air staff, and interns all standing in a semi-circle a few yards out from the garage. LD knew every single one by name, first and last, and that was a huge problem. All day long the personnel the crime scene were remarking how quiet the neighborhood was, how empty. Now, 7:00 pm, just when the Burke house should have had gawkers ten deep behind a guarded security cordon, Danes found himself looking out on a crowd composed entirely of professional media people. In a district where folks come rushing outside to rubberneck at even the most trivial car accidents and mishaps, the entire block ought to have been on the Burke front lawn. Instead, LD found himself presiding over the world’s quietest quad-homicide. The only neighbor to even bother to show up was the guy - Hightower was his name - that called 911 after hearing strange sounds emanating from inside the Burke residence at 8:45 that morning. LD figure he had about an hour before the press tracked him down, so he planned to start at Mr. Hightower’s residence, “sixth house on the right” the uniforms had told him, and go from there.
The neighborhood’s layout was one of the very old fashioned kind. The houses on both sides of the street appeared to share a common, un-fenced-in backyard running the length of the block - about two football fields worth of common lawn. LD started tramping up the vast expanse of grass towards Mr. Hightower’s place, roughly 100 yards from the Burke‘s. Instead, Law only made it as far as the Burke’s next door neighbor’s. There was a sign over the back slider that Danes could hardly make out in the flat-grey dusk. It read: “The Reed’s”. The slider was open. LD made a mental note to check back there after talking to Hightower, and then stopped dead in his tracks about 20 yards away.
There was a person laying down over the door-frame.
***
Martin Burke was wide awake. The dreams, the reverie, the infinite comfort, all of it fell away, leaving only the cold grey world and all it’s angles. He’d shed every bit of the heavy drowse that never failed to mark his regaining control from Jess. Now - also as per usual - giving it back to her was all he could think about. He lay waiting, staring up at the ceiling, willing the time to pass, seeing no results. He was just dozing off to his first sleep in 72 hours when his blessed Queen summoned him again:
Martin, stand up.
It wasn’t a voice in his head really, more like ideas dawning in his mind that he knew weren’t his. His body came under the control of the other, and soon he was understanding the situation in exactly the same way as the Jess. Even after countless times giving his body and mind over to her, Burke still marveled and swooned as she poured herself inside him. It felt like home. He called Penny in an even, placid sounding voice, and when she came before him, he gave the Queen’s command:
Get the Sig from under the couch love. I spent the round from the chamber so rake the slide before you take a bead. That‘s it. Use the suppressor.
He watched confusion appear and dissapear on the girls face like an electrical jolt, and continued:
There’s a police officer coming this way. He’s on foot, walking through the back yards. I want you to open the deck door, and I want you to call out, loudly, like your being attacked. I want you to scream “Somebody help me!!!!” and then let the door close. Step back into the shadows of the house then, and wait for the cop to come up on the deck. When he appears in front of the screen door., I want you to shoot him, three times, in the heart, right through the screen. Then once he’s down, you’ll go outside and empty the chamber into the man’s head. After that Jess wants us with her.
The girls face lit up, and she began to hop up and down in delight:
Aunty Jess AND I get to use suppression? Jess Jess Jess! I love my aunty Jess!
***
LD approached the body, climbing the three deck-steps, drawing his Colt Anaconda out of it’s shoulder holster as knelt beside he body. It was facing away from him, and lying on it’s side in a twisted heap. LD reached across for the far shoulder and gave a yank to but the body face-up. He met no resistance at all and fell, almost on his back, on the damp joists. He took a moment to steady himself, and another to curse same for thinking the Scarecrow was a body. Looking again, he noticed the marked absence of ankles and shoes, and the prescence of hay where the rest should have been. There were days in his past where his younger eyes would have saved him the divergence from his path, and pronouce: SCARECROW LAWN DECORATION from ten yards out. It had been a long day. He was just getting himself on his feet, considering weather or not to enter the house without backup, when he heard the scream.
It was long and high-pitched and very very close:
Auuuuuuggghhhhhhhh…Hellllllp! Helllllp Meeeeeeeee!!!!!!
Terrified, overwhelmed, and primal.
The cry of a child, in trouble and close.
***
It was pitch dark outside by now, with no ambient light anywhere for miles. No lamp-light, or torch light, or any kind of light spilling out from any of the houses into any of the yards. Burke watched from the far corner of the room. It was pitch dark in the house as well, but if the Queen didn’t have them up to some task or other, she’d had them snoozing. They’d been working so much by night for the last few days, Burke felt like their eyes had all relaxed completely by now, and even in the total blackness of the backyard, he could still make out enough outline and shadow to find his way. Watching the little girl eject the Sig’s magazine, check it, re-insert, chamber a round, and screw a suppressor to the barrel, he realized the same must be true for her. A little shock of pride went through him, and he smiled in the black dark.
Penny took a knee, steadying her gun hand on a side table and taking a bead on the screen door. They heard Martin Running from a few houses down, his feet thumping an urgent rythym, getting louder in his advance. Burk whispered:
Just breathe easy sweetie. Let him come.
And for a few minutes, the only sound in the night was the sound of Detective Lawson Danes, running as fast as he could.
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