1st Case - James Patterson Page 0,1
on the table, and a sheet-covered body on the floor, next to a tipped-over chair.
I was still standing in the doorway, silent until one of the bunny-suited techs brushed against me on his way out. I started to speak and had to clear my throat and try again, just to get the words out.
“Excuse me. I’m looking for Agent Keats?” I said to him. Even then, my voice sounded so small, so unlike me. I wasn’t used to feeling this way, and I didn’t like it one bit.
“Sorry, don’t know who that is,” the guy said, and kept moving. Somehow, I’d expected for everything to make sense here, and that I would know what to do as I went along. Instead, I was left standing there with a growing sense that I’d been dropped off in the wrong nightmare.
“Hoot, up here!” I heard, and turned to see one of my supervisors, Billy Keats, at the top of the stairs. Thank God.
He hurried down to meet me. “You ready for this?” he said, handing me a pair of latex gloves matching the ones he was already wearing. I put them on. His demeanor was all business, and his face was grim.
“I’m okay,” I said.
“You don’t look it.”
“I’m okay,” I repeated, as much for myself as for him. If I said it enough, maybe it would come true. And maybe my stomach would stop folding in on itself, over and over, the way it had been doing since I’d arrived. “Where do you need me?”
“This way.” He led me up the carpeted stairs, briefing as we went. “We’ve got one of the victims’ cell phones in a Faraday bag. They’re just clearing the body now.”
The body. Some person who had been alive yesterday, now just “the body.”
But that other phrase—Faraday bag—was like a piece of driftwood, something I could latch on to in the middle of all this unfamiliarity. At least I knew what I was supposed to do with that. A Faraday bag blocks out any digital signals and preserves the device in question exactly as it was found until it can be forensically examined.
“Eventually, I’m going to want you to cover every machine in the house, but this phone is going to be your primary concern.”
We passed two open bedroom doors along the upstairs hall. I told myself to keep my eyes straight ahead, but they didn’t obey the impulse. Instead, I stole a glance into each room as we passed.
Through the first door, I saw something truly horrendous. A woman lay on her back on the king-size bed, eyes wide-open, with a small but unmistakable dark hole in her forehead. A halo of blood stained the pale-blue pillowcase under her hair. Outside of the few family wakes I’d been to, this was the first corpse I’d ever laid eyes on. The sight of it seemed to jump right into my long-term memory. No way I’d ever forget that moment, I knew right away.
As awful as that tiny moment had already been, it was the bunk beds in the next room that really split my heart down the middle. Each bunk held a covered body, draped with a white sheet. On the lower bunk, I could see one small hand sticking out, spiderwebbed with dark lines of dried blood, which had also pooled on the rug.
Jesus. This just got worse as it went along. The tightness from my stomach crawled up into my chest. I didn’t want to throw up anymore: now I wanted to cry. These poor, poor people.
“Hoot? We’re in here.” I looked over to see Keats already standing outside the last door on the hall. He stepped back to make way for two EMTs rolling out a gurney with a black zippered body bag on top. Beyond them, I could see what looked like a teenage girl’s room, with a floral comforter and an LSHS Warriors banner.
As I came closer and got a full look, one thing jumped out at me right away. I didn’t see any blood. Not like with the others.
“What’s her name?” I asked Keats, looking back at the gurney as they moved it down the hall. Somehow, I needed to know who she was.
“Gwen Petty,” Keats said. “Mother Elaine, father Royce, and twin brothers Jake and Michael. But if anyone in this family had information we can use, it’s going to be this girl.”
I only nodded. There were no words. Or maybe there were too many, racing around inside my head. It was