grand house to his right and the barn off to his left. Meanwhile, Max led the other two officers over to the sheet. He bent over and pulled it back, exposing the boy’s body. The child’s dark hair glistened in the sunlight, wet with something thick, Max assumed blood. A trail of dark red began at an angry black hole just above the boy’s eyebrows, streaked his pale skin until it dripped off his face onto the ground. Max had seen similar wounds over the years. Shot in the back of the head, Max figured. Exit wound in the forehead.
“Keep watch, especially the house,” Max said to the two deputies beside him. “Someone could have a gun on us.”
Once the deputies focused on the surrounding area, Max got down on one knee and lifted the sheet higher. He didn’t want to disturb any potential evidence, but he needed to know what it concealed. A short distance from the toddler boy, near the center of the sheet, was a young girl, maybe five or six, wearing a tan-and-pink-flowered prairie dress. Like the boy’s, the girl’s black hair glistened with something dark. He saw no signs of life.
Dead bodies had always made Max uneasy, but he’d found them harder to tolerate since his wife’s death. Bloody scenes brought up images of Miriam squeezed between the steering wheel and seat, unable to breathe. The children’s bodies, frozen by death, made it that much worse. An image of his young daughter, Brooke, unconscious and bleeding in the back seat, her body twisted like a sapling caught in a tornado, flashed before him.
Taking measured steps, his eyes shuttling all around him, Max walked to the other side of the sheet. As he approached, something emitted a sharp cawing sound above him. He looked up to see a committee of vultures, pitch-black with pale, wrinkled bald heads, hovering in a nearby oak, glaring angrily at him. Ignoring them, Max focused on the larger mound under the sheet. As Max shuffled closer, a particularly thick-bodied vulture hopped off a tree limb and landed ten feet away. Max looked into the bird’s beady black eyes and thought it jeered at him, as if daring him to approach.
“Scram! Take off!” he yelled, marching toward the bird. It shuffled back two feet, stopped, and stood its ground.
“Damn thing,” Max murmured.
Max returned his attention to the sheet. Once there, he realized the vultures had been pecking at the bodies, their beaks tearing small holes in the sheet, ones ringed in bright red blood. Again, he knelt. He held out his gun, his finger on the trigger, as he lifted the white cloth, and a gust billowed beneath it, forming a tent over the sprawled body of a woman. Her dark hair flared around her head, and she lay flat on her stomach, face down on the ground. Creeping closer, he placed two fingers on her neck. No pulse. Max stood and turned to the deputy assigned to keep watch on the house and barn. “Three vics, one woman, two kids. Looks like all three have been shot. Radio headquarters and notify them,” Max said. “And keep the birds off the bodies. We’re going in.”
A bob of the deputy’s head, and Max turned to verify that Naomi was following orders. In the car’s back seat, she had her head bowed over her lap, as if trying to comfort the baby.
Drawing a deep breath, Max marched toward the house, the remaining two deputies tracking behind him. Their heads rotated side to side, watching, waiting for someone to charge out of the shadows, for a shot to ring out from an upstairs window. Their heavy boots pounded on the cement steps as they ran up onto the porch, swung the door open, and entered the house.
Following the route Naomi had taken, they cleared the living room, then the dining room. Max stationed one deputy at the foot of the stairs to make sure no one came charging down to take them by surprise. Then he and the fourth deputy made their way toward the kitchen.
Before he entered, Max heard a strange sucking noise. He hurried into the kitchen, careful to avoid a pool of blood near the head of a tall, bulky man sprawled legs akimbo on the floor. Max hadn’t seen Jacob Johansson since high school, and he wouldn’t have recognized him even if blood didn’t cover his neck and his skin wasn’t dead pale. Jacob struggled to take in each breath, and