‘Freeze.’ He crept up another step.
Darby raised her hands slowly. Then she clasped her hands behind her head and spoke in a loud, clear voice.
‘My name is Darby McCormick. I’m a special investigator for Boston’s Criminal Services Unit. My wallet and ID are in my back pocket.’
‘On the floor. On your stomach.’
Slowly she dropped to her knees. ‘I’m armed. Shotgun and a SIG tucked in my right pocket.’
Darby lay against the floor, hands clasped behind her head. The patrolman did what he was trained to do. He grabbed her wrists, yanked them around her back and cuffed her.
She rolled her head to the side. ‘The woman in the master bedroom is tied to a chair,’ Darby said. ‘She has a punctured lung. Don’t move her. When the ambulance techs come, make sure you tell them.’
Knee-high black tactical boots tucked inside dark blue trousers rushed up the steps. A pair stepped up next to her and three more rushed inside the bedroom.
‘Don’t untie her,’ the young patrolman called out. ‘She might have a punctured lung.’
Darby felt a muzzle pressed against the back of her head. Heard someone trying to unclip the strap for the shotgun. Hands patted her down and hands pulled everything from her pockets.
A pair of EMTs came up the stairs. Darby stared off into space, trying to make out the conversation of the men barking orders downstairs. She could barely hear them over the crackle of radios surrounding her. She kept hearing one say ‘Jesus Christ’ over and over again.
A chest mike crackled and Darby heard a dispatcher’s voice in a sea of static relay her information.
‘Looks like you’re legit,’ the young patrolman said. He undid her cuffs.
Darby stood in front of five men, their gaze bearing down on her. The tall one with the pie-shaped face said, ‘You mind telling us just what the hell is going on?’
Darby collected her things. ‘Who’s the detective in charge?’
‘Branham.’
‘I’ll speak to him when he gets here.’
‘I asked you a question, missy.’
‘Get the hell out of here. All of you. You’re disrupting a crime scene.’
Darby brushed past pie-face and moved to the other rooms.
A baby boy’s room, decorated like something out of a Pottery Barn catalogue. The name CARTER was stencilled on the blue painted wall above a white crib. A mobile was covered in a thick layer of dust. All the furniture was – the chest-of-drawers and matching changing table, the oak shelves holding diapers and bottles and tubes of lotion.
The room across the hall belonged to an older boy. Racecar-shaped bed, the sheets unmade. Star Wars action figures and space ships scattered along the floor and play table, everything covered in dust.
Nobody had been inside either of these rooms for years.
A note on the bed, written in penciclass="underline" Michael, I’ll be home soon. Needed to go to the hospital. No camp today. You can stay home with Carter. Stay inside until I come home, and make sure the doors are locked. Love you, Mom.
Darby stepped back into the hall thinking of Sean Sheppard.
The ambulance tech, a pudgy man with curly blond hair, walked into the hall. He blinked in surprise to see Darby standing instead of cuffed. She showed the man her ID.
‘Are the kids downstairs?’ he asked.
‘There are no kids.’
The man frowned. ‘She said they went downstairs. Wanted me to go check them out and make sure they were okay.’
‘The kids aren’t here. They’re dead.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘You’re not supposed to,’ Darby said and walked down the steps. The air was heavy with gun smoke.
Kevin Reynolds lay dead on the kitchen floor. An older patrolman with a pot-belly and ruddy cheeks hovered close to the body.
‘Is Detective Branham here?’ Darby asked.
‘Not yet.’
‘See that Glock lying on the floor? That weapon and those spent shells are most likely going to be an exact match to a recent homicide in a home in Charlestown. When Detective Branham gets here, tell him I’ll be out front. I want to talk to him about this man lying here.’
‘Kevin Reynolds.’
‘You know him?’
‘We tried to pin this son of a bitch down for what we think he did here about five years ago to this woman named Jamie Russo. Some sort of home invasion. Broke into the house, tied up the family in the upstairs bedroom and shot the two boys to death. Mother survived.’
‘What about the husband?’
‘Stuck his hand in a waste-disposal unit and strangled him – don’t ask me why, I don’t know. Nobody does.’
Darby stared down at Reynolds thinking about the room upstairs, the room with the lock and the dried blood splattered across the floor and walls.
‘How old were the kids when they died?’
‘Youngest was a toddler… one or two, I forget.’ Darby saw the room with the crib and mobile covered in dust. ‘And the older one?’
‘Don’t know.’
She heard footsteps coming down the stairwell. She moved into the foyer and watched as the two EMTs carried the woman, strapped now to a gurney, IV lines in her arm and oxygen mask on her face.
Darby didn’t realize the old-time cop had stepped up next to her until he spoke.
‘Jesus H. Bloody Christ. That’s her. That’s Russo.’
Darby watched as the EMTs wheeled the woman across the front door’s threshold and then navigated the gurney down the steps.
‘What was his name?’ she asked the cop.
‘Who?’
‘Russo’s older son.’
‘Don’t remember.’
‘She does,’ Darby said.
69
Darby staggered outside into a muggy night air drizzling with rain. Flashing blue, red and white strobe lights lit up the entire neighbourhood. At least half a dozen Wellesley police cruisers blocked off the street, parked at the far ends to give enough room for the two ambulances – and now a fire truck. She could hear its high-pitched siren wailing in the distance, building.
The driveway, covered in shards of glass and a couple of empty shotgun shells, had been taped off. A light grey smoke drifted from the gaps in Chadzynski’s crumpled bonnet – the reason the fire department had been summoned. Darby watched two patrolmen tape off the body, its limbs twisted and broken, lying on the grass. Warner, the head of Christina Chadzynski’s Anti-Corruption Unit. More like the woman’s personal hit squad, Darby thought, catching sight of the wet blood on the man’s torn clothes.
She needed to find a quiet place to call Coop. She walked numbly across the damp grass and into a big garden with overgrown grass.
At the far end she spotted a hammock set up between two thick pine trees. That looked good. Her legs carried her there and then fluttered with fatigue and relief after she plunked herself down on the wet fabric. Her heart thumped dully inside her chest, as if it wanted to go to sleep.
Shadows moved across the grass, which was lit by the windows of the house – every light had been turned on. Darby’s gaze drifted up to the windows of the room with the dried blood splattered against the walls and carpet. She thought of her mother sitting on the side of her father’s hospital bed, Sheila holding Big Red’s rough and callused hand on her lap and reciting lines from Dylan Thomas’s ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’, a poem her mother knew by heart. Sheila had said ‘bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray’ as the doctor shut off the life support machine. When her mother reached the end of the poem, she started again, holding back tears and saying the words clearly as she waited for Big Red’s body to die.