Silence, though. Everywhere dead silence.
He went back through the dining room to the kitchen and hadn't gone a step into it when he saw the woman's body lying on its side, a gun on the floor by her head. Crossing to her in several long strides, he avoided the pool of drying blood and knelt by her for a second. He saw the source of the blood, a hole in the scalp low and behind the right ear. Although there was no doubt, he touched the cold skin of her neck, then pulled out his gun and started to check the rest of the house. Two minutes later, he walked to a wall phone upstairs in the master bedroom and punched in the number he knew best.
The crime scene investigation team had already been working the house for an hour and now its sergeant, Jack Langtry, was walking across the front lawn to where Glitsky stood with a small knot of medical examiner's people and police. The sun was out, but it hadn't warmed appreciably. Everyone standing around had their hands in their pockets.
Langtry hailed originally from Australia and was normally a hearty, rugby-type guy in his late thirties. Today his face looked somehow crooked and blotchy and he seemed to lurch from side to side as he walked, almost as if he were drunk. Glitsky separated himself from the general and subdued mass and met him in the middle of the lawn.
Langtry let out some air and squeezed at his temples with one hand. He kicked at the ground, raised his eyes, looked out at the horizon. "You know one of the things I loved most about this country when I first came here? No restrictions on who can own guns. But I think I'm getting to the point where I'm changing my mind. You put guns in a house with distraught people…I've just seen this too bloody often. Stupid sods."
Glitsky thought he understood what Langtry was implying, but this wasn't a time for guessing. He wanted to be clear on the crime scene investigation unit's position. "What do you think happened in there, Jack?"
Langtry scratched under the collar of his shirt, looked again at the bright blue sky. When his eyes got back to Glitsky, he was back in professional mode. "It was Markham's gun. We found the registration in the same drawer where he probably kept it, in his office off the kitchen. It was right by her hand."
"All right. It was his gun in her hand. What's that mean?"
"By itself, I don't know for sure. The lab might tell us something we don't know."
"Other than what?"
"Other than what it seems like."
Glitsky took a beat. "We playing twenty questions here, Jack, or what?"
"You were asking them, Abe. You want to know what I think, we can go straight to there. She did them all, then killed herself."
"Carla?"
"Was that her name?"
"Yeah. She killed her kids, too?"
Langtry seemed to get a little defensive. "You telling me you've never seen it?"
"I've seen it a lot, Jack. Maybe just not like this."
"Not like what?"
But Glitsky discovered he couldn't quite put his finger on what nagged at him about this theory. "I don't know, Jack. Maybe I'm whistling through my hat. Faro come up with anything?" Faro was Lennard Faro, the crime scene lab technician.
Langtry nodded. "He's still in there. You can talk to him. You wanted my take, it's probably what it looks like. Unless you know something I don't."
It was a question, and Glitsky shook his head. "Just why? Why the whole family?"
But this wasn't a hard one for Langtry. "Her husband died yesterday, right? That's what I heard."
"Yeah. Hit and run."
"And maybe they were having problems before that?"
"I don't know. Did you hear that someplace?"
"No. But it's the profile. You know as well as me."
"Maybe not," Glitsky replied, though he thought he did. "Tell me."
Langtry squinted into the sky again, organizing his thoughts. "The world's too horrible to live in. There's too much pain and it all means nothing anyway. So she's sparing them from that. Doing them a favor, maybe."
Glitsky knew that this was the standard reading. In his career, he'd seen distraught women kill their families before. He'd read or heard about several others. It was always difficult to imagine or accept. But in his experience, those events-terrible though they had been-had a different quality to them, a more immediate and somehow more painful impetus than the simple death of the husband.
He remembered-years ago now-a family of five who'd escaped from Vietnam. The oldest boy, a young teenager, had died on the boat coming over, and then a few months after they'd arrived, they were packed into a one-bedroom place and one of the Chinatown gangs broke in, took some stuff, and then-possibly angry that the family didn't have more stuff to steal-shot the husband dead. The next day, the mother had suffocated the two young kids, then cut her own wrists.
He'd seen another young woman in a so-called burning bed case. Her boyfriend had been beating her and finally she shot him in his sleep, then did the same with her baby and herself. About two years ago, a clinically depressed, suicidal woman named Gerry Patecik-for some reason, he remembered her name-overdosed herself and two out of her three kids with barbiturates in milk shakes after her husband walked out and filed for divorce.
So Glitsky had seen it-the bare fact of murder/suicide wasn't unknown or even terribly uncommon, given its heinous nature. But all the other cases he'd seen or heard about had a certain over-the-edge quality that seemed to be missing here. And he'd never before seen or heard of teenage victims-they'd always been younger children. This was an apparently comfortable family who'd simply lost their father. Tragic, yes-but could Carla Markham have been that close to the kind of complete and utter despair that would seem to be in evidence and still entertain a reasonable crowd here the night before? It was hard to imagine.
"Goddamnit, Abe," Langtry suddenly said. He turned back toward the house, as though looking to it for some answers. "Goddamn stupid stupid stupid."
Glitsky hated the profanity but he empathized with Langtry's fury. Four people were dead in the house, the woman and her three teenage children, shot in their beds upstairs. With the death of Tim Markham yesterday, this made an entire family wiped out in twenty-four hours. "I hear you, Jack," he said. "You got anything else I need to know?"
"Nah, it's all peaceful as a bloody tomb in there. It is a bloody tomb. Christ."
At that moment, a woman from the CSI team appeared in the doorway, carrying the rag doll body of the Markhams' dog, a large and beautiful golden retriever. Glitsky watched as, sagging under the weight, she crossed the flagstone stoop. Langtry took a step toward her, said, "Carol," and got stopped by her glare. Crying silently, she didn't want any help. At the curb, she placed the lifeless form in the back of one of the ambulances still parked there, then walked over to one of the patrol cars and sat down inside, closing the door behind her.
Glitsky laid a quick fraternal hand on Langtry's shoulder as he passed him, then went up across the lawn and through the front door.
Inside, he found Lennard Faro, the crime scene lab specialist, standing by the sink in the kitchen. Dark and wiry, with a thin mustache and a tiny gold cross in his earlobe, he had his arms and legs crossed in an attitude of casual impatience. The photographer was taking pictures and he seemed to be waiting until he finished up.
Glitsky stopped for a second at the entrance to the kitchen, took another glance at Mrs. Markham's body, then joined Faro at the sink. "Jack Langtry tells me she shot the gun," he said.
Faro turned his head sideways. "Maybe. There it is. Close enough."