"Not too. Nothing like a three five seven. Just a flat pop."
"You shoot one in a house at night, you wake everybody up?"
"I don't know. Maybe not."
"All right. Here's another one. Why would Markham have a twenty-two?"
"I don't know that one, mate. Makes no sense for protection. Wouldn't stop any determined bugger, now, would it? Unless the shot was dead-on. Or point-blank, like these here."
"Okay." He flipped through some more pictures. "If you don't mind, Sergeant, and Marlene, I'd like to see the house."
They drove out separately. Langtry met him again at the Markhams' front door, and as he was fiddling with the key, suddenly another man was coming across the lawn from next door, waving at them in a friendly manner. "Excuse me," he said. "I saw you waiting, standing on the stoop here. You should know that nobody…nobody lives here anymore."
"Yes, sir, thanks." Langtry had pulled his wallet and badge, and now showed it to the man. "Police. We know all about it. And you are…?"
"The neighbor from over there. Frank Husic." He motioned toward his own home. "Just keeping an eye out."
"We appreciate it. Thank you," Langtry said. "We're taking another look."
"You go ahead then. Sorry to have bothered you."
"No bother."
Now they were inside, in the kitchen. Hardy stood on the Mexican tiled floor. Warm daylight suffused the room. Through a skylight, the noon sun drew a large and bright rectangle in front of the stove. There was a double-wide window over the sink, a laundry room off the back, well-lit with natural light. A short hallway by the refrigerator-where the dog had been killed-led to a half-glass back door.
Langtry was sitting behind him on a dining room chair that he'd pulled over. Hardy went down to one knee. Rising, he crossed to the sink, undid the latch, and lifted the right-hand window. Stepping sideways, he did the same to the left one, then walked back to where Carla had fallen. "If I'm down here near the ground and put a bullet through either of those windows"-he could have been talking to himself-"I don't hit the house next door. I hit the sky. You want to do me another favor? Stand here in the kitchen a minute."
Langtry did as requested and Hardy went back out through the dining room. His footsteps fell audibly on the central staircase; then his voice carried as he called down, "Count to ten and then call up to me as loud as you can."
After another minute, Hardy was back in the kitchen. "I heard you, but just barely. I was in Ian's room."
"Which means what?"
"It means nobody wakes up while Carla and the dog get shot. It means the dog's shot to shut him up, which is the only thing that makes sense."
"Then why do the kids get shot?"
"He's afraid he's woken somebody up. Either that or the kids knew he was here when they went to bed. Except the kids are asleep. The gunshots didn't carry up. But it's still too risky. So it's Ian first, and he silences the gun with the pillow. Then the girls. How's that sound?"
Hardy wasn't going to talk to a witness with a cop there. He followed Langtry for a few blocks, then honked a goodbye and drove back to Markham's street, where he pulled up, parked, got back out of his car, and knocked on Frank Husic's door. The gentleman probably assumed, since he'd been next door with Langtry and his badge, that he, too, was a cop. Hardy let him think so.
Husic invited him in and offered him iced tea, which he accepted. They then went out the back door onto a well-constructed redwood deck. Hardy didn't know when he'd last sat amidst such an explosion of well-tended flowers. Husic had planted them around the deck on the ground, in pots on the deck itself and now in late April they were blooming in profusion. But he'd left an open area in the center of the deck, and in that had placed a wrought-iron table, shaded by a large canvas umbrella. Here they sat in comfortable padded chairs.
From the transcripts he'd read, Hardy knew that Husic was a retired dentist, sixty-two years old. He had a ruddy complexion and cropped gray hair. Today he wore faded navy blue slacks, loafers with no socks, a shirt with a button-down collar, two buttons open at the neck. He came across as solicitous, friendly, intelligent. Hardy made a mental note that, should it come to that, Husic would make a terrific witness.
"Yes, I heard the shot," he said. "It's only a stone's throw away over there. I already told this to the police, you know."
Hardy did know this, but one of the frustrations of his discovery in this matter was the ineptness of some of Fisk's and Bracco's interrogations. He wondered if they'd ever heard of the relatively simple concept of asking witnesses where they'd been, what they'd seen or thought, and what they'd been doing at the time of a murder. This, he thought, was not high-concept police work. And Husic's interrogation-just random chat about flowers and investments, almost nothing about the day of Markham's death-had been one of the worst, he thought.
So he had a lot to fill in here. "I realize that," he replied. "In fact, I've read a transcript of that interview, but I've got a slightly different approach. You just now said 'shot.' You only heard one? I thought I noticed you said 'three' somewhere."
Husic sipped his drink thoughtfully, put it down carefully on the table. "They asked that, too, and I'm afraid I don't have a good answer. I believe I told the other officers that I was in bed at the time, pretty tired after the day over at Carla's. It was emotionally draining as hell over there, let me tell you. But if she needed me, I wanted to be available." Lightly slapping his forehead, he made a face. "Which doesn't answer what you asked me, does it? Sorry. You're a dentist, you spend your whole life making conversation with people who can't answer you. It affects your patterns of speech, and here I go again. All right. How many shots did I hear? Distinctly, only one."
Hardy looked across the expanse of lawn to what he knew to be the Markhams' kitchen. He realized they'd left the kitchen windows open when they'd gone.
"I thought it was a backfire or something. I mean, a gunshot is not your first thought in this neighborhood."
"But you may have heard three of them?"
"Well, that's funny, you know. None of them were really loud. In my memory it's three, but when I go back there and try to hear them, it's more like I heard one and remembered two. I'm not making sense, am I? What I mean is, the last one definitely was something-I sat up in bed-but the first two were almost as if I dreamed them, you know how that happens?"
"Sure." Hardy nodded. The siren that turns out to be your alarm clock. But this, he thought, might possibly be the two shots that killed the girls-right there seventy feet away-then the last round through the open kitchen window, which would have been louder. "But you were in bed when you heard them? Do you remember what time it was?"
"Yes, exactly. It was ten forty-two on the clock by my bed. I remember being very frustrated. I don't go to sleep easily since Meg passed-four years ago now-and if I wake up, that's usually it for the night. I'm up. And last Tuesday, with all the strain, I came home from Carla's and had a glass of wine, but barely dozed. Then with the gunshot…"
"You were awake the rest of the night?"
"Until three, anyway. Those are long hours, eleven to three."
Hardy made a sympathetic noise. "I know them pretty well myself. So when did you finally determine that they were gunshots?"
"Oh, not until the next morning." The memory bushwhacked him for a moment. "God, it's just so awful."
"You were close to them, the Markhams?"
He hesitated. "Well, Carla, I'd say so. Tim was a bit of a cold fish, at least to me." Moving along to happier memories, his face came alive. "But Carla would come over and help with my garden here sometimes. We'd have coffee…some nice talks. I can't believe…" He hung his head and shook it. When he looked back up, he smiled, but his eyes had a glassy quality.