“The angle of the first two bullets through the glass shows that they were fired from the first floor,” I explained, “but if the killer fired those before ascending the steps, it would have alerted Ardis and Lizzie, who would have hidden in a room since the only exit route is down the steps. Additionally-”
“He would’ve shot Ardis from the ground floor,” Jake said, tracking with me, “rather than from the landing.”
I nodded. “Yes.”
“Huh.” He gestured toward the plate glass. “You knew all this earlier, didn’t you? Just by looking at the trajectory of the bullet holes and knowing the position of the bodies? That’s why you were so concerned about the angles in the glass when we first got here.” He sounded impressed, but I noted a thread of contempt in his voice. “You knew it already back then.”
Well, I didn’t quite know it.
“I had my suspicions.”
When he replied I sensed that he’d taken offense, as if reconstructing the crime scene had become some kind of competition between us: “So then, after killing them, he fires the shots through the window.” Jake was pretending to take aim at the window, here from the landing.
“First he descends the stairs,” I corrected him. “The single shot fired from the landing was the final one to pass through the glass. He would’ve had to go to the ground floor and fire the two shots through the window first.”
“Why would he do that?”
I shook my head. “I have no idea. But I’m really wondering about that last shot the neighbor heard-the final bullet to pass through the window. The trajectory tells us it was fired from the landing. That means that after coming down the stairs, the killer would’ve had to return to the landing-stepping over Ardis’s body as he did-before firing again through the window.”
Mentally, I played out a few other scenarios, but at the moment I didn’t come up with any other event progression that took into account the timing and trajectory of the shots as well as the location of the bodies and their position.
“When the shots were fired, where Donnie shot ’em from,” Ellory called from the base of the stairs, “what does any of that matter, anyway?”
“Everything matters.” I didn’t like that he was referring to Donnie as the killer.
I pressed the master bedroom door open the rest of the way and stepped inside.
10
I studied the carpet for any evidence that someone might have entered the room.
“What is it?” Jake asked.
“We have no footprints leading from the front porch to the side of the house where the snowmobile was parked, so, assuming the killer rode it from the scene, he exited the scene through the laundry room. The family left their shoes, not just their boots, near the front door. Neither Ardis nor Lizzie was wearing shoes, so it appears the family habitually-”
“Takes off their shoes in the house.”
“Yes.”
Jake went on, paralleling my thoughts: “And if Donnie was the shooter, he would’ve had his shoes off in the house.”
“It’s likely.”
“However, if someone else was the shooter, he wouldn’t have taken off his shoes. After all, why would he?”
“That’s right.”
“So, mud on the carpet?”
Or water stains or shoe impressions…
It was more likely we’d find mud or impressions by one of the entrances to the home or on the pristine white living room rug. “Maybe.”
I inspected the carpet but couldn’t tell if the shoe impressions I saw were the same size as Donnie’s boots in the mud room. Natasha should be here any minute to process the crime scene. I’d have her check it out.
I descended the stairs, stepping past Ardis’s body as reverently as I could. “We’ll want to check the neighbor’s clock,” I told Ellory. “See if it has the correct time. If we really are talking about 1:48 p.m.”
“I’ll have an officer do it.” He stared past me toward the landing. “You think he forgot something maybe?”
“Who?”
“The shooter. That he might have been on his way out, realized he forgot something upstairs, went back to the landing to get it, and then fired the last shot through the living room window when he got there.”
“I really couldn’t say.”
Jake, who was still on the landing, answered, “That would make sense.”
While Jake came down the stairs to join us, I questioned Ellory about some of the issues that the rather disappointing and incomplete police report had left unanswered.
“Were the lights in the house on or off when you arrived?”
“They were on. All of them, except the study.”
“Were the exterior doors locked or unlocked?”
“The doors were unlocked, but that’s not so unusual.” He said the next few words with uncertainty, as if he’d stopped believing them: “There’s not much crime around here.”
“Appliances. Which were on?”
“You mean like the oven?”
“Yes, and the computer, television, the washer, dryer, a cooking timer-anything.” All of these things tell us what was happening, where people were, what they were doing, or when they were doing it.
He thought. “Not the washer or dryer. Or the TV. We checked the computer for a suicide note; didn’t find one though.”
“The computer is in the study?”
“Yes.”
I retrieved my laptop from the mud room. “Do you by any chance know the last webpage that was opened?”
He was looking increasingly disappointed in himself the more we spoke. “I didn’t look.”
“It’s okay. Thanks.”
In the small office nook attached to the living room I clicked to the internet history while Ellory asked Jake, “You’re a profiler. What’s your take on this?”
The web history was password protected. The Bureau has ways past that, however. I surfed to the Federal Digital Database and entered my ID number.
“Rage,” Jake said. “Donnie’s-or whoever committed these crimes-their behavior exhibits uncontrollable rage. We find this type of thing with people who snap. Something pushes them over the edge-job loss, marital problems, the death of a child.”
I downloaded the program I needed, and a few seconds later, using a 32-byte MD5 hash, I’d cracked the password and I was in.
Jake continued, “Almost always in cases like this, we find what we call a trigger event or a precipitating stressor. Do we know if there was any sudden trauma in his life recently?”
“No,” Ellory answered. “If there was I don't know what it would be.”
The web history had been deleted, but the hard drive hadn’t been wiped. It wasn’t difficult to click into the terminal window, enter a few lines of code that Angela Knight, my friend in the Bureau’s Cybercrime Division, had taught me, and pull up the files.
Someone had been surfing through the naval archives of Ohio Class fleet ballistic missile submarine, or SSBN, deployment records from the 1980s. I could hardly believe the information was made available to the public, but then again, the data was three decades old. A few mouse clicks told me that the Cold War archives weren’t considered matters of national security any longer, and a Freedom of Information Act request had apparently been filed by a group known as Eco-Tech four months ago.
Interesting.
Following up on that, I discovered that Eco-Tech had done some consulting for half a dozen Fortune 500 companies and two foreign governments-Brazil and Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, Jake kept his questions coming to Ellory. “Did Donnie have any mental or emotional problems that you’re aware of?”
“Not that I know of.”
I checked the time the sub archives were last opened.
Just minutes after the murders.
After the murders.
Odd.
Donnie was in the Navy. Maybe he was searching the sites.
But why then?
I heard a car crunch to a stop out front, possibly Agent Farraday. After I finished downloading the web history and email records to my laptop, I headed for the front door.
“Job dissatisfaction?” Jake asked Ellory behind me.