I unhitched the Nextel from my waistband and called for backup.
Jacobi nodded, looked around the porch, then decided on a concrete planter the size of a pillow. He tipped the geraniums over the railing and, using the planter as a battering ram, smashed in a panel of the oaken front door.
I reached in through the splintered wood, flapped my hand around until I located the lock, and opened the door to Garza’s house.
Chapter 125
I YELLED OUT from the doorway, “This is the police. We’re coming in.”
Again, there was no answer, and the place just felt empty.
Jacobi and I advanced through the foyer into a living room that no longer looked like a photo feature in Town & Country magazine. I ran my eyes over the upended furniture and the vast amount of blood that was absolutely everywhere in the room.
“Let me be the first to say,” Jacobi said, scanning the devastation with hooded eyes, “whatever happened here wasn’t the work of a pro.”
My mouth went dry as I took it all in.
Arterial spray was splashed across the pale plaster walls and had dripped down to the baseboards. Constellations of blood spattered the ceiling. A large red-brown stain soaked into the carpet in front of the sofa. Bloody footprints crisscrossed the floor, and handprints smeared the fireplace mantel.
Bile climbed into my throat as I imagined the fury and the terror that had filled this room only a short time ago. Who was involved?
I was locked in a vacant stare until Jacobi broke the spell for me.
“Boxer. Let’s do it,” he said.
We swept the downstairs rooms, covering each other. Blood smears on the dining-room walls led us to the kitchen sink, where an eight-inch Chicago Cutlery meat knife rested in the watery blood rimming the drain.
We climbed the stairs to the second and third floors, clearing the rooms, throwing open the closets and shower-stall doors, checking under the beds.
“Nobody. Nothing.” Jacobi grunted.
The master bedroom was furnished in heavy mahogany furniture, navy-blue carpet and curtains, pale-blue sheets. But the blankets had been stripped off the bed and removed from the room.
We holstered our guns and headed back downstairs to the living room.
That’s when I saw the heavy crystal vase lying on its side in the niche of the fireplace.
“Jacobi. Come here and look at this.”
He stepped heavily across the room, put his hands on his knees, then bent down and examined the vase.
“It wouldn’t take much to clobber someone with that thing. Take a nice chunk out of their skull,” Jacobi said.
“Look here,” I said, feeling a chill as I pointed to the hairs sticking to the bloody, sawtoothed lip of the vase. The strands were black, about five inches in length. It would take days of lab work to confirm what I already knew.
“Jacobi—this is Dennis Garza’s hair.”
Chapter 126
SIRENS SCREAMED UP Leavenworth, the swooping wail getting louder as the line of patrol cars turned onto Filbert.
“I’ll be outside,” Jacobi told me.
We’d only been in the house for a few minutes, but I felt time whizzing past. I took up a position in the foyer that gave me a full view of the living room. I ran the scene through my mind again, trying to make sense of evidence that didn’t want to make any sense.
It didn’t look like a robbery gone bad. The doors were all locked, and the only sign of forced entry was what Jacobi had done to the front door.
I imagined someone ringing the doorbell as we had done, Garza letting in a person he knew. But who was it?