Erika covered her ears as they began to ring.
“It’s fine,” she mumbled as Trey stepped in front of her again. “I’m fine.”
“I’ll walk you out.”
“The hell you will.”
Leaning to the side, Erika looked at the girl’s face. She was staring at the ceiling, the makeup around her now-vacant eyes smudged, the sooty rivers down her cheeks and smeared lipstick making a clown mask out of what had no doubt been very expertly applied, given the amount of brushes and compacts on that dresser top.
There was one other mark on her visage, but it wasn’t from MAC or NARS or whatever. The bullet hole at her temple was a circular penetration, and the entry wound was relatively neat, just some powder residue around a small pink-and-red extrusion of flesh. It was what was on the other side of her skull that was more gruesome, the bone, blood, and brain matter splattering across her pink duvet.
“He came with three weapons,” Erika heard herself say. “The knife, the hammer… and this gun.”
Had she gotten the nine millimeter away from him as he’d attacked her? Yes, that was how it had to have gone down. He had broken in here after he’d killed both her parents, and he’d gotten on her… and she’d somehow disarmed him… maybe because she’d pretended to go along with the sex?
She must have listened to the slaughter downstairs, heard her parents’ panic and pain. At least one of the pair of them, probably both, had no doubt yelled up at her to lock herself in and call for help—
“The parents don’t know yet,” Trey said. “His, I mean. We just sent a squad car over to the address.”
“Who found them all?” she asked roughly.
“We did. She called nine-one-one before she shot herself.”
Erika’s eyes quickly scanned the bed—there it was. A cell phone was on the bloodstained duvet cover, right by her.
The girl had held on to the nine millimeter, but not the phone.
“The operator who took the call heard the gun go off.” Trey went over and knelt by the boy’s body. “The girl was crying so hard, she could barely speak. But she managed to give his name, and tell the operator that he’d broken in and killed her parents. Then she provided her own address and… pulled the trigger a third time.”
“But it wasn’t her fault,” Erika whispered as she leaned across the bed to meet that vacant stare. “It wasn’t your fault, sweetheart. I promise you.”
As her voice broke, she cleared her throat. And cleared it again.
Without conscious thought, her hand went to a spot below her left collarbone. Through her jacket, she couldn’t feel the scars, but they were there.
Surrounded by the black-hole stillness of death, Erika’s own past came on her like a mugger, stealing reality from her, sucking her back to the one night she never wanted to relive and always did. Always. She had fought back, too, during the worst moments of her family’s life. And God knew, there had been so many times in the last fourteen years that she had wished she had killed herself—or could.
Trying to control the urge to vomit, she listened to a surge of voices down below by the front door. Some more people were entering the scene. No doubt the photographer. Maybe it was CSI already.
Erika looked at her partner, focusing on him properly for the first time. As always, Trey was military-trim in his trademark CPD fleece, his fade sharp as always, his clean-shaven jaw the kind of thing Superman would have envied. As he stared back at her, his dark eyes were hooded and his lips drawn tight.
“It’s okay,” Erika said. “I can handle this. But I appreciate you… you know, looking out for me.”
“If you want to go, no one will blame you.”
She looked back down to the bed, to the beautiful young girl whose life had been cut so short. All those family photographs in the living room? All those pictures that had been consciously and carefully taken to record her growing up with her loving parents?
No more pictures. Of any of them—
Out in the stairwell, steps creaked as someone ascended.
Actually, that wasn’t correct, Erika thought. There would be one more set of images, taken by somebody trained in forensics, to record the way they had all died.
“I can handle this,” Erika said to her partner.
And also to herself.
She didn’t believe the words at all.
CHAPTER TWO
2464 Crandall Avenue
Approx. 7.2 miles away
No! No, no, I don’t want this, I don’t want you! Stop—
Balthazar, son of Hanst, woke up shouting and shoving hands off his leather-clad hips. As he beat at his privates, he exploded up to his feet and tried to get away from the demon who was on him, all around him, inside of him. Banging into something hard—a tree?—he ricocheted into thin air, tripped, fell.