Four police cars and a few other vehicles were already parked in the road, and a couple of officers were standing in waterproof jackets, managing the scene. The rain was lashing down.
Cami looked around her in growing unease as they parked. Despite the rain, there was a small crowd gathered on the sidewalk. Under the umbrellas and rain jackets, she couldn’t see the people’s faces. Nor did she want to. This whole scene felt so tense, so fraught. These people had suffered a terrible crime in their neighborhood. There was a sense of shock.
Connor got out, and he and Cami half-ran the short distance to Kate Warner’s home. It was a small white house, with a tasteful, old-fashioned front yard—flowering shrubs and bushes, a stone birdbath.
Connor led the way up to the house. They got under cover in the hallway. Immediately, Cami picked up the hum of voices, and from their direction, she guessed that this murder had taken place in the room on the right, down the corridor.
A police officer rushed out, greeting Connor like an old friend.
“Morning, Connor. Glad to have you on the scene,” he said.
“Morning,” Connor replied.
Getting straight to the point, he then asked, “Who found the body?”
“The cleaner,” the police officer said. “A woman called Melissa Perez, who cleans here twice a week. She has a key to the back door. She let herself in this morning, found the body, and called us.”
“Have you interviewed her?”
The police officer grimaced. “She was in a state, understandably. We took her statement. She saw nothing. She arrived on the bus. She said the door was open. There’s an electronic locking system on the front door, and she wasn’t sure how it could have been bypassed, but she said it has malfunctioned before.”
Or the killer could have hacked it, Cami instantly thought, guessing from Connor’s glance he might suspect the same.
“Thanks. We’ll go and have a look at the scene now,” he said.
“Before we go through, we need to put on PPE,” Connor told her.
He handed her foot covers and gloves. Cami fumbled on the still unfamiliar items, with the plastic feeling weird as she walked. Then they headed down the wooden floorboards toward the murder scene.
Cami took a deep breath as they entered the room, telling herself not to be distracted by the corpse. She must look at the surroundings and focus on her reason for being there.
There were two white-suited technicians on the floor near the body, obscuring it mostly from view. To her relief, she saw that the body lay a couple of yards away from the new-looking computer console on the desk that would be her area of focus, in an office that looked well used. There were files on the table and notebooks in a tray. The victim was lying near an upended chair. Had the killer grabbed her from behind and pulled her backward? she wondered.
She saw dark clothing and a flash of blond hair. She felt a surprising surge of anger that a criminal could have done such a brutal, terrible thing, and in this woman’s own home, while she was online and in another world.
“Morning, morning,” Connor said.
“Morning, Connor,” the closest of the two men replied. “Bad situation with three of these, now. Going to need to contain the panic, and all in Boston too.”
“It is bad,” Connor said briefly. “Time of death?”
“Probably about ten p.m. last night. No sign of forced entry—there was in the other places. Possible that the electronic lock malfunctioned, or the killer found a way past it.”
“Possible,” Connor said. “Any evidence, any trace?”
“Nothing so far. We’ve checked the desk. We did that first, so if you want to work there, go ahead. The computer was turned off when we arrived.”
Like the others had been, Cami remembered from the case file.
“Any phone in evidence?” Connor asked, and she thought he was also looking for the parallels.
“We haven’t found one.”
Connor nodded at the setup.
“Take a look,” he said to Cami. “See what you can find, see where she was. Whatever you can get from this setup, might be useful.”
This was her time. Her test. Even though she knew Connor didn’t trust her and would be watching her closely, she hoped that she could prove her skills now, and shine the spotlight into the darkness where this killer was hiding.
Stepping forward, relieved to be moving into familiar territory, Cami turned on the machines. Blocking out the sights and sounds from behind her, she went on the hunt.