A Grim Discovery
Trying not to freak out, the minute the house is secure and Theresa finishes bandaging up her hand, she pops some Advil and crosses town to the Lockes’ place. She needs stitches, but she needs to check on them first. She has a bad, bad feeling.
She presses the button to the gates impatiently with her left hand, gritting her teeth against the pain in her right.
It’s early, barely dawn, and she’s probably going to wake them up, but she doesn’t care.
This is a welfare check as much as an interrogation.
With psychopathic strangers in town looking for Andrew, she needs to make sure the Lockes are okay.
There’s no answer. She is not deterred. She calls the head of the fire department, Joe Markey. He answers with a crisp hello.
“I need a favor. What’s the emergency code to the Lockes’ gate?”
“What’s wrong? Is there smoke? They didn’t call for help, and we don’t have an alarm going.”
“No smoke, but I need to do a welfare check. No one’s answering the gate.”
Joe sucks in a breath. “Hold on. I’ll get it.”
She has never been more grateful that the city code ordinances in Malogen require people within the city limits to provide ready access for emergency services—and for the Lockes, the stipulation for their gate was an emergency code that the firefighters could use if the place ever went up in flames.
Additionally, a fire tower is located on the hill behind their house, and their driveway is designated as an alternate access point for evacuation, in case of a forest fire or other natural disaster.
The gate is wide enough to allow full-size fire trucks through. She bets it costs a fortune.
“Ready? It’s pound sign, then 9-9-8-4-4-5.”
She depresses the buttons and is rewarded with a metallic creak. The gate unlatches and swings inward.
“I’m sending truck twelve your way, just in case. I’ll be five minutes behind them.”
She wants to say “Don’t bother,” but there’s no way she can raise a red flag like this and not expect Markey to send backup. “Copy that. Thanks.”
“Be careful.”
“Copy that, too.” She hangs up and gets back in the car.
The driveway is long, almost half a mile up the hill, with two gentle switchbacks.
She notices her hand is bleeding freely through the dish towel she used to wrap it.
She has a strange déjà vu of the time she drove up to interview them about Chloe’s death.
She’d been looking for Andrew that day, too.
He’d left the crime scene without permission, and she had more questions for him.
She found him at his parents’ kitchen table, eyes red and swollen from crying, his father furious at the interruption.
He’d been grilling his son about what happened and hadn’t welcomed Theresa’s attentions.
The house looks to be asleep. It is a classic Revival, three stories, a slightly smaller version of the Bellevue House in LaGrange. White stone, grand porticos, symmetrical windows and columns: It is almost ridiculous in its grandeur. A red tile roof gives it an Italianate air.
Lockes have lived in this house for generations. It’s grown over the years, as additions were made. It is an elegant monstrosity.
She parks and crunches through the gravel to the path that leads to the front door.
She catches a glimpse of the gardens in the back—they are extensive, growing wild.
They used to be so well groomed. It took a staff of gardeners; no single person could maintain all of this land.
So much fun when they used to have the parties, and the staff would work for weeks ahead of time to get the decorations in order, sophisticated, tasteful, covering all the foliage and lighting the paths.
Now, so close to the holidays, there’s no sign of the elaborate decor. There isn’t even a wreath on the door, just that anemic one on the gate. The house looks empty and unloved. It’s missing its heart.
She should be doing a better job of reaching out to the Lockes.
They are older, and they’ve been through such a trauma.
They’ve lost so much. It’s her job to make sure the people in her community are safe and taken care of.
The last time she tried, though, Colonel Locke had made it abundantly clear that Theresa was not to set foot on the premises again.
He’d been angry, brokenhearted, and looking for someone to blame for his beloved daughter-in-law’s murder, and Theresa was the perfect foil.
She’d listened, because what else was she going to do?
She had no cause, no warrant, no reason to force herself on them, just the time-honored desire of a cop to protect their flock.
Some don’t want that kind of protection.
The wide oak double door has matching lion’s-head knockers.
She grabs the right one’s lower jaw and heaves it, hard, into the brass three times.
It echoes. She waits impatiently. No one answers.
She hears the thin wail of the fire truck.
They’re coming, and she should wait, but the sense of foreboding has overtaken her.
She reaches into her pocket and awkwardly pulls out a purple nitrile glove that she quickly wrestles onto her left hand, then twists the knob.
The door is not locked.
Her instincts are on fire. Gritting her teeth, she thumbs the lever on her holster and rests her injured hand on her weapon.
The adrenaline is taking away the worst of the pain.
The door eases open, and she is assailed immediately by the scent of blood.
It is unique, this scent. It holds too much in its grip: fear, pain, sorrow.
It makes her prehensile tail curl under, sends her heart into overdrive.
Her muscles tense in preparation for flight.
She eases into the house, moving carefully but swiftly, eyes searching through the morning gloom to assess the scene.
There are no lights on. She clears the parlor, the dining room, the downstairs living spaces.
The farther she moves into the house, the stronger the scent of death becomes.
Her hackles are raised. She wants to run—any normal human would run as far away as they could from this, but she’s trained to move toward danger, and she does.
Stepping carefully, slowly, gun drawn, hand throbbing.
She finds Andrew’s mother first.
Lucy Locke is tied to a chair in the eat-in, arms behind her back, her head slumped forward as if she’s fallen asleep in that position, long gray hair a curtain hiding her injuries.
Her lap is a mess of red, the floor beneath her covered in dried blood.
Theresa knows what she’s going to see before she acts, gently checking for a nonexistent pulse, then lifting Lucy’s head slowly.
It’s wobbly, and she realizes the woman’s throat is cut, deeply.
“Theresa?” a voice calls. It’s Joe.
“Hold there, please,” she shouts, not sure how she can even find her voice.
She snaps a picture of Mrs. Locke, then skirts the blood pooled around the chair, moving deeper into the kitchen. She clears that room, then the back porch, and the morning room, with no signs of Colonel Locke.
This circle brings her back to the foyer, where Joe is standing with a bevy of his firefighters.
“One down so far. Mrs. Locke’s in the kitchen. I’m still looking for Colonel Locke. Back out and call Captain Armstrong, would you?”
Her voice is calm and measured. Commanding. She is surprised at how steady it sounds, considering that inside, she is screaming in horror. Joe moves to comply immediately, then sees her hand.
“You’re bleeding,” he says. She looks at the cloth, bright red, like a cardinal in the snow.
“Yeah, I cut myself. Don’t worry about it, I’ll deal with it later.”
“Don’t drip it in the crime scene,” he says practically, handing her a handkerchief from his pocket. She winds it around the already soaked cloth, wincing against the pain.
She is going to murder that bastard when she finds him.
Theresa reenters the house, pauses in the grand foyer. Upstairs, or garage?
Something draws her to the door that leads to the garage.
It’s a later addition to the house, something Locke built thirty years ago when he started collecting expensive vehicles.
There is a hallway that leads to the space, and as she traverses it, she notices speckles of blood on the floor and walls.
The droplets get larger closer to the door.
She levels her weapon at the door and opens it. It pulls inward, and she steps through into darkness. She slides a hand along the edge to the left of the doorframe and finds the switch. The room lights up with a small crack. She has to bite her lip not to scream aloud.
Andrew’s father is hanging from the steel beam that supports the garage-door-opening system, face red and congested.
There is a yellow cord around his neck. His body drifts ever so slightly in the draft she’s created by opening the door.
She doesn’t see the copious amounts of blood like there were in the kitchen, but his shirtfront shows stains, like he had a nosebleed.
A picture is forming in her mind. Lucy Locke was killed first. God knows what sort of horrors they’re going to find on her body.
Then the colonel was beaten, marched out to the garage, and hanged.
Or there’s more than one perpetrator, and it was done simultaneously.
Or maybe they knocked out the colonel . . . Hell, she doesn’t know.
It’s hard to do that to another human being.
If Andy Locke was alive when he went up, he would have been struggling, and even though he’s in his early eighties now, he’s a big man; she has to assume that he was at the very least unconscious.
She can’t rule out the possibility that he killed Mrs. Locke, then killed himself.
But murder/suicide, the night your son shows up a decade after disappearing from his life, feels like too much of a coincidence.
Plus, her psycho gentleman caller tells her more is afoot.
Andrew. What have you done? How could you let this happen to them?
Damn it. She should have come calling last night, when she had the sense that something was wrong. She shouldn’t have waited until the morning. She might have interrupted the killer—killers?—before they had a chance to act.
She should have done so many things.
Logic dictates she consider her visitor as a suspect, too. Was he chasing Andrew after the murders? Or looking for answers? She has to think that her visitor stopped here before he came to her house. Brazen asshole. Didn’t get what he wanted from the Lockes and came searching in her kitchen.
It puts Andrew’s culpability in question, and her instinct is to lean toward the masochist who violated her space as the primary suspect here.
But what if she’s wrong? What if Andrew is responsible?
Could a son do such a thing to his parents?
Their relationship was fraught, and then, after Chloe’s death, completely fractured.
But why now? Why deviate from the course of taking his young family to Italy and instead make his way to his hometown to murder his parents?
She can’t rule it out. People do insane, inexplicable things all the time. They think they are above the law. That they will get away with it. That the codes of humanity don’t apply to them.
She makes her way carefully back to the front door and exits to the concerned faces of Joe and the first responders of truck twelve.
“Call the coroner,” she says. “They’re both dead.”