There’s no blood obvious on the white painted steps to the second story, or on the tan carpet down the hallway. “Detective Mignone?” Eddison calls out. “Agents Eddison and Ramirez; Holmes sent us over.”
“Bootie up and come on in,” answers a male voice from inside the bedroom. There’s a low murmur of other voices.
We bend down to pull the thin paper booties on over our shoes. It isn’t just to protect our shoes, but also to minimize impact on the evidence, to avoid things like dragging blood or putting fresh shoe prints on the surfaces. I pull on a second pair over the first, and after a moment’s thought, so does Eddison.
Ronnie had an awful lot of blood on him; the room has to be a god-awful mess.
I probably should have guessed it from the ME’s van outside, but it somehow comes as a surprise that the Wilkinses are still in bed. The covers are in disarray, and there is blood pretty damn near everywhere. I can track a few spots that are clearly arterial spray—it’s a very distinctive pattern—and several that seem more likely to be cast off, probably from a knife. After that, it gets more chaotic where different blood patterns cross and drip. There are dual negative spaces on the carpet on either side of the bed. One on each side is most likely where the killer—Ronnie’s angel—stood, but the others . . .
When he said she made him watch, I didn’t imagine he meant this closely.
Two sets of bloody footprints track around the bed and to the door, but they stop there. There was zero blood in the hall. The killer could have carried Ronnie—probably carried Ronnie, as an extra measure of control—but she had to have had something to cover her feet. Booties? Bags? Another pair of shoes? The larger pair of bloody prints shows shoe treads, at any rate.
“Kid’s really okay?” asks the suited detective. Mignone appears to be in his fifties, his skin weathered by sun, with close-cropped hair and a bristling salt-and-pepper moustache.
“Traumatized, but physically unhurt,” I tell him. “Unless you count old wounds.”
“Don’t know if Holmes mentioned it: patrol knows this house pretty well. Their neighbors usually make a point of being uncurious, but there are still a couple calls a month for domestic disturbance. We’ll get a copy of the full file on your desks tomorrow.” He nods at both of us, then gestures to the bodies on the bed. “Hell of a thing.”
That’s one way to put it.
Daniel Wilkins is on the left side of the bed, a broad-shouldered man with a layer of beer fat over muscle. What he looked like before the attack is impossible to gauge: his face isn’t just bloody, it’s been slashed and stabbed, along with his torso.
“Twenty-nine separate knife wounds on him,” says the medical examiner, looking up from the other side of the bed. “Plus two gunshot wounds to the chest. Those weren’t immediately fatal, but he wasn’t moving around with them, either.”
“Any shots on her?”
The ME shakes her head. “Probably intended as a subduing measure. Near as we can tell before autopsy, the shots on him came first. Then she was attacked, and the killer went back to him. Spent a bit more time on him. She’s only got seventeen knife wounds, all on the torso.”
Seventeen and twenty-nine . . . that’s a lot of rage.
“Physically fit killer,” Eddison says, carefully stepping between two arcs of blood on the carpet so he can get closer. “Frenzies like this are tiring, but they also carried Ronnie down the stairs and to a vehicle, then up to Ramirez’s porch.”
“And you really have no idea why?” asks Mignone.
I am going to get very tired of repeating no. Fortunately, Eddison does it for me this time.
I come around to Sandra Wilkins’s side of the bed, standing next to one of the ME’s assistants. “Probably hard to tell, given the mess, but does she show signs of abuse?”
“Besides the black eye and swollen cheek? She’s got some bruising, and it wouldn’t be any surprise to find a few broken bones on the X-rays. We’ll know better once we get her cleaned up.”
“And some of her hospital records are in the file,” adds Mignone. “Entrance into the house looks pretty straightforward. Porch light was unscrewed just enough to not connect, not far enough to fall and shatter.”
“That’s it?”
“Didn’t need to be any more sophisticated than that; it did the trick. Didn’t have to pick the lock because it’s been broken for a while. Mrs. Wilkins locked her husband out of the house during a fight so he broke the lock, never replaced it.”
“Was that in a police report?”
“Yes, few months ago. No blood in or around the kid’s room. Looks like the killer woke him up, brought him here, started to work.”
“Matches what Ronnie said.”
“I’m guessing she never pressed charges?” Eddison says.
“Gee, it’s almost like you’ve seen this before.” Mignone straightens his tie, an incongruously cheerful thing with giant sunflowers all over it. “In the morning, we’ll get on the horn with CPS, get copies of their files. I’ll make sure one gets to you. Ronnie’s got a couple inches, at least.”
“Police file, hospital records, Child Protective Services file . . . that’s a lot of eyes and hands on this kind of information,” I say. “That’s not even counting family members, neighbors, friends, teachers, church members, or any other groups they might be part of. If the murders are connected to the abuse, that is way too many people to sift through.”
The second assistant clears his throat, blushing as we all turn to look at him. “Sorry, this is only my second, ah . . . murder? But am I allowed to ask a question?”
The ME rolls her eyes but looks provisionally impressed rather than irritated. “It is how we learn. Try to make it a good one.”
“If this is about the abuse, Mrs. Wilkins was probably abused too: Why would the killer attack her as well?”
“Remind me when we get to the van. That earns you a lollipop.”
Morbid humor: not just an agent thing.
“If this is about the abuse,” Eddison answers, “and we are still spitballing that, but if it is, then killers of this kind generally consider the mother complicit, even if she is herself a victim. She didn’t protect her child. She had to have known about it but didn’t stop it, either because she didn’t think she could, or because she chose not to in order to relieve some of the burden on herself.”
“When I go to my parents’ on Sundays, my mom asks me if I’ve learned anything new over the week,” the assistant says. “I need to start lying.”
“Fact of the day calendar,” Eddison tells him. “Seriously.”
“Saw some of the neighbors outside,” I note. “Any of them mention hearing gunshots?”
The detective shakes his head. “We’ll know better once the bullets are out, but there seems to have been some kind of silencer. A potato, probably, from debris in the wound tracks. Neighbors mentioned screams, but that’s pretty commonplace for this house.”
“A child’s screams?”
Eddison gives me a slightly jaundiced look. “You think Ronnie stood and watched his parents get murdered and didn’t scream?”
“He didn’t move off my porch. After the killer left him there, he could have gone to any other house and asked for help, but he stayed exactly where he was put. And look at the carpet: Is there any sign of a struggle around where he must have stood?”
“If he’d ever admitted to Social Services what was happening to him, he likely wouldn’t have been returned to the home.” Eddison rubs at his jaw. “So he’s probably pretty conditioned to protect his father by keeping silent. Anyone suitably authoritative is someone he’d probably obey, so long as it didn’t mean talking about the abuse.”
“Poor kid’s got years of therapy ahead of him,” the ME observes.
“Does the scene remind you of any of your cases? Or things that have come across your desk that didn’t become your cases?” asks Mignone.