Chapter 4
TESSA ENTERED THE DENBES’ TOWNHOME with a mixture of trepidation and curiosity. Nervousness over inspecting a crime scene that may or may not involve a child. Curiosity over touring the inside of a multimillion-dollar Boston brownstone. Restored town houses in this area of the city were the stuff of legend, and upon first glance, the Denbe residence didn’t disappoint. Tessa took in a sweeping expanse of meticulously polished hardwood floors, soaring nine-foot ceilings, original four-inch-thick dentil crown moldings and enough hand-carved woodwork to keep a crew of carpenters busy for an entire year.
Like most Boston townhomes, the home’s footprint was narrow but deep. A yawning two-story foyer complete with a massive blown-glass chandelier—Venetian, she was guessing—set the stage for a gracefully sweeping staircase straight ahead and a great room with a beautifully restored historic fireplace to the left. Off the great room, stretching toward the back of the home, she spotted the beginning of what she guessed would be a state-of-the-art kitchen, complete with granite, Sub-Zeros and custom cabinetry.
Not a fussy house, Tessa decided. Nor an ultramodern one. Warm neutrals punctuated by unexpected splashes of color. Some contemporary art, mixed with obviously antique furniture. A home meant to impress, but not overwhelm, where one could entertain business cronies as well as the local kids with equal success.
Which made the scene in the foyer all the more disturbing.
Vomit. A large, watery pool, five feet inside the front door, near the far right wall. Confetti. Bright green, a million little pieces, each of which would bear a serial number of the Taser used to fire the cartridge. Bitch to clean up, Tessa knew from personal experience, having spent time at the academy both shooting Tasers and being shot by them, and she still had the burn marks on her hip and ankle to prove it.
Yellow evidence placards were currently placed around the scene, identifying confetti and vomit, as well as a few traces of black scuff marks, probably from the bottom of someone’s shoe. Tessa bent down to examine first the confetti, then the scuff marks more closely. Confetti was probably useless to them. On the one hand, the whole purpose of the serial-number-stamped bits was to be able to trace an incident back to the Taser in question, just as a slug could be traced through its rifling marks to a specific gun. In Massachusetts, however, Tasers were illegal for civilian use. Meaning whoever had fired this weapon had most likely purchased it on the black market and forged the paperwork accordingly.
The scuff marks interested her more. Not enough tread pattern to guess about make and model of shoe. She would guess, however, either a black-soled tennis shoe or work boot. Justin Denbe’s? His attacker’s? Already she was forming her list of questions, as well as a growing sense of dread.
For just one moment, Tessa couldn’t help herself. She was standing in her own kitchen, fresh off patrol, duty belt snug around her waist, trooper’s hat pushed low on her brow, reaching for her Sig Sauer, slowly removing it from its holster, dangling it in the space between herself and her husband… Who do you love?
“House has a state-of-the-art security system,” D.D. announced crisply. “According to the housekeeper, it was not activated when she arrived at five thirty this morning. She doesn’t use the front door, but enters via the rear garage into the lower level. Given that Justin Denbe is extremely security conscious, standard operating procedure involves punching in a key code to raise the outside garage door, then a second code to unlock the inner door leading from the garage into the basement. The garage door was lowered and secured; the inner door, however, was open. Then, she came upstairs and spotted the kitchen island.”
D.D. hugged the front wall as she headed left into the main area of the house, bypassing the pool of vomit, the pile of Taser confetti. Tessa followed in D.D.’s footsteps, careful to limit their own evidence trail as they headed toward the kitchen.
Her own home that morning had been a modest three-hundred-thousand-dollar single-family dwelling in the middle of a working-class area of Boston. And yet, what had happened in her modest kitchen, versus what had happened in the great foyer here…
Violence, the great equalizer. Cared nothing for money, class, occupation. One day, it simply found you.
The kitchen was vast, stretching back forever to the rear of the home. It was also meticulously clean, and surprisingly empty. Tessa shot a quick glance at D.D. Outside, there had been at least half a dozen detectives’ vehicles. But inside the house, Tessa had so far seen D.D., D.D., and only D.D.
Then, Tessa corrected herself. On the first floor of the home, she’d encountered a single detective. Meaning—she raised her gaze automatically to the ceiling above her—if the foyer was bad, upstairs, she guessed, had to be worse to have demanded the attention of at least five more Boston detectives.
“Look.” D.D. pointed straight ahead.
Big center island. At least eight feet long, covered in an expanse of green-gold granite with darker gray veins that flowed like water. Currently, the high-polished surface was marred by a single jumbled collection of items, all piled directly in the middle.
Tessa approached slowly, reaching into her coat pocket for a pair of latex gloves.
Purse, she identified. Rich brown leather, looked Italian. Smart phone. iPod. Man’s wallet. Another smart phone, two key fobs, one for a Range Rover, another bearing the logo of Mercedes-Benz. Two iPads. A red Swiss Army pocketknife, tightly folded. Finally, cotton-candy-pink lip gloss, a wad of cash and two sticks of bent gum, still in silver foil.
Purse most likely belonged to the wife. Wallet, pocketknife, at least one of the phones would be the husband’s, while the two sets of keys translated to his car, her car. The rest she would guess belonged to Ashlyn. Electronics, smart phone, lip gloss, cash, gum. Pretty much everything required by the modern teenager on the go.
Tessa was looking at the contents of an entire family’s pockets/purses, single-mindedly extricated and piled like offerings on an altar in the middle of the kitchen island.
She glanced again at D.D., found the detective studying her.
“The two cell phones?” Tessa asked.
“Three. Third’s in the purse, belongs to Libby. We contacted the carrier, who’s in the process of faxing the past forty-eight hours of calls, texts and messages. Preliminary synopsis: no outgoing calls from any member of the family after ten P.M. last night. Ashlyn, the teenager, has a series of texts from various friends trying to contact her with growing degrees of urgency, but nothing the other way around. Last text message Ashlyn sent was at approximately nine forty-eight P.M. Last text message she received was shortly after midnight, the fourth from her BFF, Lindsay Edmiston, demanding her immediate reply.”
“Perpetrator catches the family by surprise,” Tessa said, testing out the scenario in her mind. “Hence no aborted calls or texts for help. Attacker uses a Taser to subdue them, hence the confetti in the foyer. Then he restrains them and divests them of their personal possessions.”
“Some robbery,” D.D. stated, voice challenging.
“Not a robbery,” Tessa immediately concurred. “You’re right. The smart phones, purse, wallet. Those would be the first items taken, not left behind.”
Tessa wondered if the family had been conscious during this phase. Most likely. Tasering was intensely painful, but only briefly incapacitating. The moment the shooter squeezed the trigger, an electric current screamed through the victim’s body, firing each nerve ending to intense, excruciating life. The second the trigger was released, however, the current ceased and the pain passed, leaving the subject shaken, but standing.
Most police officers preferred Tasering to pepper spray for just that reason. Pepper spray reduced the subject to a giant, blubbering, mucousy mess, which the officer then had to awkwardly heave into the back of the squad car. Tasering, on the other hand, generally involved two to three quick bursts of searing electrical charge, at which point most perpetrators tucked themselves obediently inside the squad car, anything not to be Tasered again.
So most likely the family was conscious. Restrained, subdued, while the perpetrator ransacked their pockets, rifled through their personal possessions, then placed everything neatly on the kitchen island. The parents, at the very least, must have realized the full implications.
That this was no robbery.
That by definition, therefore, the attack was something more personal. Something worse.
“Since you’re doing a nice job of looking, not touching,” D.D. said, “I’ll let you in on a little secret.”
Tessa waited. D.D. pointed to the pile.
“Beneath all those electronics, we found the family’s jewelry. Engagement ring, wedding bands, diamond studs, gold hoops, two necklaces, a Rolex. My highly conservative estimate: at least a hundred grand in easy-to-pawn items.”
“Shit.” Tessa couldn’t help herself.
“Yep. Some robbery.”
“All right. Talk to me about the security system.”
“Electronically operated. Denbe’s firm has built a number of prisons, and he incorporated a system into his own home similar to what they use for jail cells. Doors all have multiple steel bolts, which are controlled by a master panel. Punch in one code, the system automatically locks down all means of entry and exit. Punch in a second code, the system automatically disarms, unlocking all egresses. I guess there’s other codes, specifying unlocking just inner door A or outer door B, but given this system probably costs more than my entire house, I’m hardly an expert. Of course, the windows and doors are also hardwired to the security system, which would automatically contact the security company while blasting an alarm if someone tried to manually break down a door.”
“And the system was disarmed when the housekeeper showed up at five thirty?”
“Correct. Which is highly unusual. Justin Denbe required the house to be locked at all times, whether anyone was home or not.”
“City life one-oh-one,” Tessa commented dryly. She went with the logical assumption. “Who knows the codes?”
“Family, housekeeper and the security company.”
“How often are the codes changed?”
“Once a month.”
“Can it be manually overridden? Wires cut, that sort of thing?”
“According to the security company, any tampering with the wires would activate the alarm. And there’s redundancy…two sets of wires, both fiber optics and cable. Hell, I didn’t understand it all, but Justin Denbe knows his shit, and applied it to his personal living situation. The security company can be contacted by first responders for emergency override—say, in the case of fire—but reported no such requests. Whoever gained access, they did it right.”
Tessa turned to look at the detective. “You said the housekeeper enters through the garage. How about the family?”
“When on foot, they use the front door, just as we did. When Libby is driving, she enters from the lower-level garage where she keeps her car. But according to the housekeeper, Justin and Libby had dinner plans for the evening. And in a his-and-her situation, he always drove.”
“But he doesn’t park in the garage?”
“Nope, single bay, which gallantly, I suppose, he gave to her. They also have a reserved parking space around back, but the housekeeper uses it. Guess he’s gone so much, he mostly keeps his car in the Denbe parking garage and limo’s it from there. Then, on the few days a week he’s back home, he takes his chances street side, like the rest of us schmucks.” D.D. rolled her eyes.
“And the girl, Ashlyn? Where was she?”
“Parents’ night out. She was staying in.”
Tessa processed this. “So the teenager is already home. Parents return. Enter through the front door… Attacker is already inside. Ambushes Justin and Libby in the foyer.”
“Attacker or attackers?”
“Attackers. One person can’t subdue an entire family with a Taser alone. And Justin worked in the field, yes? Hands-on, my boss said. Big guy, fit.”
“Big guy,” D.D. agreed. “Very fit.”
“So attackers. At least one or two in the entryway. Element of surprise for the parents. Which just leaves the girl.”
“If you were the kidnappers, who would you tend to first? Parents or child?”
“Child,” Tessa said immediately. “Moment you control the child, you control the parents.”
“Yep. Which is where our guys almost made their first mistake. Girl’s room is on the third floor. Come on, follow me.”