I nodded back. “Uh-huh.”
It was the first crime scene I had ever been to, and I couldn’t help but remember the pristine room, the high ceilings, and the tulips leaning so gracefully over the cut-glass lip of the vase. I also couldn’t help but recall the woman who’d looked as though she had just fallen into a light and peaceful slumber, with her golden-blond hair splayed over the pillow, her pale pink lips pressed together. Under her satin blankets her chest was torn open, her heart removed.
It was an image I never bothered to strain from my mind, because I knew it was burned into my subconscious.
I rolled down the window and pressed my head out, gulping in a huge lungful of the slightly salt-tinged air. I leaned back into the car. “Did they tell you anything when headquarters called it in?”
Alex chewed his bottom lip and shook his head silently—a sure sign he knew more than he was letting on.
“Alex? I can handle it.”
Silence.
“I have a gun, you know.”
He gently let his foot off the gas but kept his gaze fixed on the street ahead. “Are you threatening me with an unloaded gun?”
I sucked a quick breath through my teeth. “Just tell me: is it as bad as last time?”
“Let’s just say property values are about to plunge again.”
“Huh?”
Alex nodded toward the house on the other side of the street, just a few houses past this one. Police lights were washing the sidewalk in rounds of red and blue as officers unfurled their yellow crime scene tape and held back curious onlookers. An ambulance was stationed with back doors open, but no one was inside, and no one seemed to be moving very quickly.
“I don’t suppose it’s worth asking if you want to stay in the car,” Alex said.
But my eyes were glued to the house.
Yes, I’m a wimp. Yes, I turn into a quivering bowl of jelly when blood—that isn’t nicely encased in a blood bag—is present. But this was something different. It wasn’t a fear so much as a deep foreboding. An all-over sense that once I walked into that house, something would be set in motion and nothing that I knew would seem real anymore.
I licked my lips and put my hand on the car door. “No, it’s not worth asking. Let’s go.”
Two ashen-faced pup officers ran out of the house as we approached the walk. Both doubled over in the bushes rimming the house, but only one started to vomit. A chill started at the base of my neck and went down my spine. I hugged my elbows and hung close to Alex.
We stepped into the foyer of the residence—it was big and grand, as to be expected in the neighborhood, but it was empty, a collection of orb-eyed statues staring at no one. A murmured hum came from a room just to our left and I followed Alex as he headed straight for it, the heels of my boots click-clacking on the marble floors and bouncing off the mile-high ceilings.
The dim room was immediately ten degrees hotter than the deserted foyer and crammed with bodies in flak jackets and weapons belts. A bank of black-and-white televisions lined one wall nearly floor to ceiling, and a desk ran the entire length underneath, littered with wired telephones and a complicated-looking control panel.
“What is all this?” I whispered to Alex.
“Panic room, essentially,” he muttered.
Officer Romero was one of the officers crammed in the room and he looked over his shoulder when he heard my voice. “State of the art.” He waved his hand over the equipment. “I don’t even think the CIA has this kind of shit yet. Grace, Lawson. Glad you’re here.”
“Who needs this kind of security?” I asked, trying my best to pick up the home owner’s identity. “The president? Justin Bieber?”
“Tia Shively.”
Alex and I looked at each other, blank faced.
“Very wealthy. Old money,” Romero said.
“Silver-spoon-in-her-mouth kind of thing?” Alex asked.
“More like golden microchip. Married to Kidson Jobs.”
“The concert promoter?”
“Actually”—Romero shut his notebook—“the former barista. Apparently old Kidson made Tia’s lattes with a little something extra because she married him six months later.” Romero shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe he just had an enormous dipstick. She swoops in, marries Kidson—she’s twenty-five, by the way. He’s out of the country and something trips the house alarm out here.”
Alex gestured toward the monitors. “So is this the crime scene?”
“No.” Romero shook his head. “It’s the crime.”
Officer Romero barked out an order and a space opened up at the desk. Alex and I squeezed our way in so we had a better vantage point. “That one there is a camera facing over the back fence.”
Alex nodded and I squinted at the grainy image. I could barely make out gray, oblong fuzzy patches; I assumed they were juniper bushes.