It was a scene of utter carnage.
The normally comfortable and pleasant living room of this nice family home on the outskirts of Prosperity would never be the same again. The Gardner family had consisted of two parents and three children. There were four bodies sprawled around the room, very still, very silent, and very dead.
Blood was everywhere, the acrid, metallic smell of it hanging in the air like smoke.
Ed Gardner, thirty-five, was stretched out on the floor just inside the living room, his head in a large pool of blood, his eyes wide open as if in total shock. His throat had been cut from ear to ear. Three of the fingers on his left hand had been chopped off but left there as if the killer had been interrupted or had just decided it was no fun to chop off body parts if the victim was dead.
Lying closest to her father on one end of a big sectional couch that was unfortunately made of a once light-colored fabric was eleven-year-old Suzy Gardner, the eldest of the three Gardner children. Her eyes were closed, so perhaps she had been rendered unconscious or even dead before the dismembering of her slight body had commenced.
Jesus Christ, I hope she was already dead when that was done. Or out at least. Not aware of what was happening. Drugged, maybe. Or even a blow to the head. Just . . . let it be something like that. Let it be that she was dead before she knew what was being done to her. And who was doing it . . .
But Archer was afraid she had been alive, even if unconscious, because there was a lot of blood soaked into the couch. Blood soaked around her arms, dismembered at the shoulders. Blood soaked around her legs, dismembered at the hips.
Dismembered . . . by a hacksaw. And an axe.
And her limbs lay where they belonged, more or less, as though some demented dollmaker stood ready to sew them back on.
At the other end of the sectional sprawled Bobby Gardner, eight, whose small body had been opened from breastbone to crotch. Blood was everywhere. Too much of what had been inside his body had been pulled out to lie on the couch near him or to . . . dangle . . . toward the floor. And his eyes were open.
Archer turned his horrified gaze with more reluctance than he could have expressed to the fourth and final victim of this slaughter, on the carpeted floor, nearly hidden between the big coffee table and that section of the couch.
Five-year-old Luke Gardner, not yet in school, had probably been the first victim, he guessed, because the blood on his small body appeared closer to being dried than what was on and around the others, and what lay around him on the pale carpet of the living room had dulled and . . . congealed.
His head was horribly misshapen, some number of blows with a heavy object having caved in his skull in several places. His ears had been sliced off. Each of his fingers had been chopped off with an axe and, even more unnervingly, were nowhere to be seen. His feet had been chopped off at the ankles and stood bizarrely upright in blood-soaked bedroom slippers with the floppy ears of a rabbit.
Most bizarrely of all, on the big coffee table lay a wooden kitchen cutting board, blood-soaked and bearing the deep imprints of an axe. It had clearly been slid under the children so that the axe had been able to chop more effectively.
Archer tore his gaze away and half turned to look at the chair closest to the front door. It were where Leslie Gardner had been found, curled up in apparently peaceful sleep, her hands covered in blood, her face spattered, clots of blood matting her blond hair. Her jeans and blouse had been literally soaked with blood and all the instruments and objects she had used to slaughter her family lay on the carpet near the chair in a neat semicircle. A huge kitchen butcher knife. An axe. A hacksaw. The heavy bronze figurine of a woman holding a child.
They were all covered with blood.
It doesn’t make any sense. It just doesn’t . . .
“Jack?”
Katie was informal only rarely while they were working, but just as the morning’s inexplicable suicide had shaken her, this horrifically inexplicable mass murder had also shaken her. Badly.
Archer turned to face his chief deputy, noting that she had come only far enough to address him, clearly trying not to look down at the body of Ed Gardner, which was closest to her since she stood in the doorway to the entrance hall. And looking Archer square in the eye out of the equally clear determination to not allow her gaze to stray to the other horrors.
Not again, at least.
“Any word from the hospital?” he asked, functioning on automatic in a situation he had never been trained to handle, his tone queerly detached.
“Yeah, but no real news. Nothing we didn’t know, nothing we couldn’t see for ourselves. Gabby says Leslie Gardner is still asleep—and the doctors say she is asleep even though they haven’t been able to wake her, not faking, not unconscious or in any way injured—and not drugged.”
Gabby Morgan was Archer’s second most experienced deputy, sent to the hospital with EMS and Leslie Gardner, with orders to stick close, follow procedure as far as she was able, and report everything. And not to leave Leslie’s side for a moment.
“They’re sure she wasn’t drugged?” It had been a vain hope, he’d known it even as he’d hoped, struggling to find something that might make sense in a situation that was madness.
“The doctors are sure. They’re conducting more tests on her blood just in case, tests they don’t usually do in . . . normal situations . . . but so far they haven’t found a single sign that she was acting under the influence of anything at all. Except maybe a psychotic break, which they can’t know until she’s awake and shrinks can talk to her. And even if it was something like that, they say there would have been signs people around her would have noticed. Long before it got so bad that something like this could happen.”
Katie drew a deep breath. “Everything was photographed at the hospital, her clothing removed and bagged for us. Or for whatever technicians or lab we send it to. Gabby’s hanging on to that to preserve the chain of evidence. The doctors and nurses checked Leslie Gardner’s body head to toe; there aren’t even any bruises, or the . . . normal . . . cuts we’d expect where the knife might have slipped, should have slipped when it got slippery with blood. The blood was all . . . theirs. All belonged to her husband and kids. She didn’t have a single wound or cut or even a scratch. I don’t have to be a medical examiner or crime scene tech to know that that’s weird.”
She glanced back over her shoulder, noting that deputies Cody Greene and Matt Spencer, still gray with shock since they had responded to the initial call from a worried neighbor, were standing out on the front porch on the other side of the clear storm door. Neither had ventured any farther into the room than where Katie stood now. They had called the station, horrified and bewildered, and it had been the sheriff and his chief deputy who had discovered Leslie Gardner to be very much alive but weirdly unconscious and summoned paramedics.
Before they’d arrived, Katie had silently taken pictures with her cell phone, focusing on Leslie Gardner and the area around her before she could be moved.
Katie wasn’t even sure why she’d done it. And all she knew now was that she couldn’t keep silent any longer.
“Jack . . . first that apparent suicide that didn’t make sense, that doesn’t make sense this morning, and now this. The youngest boy was probably killed hours ago, maybe before the other kids were up, maybe even while we were three streets over trying to figure out why Sam Bowers would have killed himself.”