Stolen Prey

Lucas, he said, “Maybe a break.”
    Lucas nodded, once. “Anything more?”
    “Romeo’s worked out a sequence. I think it’s probably right.”
    R OMEO WAS a lab tech, a short man with a swarthy complexion, a fleshy nose, and a neat little soul patch that actually looked good. Lucas and Del found him in the living room, looking at the dead adult male, a notebook in his hand. He might have been taking inventory in a dime store. But the living room didn’t smell like a dime store; it smelled like the back room at a meat locker.
    The dead man, who was almost certainly named Patrick Brooks, forty-five, blond, once good-looking with big white Chiclet teeth, lay on his back, on the living room carpet, in a drying circle of blood. His arms, down to his elbows, were taped to his sides with ordinary duct tape. There were no fingers on his hands: they’d been cut off, one knuckle-length at a time, and lay around the room like so many cocktail wieners. He had no eyes—they were over by the television. His pants had been pulled down to his knees; he’d been castrated. They’d cut off his ears, but left his tongue, probably so he could talk. He had apparently died while the killers were cutting open his abdomen, because they hadn’t finished the job.
    “Shaffer said you have a sequence,” Lucas said.
    “I think so,” Romeo said. He ticked his yellow pencil at the dead man. “He went last. I think they came in with guns, to keep everybody under control. Rounded them up, taped them up, put them on the floor. They started out shooting the dogs. The golden got it right here, the poodles ran into the kitchen. Shot them there. Did the wife next: Candace. Raped her, beat her, whatever, then cut her throat. Then the kid, uh, Jackson, started screaming or struggling or something, and they shot him: some of the blood splatter and brain tissue from the head shot landed on his mother’s leg, which was already naked, and didn’t move after the blood landed on it.”
    “So she was dead first,” Del said.
    “Right. Then they did the daughter, Amelia. She’s pretty messed up, so I’m thinking … they did a lot of stuff to her. The ME’ll have to give you that. Then they cut her throat. She bled out, and you can see, there are a couple finger joints on her blood. It looks like they rolled across her blood and picked some of it up.”
    “Unless it’s his blood,” Del said.
    “No, it looks like they rolled across wet blood. I think it’ll turn out to be hers.”
    “Like we were talking about,” Lucas said to Del. “They wanted something from him, or they were sending a message.”
    “Did they bring the knives, or use the kitchen knives?” Del asked.
    “Brought them. The knife block is full. Looks like razors, or scalpels, and for some of it, it was probably pliers, side cutters. You get that kind of crushing cut with side cutters. They knew what they were going to do,” Romeo said.
    “Then they wrote on the wall,” Lucas said. They all turned and looked at the wall, where a bloody message said: “Were coming.” No apostrophe.
    “Yeah … they took a couple of the finger joints and used them like markers. The joints are the ones on the couch. They’ve got wall paint on them, like chalk. We’re hoping we might get some DNA, but I’ll bet you anything that they were wearing gloves.”
    “Didn’t gag them—had the tape, but didn’t tape their mouths,” Del said.
    “I think they wanted them to talk back and forth. I think they wanted them to hear each other dying,” Lucas said.
    “That would be the gloomy interpretation,” Romeo said.
    “You got another one?” Lucas asked.
    “No, I don’t,” Romeo said. “You’re probably right. One thing: we’ve got precision, rather than frenzy. Del was talking before, about maybe some crazy guys. I don’t think so. I think it was cold. It feels that way to me. Three or four guys.”
    Lucas looked at the bodies, at the mess. “What about DNA? Any chance?”
    “Oh, yeah. We’ll get some DNA,” Romeo said. “We’ll get sweat or skin cells off the woman’s or the girl’s thighs, if no place else.”
    Del said, “If they’re professionals, they’ll know that sooner or later they’ll do time, and if they pop up in a DNA bank, they’ll go down for this. So I’m thinking, they’re not too worried about DNA banks.”
    “Because they’re stupid?” Romeo suggested.
    “No,” Del said, surveying the shambles. “It’d be becausethey’re not from