Zero Day (10 page)

A
MAN AND A WOMAN
. Both heavyset and possibly in their forties. It was hard to tell with the state they were in. The man had a heavy beard, and tat sleeves ran down both bare arms. There was also an eagle tattoo across his bare pecs. The woman’s hair was bottle blonde and she was dressed in hospital scrub bottoms, but no top.

They were sitting on the couch in the living room.

They were clearly dead, but it wasn’t obvious how they had died.

Cole stood next to Puller, who stared down at the corpses.

Puller looked down at the floor. No visible tripod indents, because it was hardwood and not carpet. Still, his gut was sending him a clear message.

They were interrogated too
.

They were both turning green. CPR was not called for. A grave was.

The man had a Virginia Tech ring on his right hand. The woman had a bracelet on her left wrist along with a Timex wristwatch.

Puller said, “Look to be dead about the same time as the Reynoldses. We’ll need someone to pronounce them deceased officially.”

“Okay, but how did they die?” asked Cole.

Puller checked the floor again. No blood spatters. He slapped on a fresh pair of gloves pulled from a fanny pack on his belt and tilted the man’s head forward. No obvious gunshot entries or exits. There were no brain stem bruises. No knife wounds. No ligature marks on the neck. No evidence of blows to the abdomen.

“Suffocation?” said Lou, who was standing farther back and looking queasy, probably from the smell.

Puller carefully opened the man’s left eyelid. “No sign of petechial hemorrhage.” He glanced at the man’s torso and then at the woman’s.

“What?” asked Cole, who’d noted his quizzical look.

“The bodies have been moved. And their shirts were taken off.”

“How do you know that?” asked Cole.

He pointed to some pale marks on the arms and around the necks of both. “Those are vibices. Pressure on the capillaries from tight clothing keeps them from filling. That means they had shirts on for a while after death. And after death blood pools by gravity to the lowest parts of the body.”

“Lividity,” said Cole.

He said, “Right. Six hours after death the capillaries coagulate. Then you have permanent postmortem staining.”

“Why would they take their shirts off
after
killing them?”

Lou said, “Well, we don’t know anybody killed them, do we? Maybe they committed suicide. Took poison or something and took their shirts off before they croaked.”

Puller shook his head at this suggestion. “Tox screens will tell for certain. But in most poisoning cases the hypostatic areas have distinct colorings, cherry red, red, red-brown, or dark brown. Don’t see any of that here.”

Cole examined each of their hands. “No sign of defensive wounds. Nails look relatively clean. But why take off the shirts? Especially her. I mean, if I’m a woman and I kill myself, I sure as hell don’t want to be found topless.”

She drew her gaze away from the woman’s heavy, veined breasts, which sagged nearly to her belly button.

Puller said, “The killers took off the shirts because they wanted us to work a little harder to find out how these people died.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning the shirts had bloodstains on them.”

“How do you know that?”

He pointed to a spot where the woman’s right breast attached to her chest. “Blood soaked through the shirt and some of it got
lodged in that crevice. Killers must’ve missed it, but they did a good job cleaning up everything else, because there would have been blood and tissue spatters.”

“Okay, but from where and what?” exclaimed Cole.

Puller bent down and carefully lifted up the man’s right eyelid. “Would’ve seen this earlier, but I opened the wrong one.”

Cole leaned in closer. “Damn.”

The eye was gone. In its place was a dark, blistered hole. “Contact wound,” said Puller. “We’ll find powder in the wound track. Small caliber. Check the woman.”

Cole slapped on gloves. The woman’s left eye was just a hole too. Gray brain matter clustered around the opening.

“Only seen that once before,” said Puller. “In Germany. Soldier on soldier. Special Forces. Their knowledge base on killing people runs pretty deep.”

Cole straightened up and put her hands on her hips. “Why the subterfuge? Even if we didn’t catch it here, the post would have.”

“The post
might
have. Maybe they were counting on you having to get a paramedic to do the cutting and missing it. Or no X-ray so they don’t see the bullet in the brain. Happens all the time, unfortunately, and they probably thought it was worth a shot here. The good news is there’s no exit wound on either one. That means the rounds are still in them.” He eyed Lou. “This is obviously not the guy you spoke with yesterday.”

“No. He was a lot thinner and was clean-shaven,” conceded Lou a bit lamely.

“Give us a full description of him.”

Lou did so.

Puller said, “We’ll have to check for ID here.”

Cole spoke up. “And this guy was obviously already dead when that guy was pulling a slick one on you, Lou. Get his description to dispatch and put out a BOLO. Go do it now, although the guy’s probably long gone.”

Lou left and she turned to Puller. “Now we’ve got two crime
scenes to work. This is going to drain my resources fast. Think the Army can spare some more people?”

“Don’t know,” said Puller, who thought,
They could only spare me initially. Does that change now or not?

“Well, they have to be connected. At least we know that. Way too big a coincidence to have two murders on the same street at the same time by two different sets of killers.”

When he didn’t respond to this she said again, “They have to be connected, right?”

“Nothing has to be anything. It has to be proven.”

“But you got any early theories as to why they might be tied together?”

Puller eyed the window. “That looks directly across to the Reynolds place.”

Cole went to stand by the window and looked out. “So you’re thinking these folks saw something over there and had to be silenced?”

“But if you reverse it the Reynoldses’ front window looks right back at this place.”

Cole nodded, seeing where this line of reasoning was going. “So it’s chicken and egg? Who saw what first?”

“Maybe.”

“Well, it really has to be one or the other.”

“No it doesn’t,” said Puller.

T
HE BODIES YIELDED FEW CLUES
.

The basement was far more interesting.

Puller and Cole had searched the lower level and come to a door that was locked. With Cole’s okay, Puller opened the door using a tire iron he found in an old storage bin set against one wall. The revealed room was ten feet wide and twelve feet deep.

On a long folding table were propane tanks, bottles of paint thinner, a can of camp stove fuel, Mason jars, rolls of tubing, gas cylinders, pill bottles and rock salt, funnels and clamps, coffee filters, pillowcases, coolers, and thermos bottles.

“You got a biohazard team?” asked Puller, putting a hand over his mouth and nose to shield his lungs from the smell of solvents and chemicals.

“Meth lab,” said Cole.

“Meth lab,” repeated Puller. “You got a biohazard team?” he asked again. “This thing could blow up. And take the crime scene upstairs with it.”

“We don’t have a biohazard team, Puller.”

“Then I’ll make one.”

Twenty minutes later, with the neighbors and Cole and her deputies watching, Puller reentered the house dressed in a hooded green biohazard suit with an air filter, red shoe coverings, and green gloves, all of which he kept packed in his rucksack. Puller methodically pored over the site, dusting for and lifting prints, separating potentially volatile substances from each other, and photographing and tagging all of it. Two hours later he stepped outside and
noted the sun was nearly down. He took off his hood. His body was drenched with sweat. The house had been hot. Inside the suit added at least another twenty degrees.

Cole saw the beads of sweat on his face, the flattened wet hair. She handed him a bottle of cold water. “You okay? You look whipped.”

He drank down half the liquid. “I’m good. Lot of stuff in there. I worked a bunch of drug lab cases in the Army. That lab was pretty rudimentary but effective. They could turn out some decent product, just not that much.”

“While you were working that I found a place to take the bodies.”

“Where?”

“Local funeral home. They have refrigeration facilities.”

“It needs to be secure.”

“I’m posting two deputies here and one there. Rotate 24/7.”

Puller stretched out his back.

“You hungry?” she said.

“Yeah.”

“There’s a good restaurant in town. It’s open late.”

“Late enough for me to grab a shower and change my clothes?”

“Yes. I plan on doing the same. Try to get the stench out.”

“Tell me how to get there.”

“Where are you staying?”

“Annie’s Motel.”

“Restaurant’s only three minutes from there, two blocks to the east. Hang a right on Cyrus Street. Can’t miss it. Hell, everything here is only three minutes from each other. That kind of town.”

“Forty minutes to the hotel. Ten minutes to shower and dress. Five minutes there. I’ll see you in sixty minutes.”

“But the minutes only add up to fifty-five.”

“I need five minutes to communicate with my boss. I should’ve done it before now, but things got a little busy.”

“A little busy? You have high standards, then. I’ve got my stopwatch. Don’t disappoint me.”

He drove back to the motel, passing the restaurant where they would be eating, showered, and changed into fresh jeans and a
T-shirt. He pulled out his mini laptop, plugged in his communication fob, and sent an encrypted email back to Quantico. Then he spent two minutes on his secure phone filling in the SAC on what he had discovered and his progress so far. Don White wanted detailed reports sent out the next day by email with more formal ones in the snail mail shortly thereafter.

“Lot of eyes on this, Puller.”

“Yes, sir. You made that very clear.”

“Any theories yet?” White asked.

“As soon as I have them, so will you. The colonel’s laptop and briefcase are secure. I’ll try to get them released from police custody and drop them off at the DHS site.”

“Have you readied anything to be sent to USACIL yet?”

“In the process, sir. Should go out tomorrow. At least the first batch. There’s a lot to process. Two crime scenes instead of one.” He paused to allow the SAC to offer more manpower to assist him. The offer never came.

“Lines of communication open, Puller,” the man said instead.

“Yes, sir.”

Puller closed his phone and slipped his mini laptop into an inner pocket of his jacket. He didn’t like leaving things like that behind in a motel room that anyone could break into with a jackknife or credit card. He gunned up, one front, one back.

He passed his car on the way out and double-checked that it was locked. He decided it would be faster to walk to the place than drive.

So Puller walked. He’d get a better lay of the land that way. And he might just see the person who had wiped out two households. He had a feeling this killing was local. But not necessarily in all respects.