Zero Day (5 page)

P
ULLER EASED HIS CAR
to the side of the road and looked out the window. This would be the only time on this case his senses would not be dulled by prior observation.

He stepped out and leaned against the Malibu. He took another deep breath. In the air currents he could smell the mining operation he had passed a couple of miles back. His ears picked up the distant sounds of rumbling trucks. He looked to the west and saw a searchlight crisscrossing the sky; why, he didn’t know.

He studied the neighborhood. His night vision was excellent and the moonlight and lightening skies allowed both large and small details to be revealed. Small, dilapidated cookie-cutter houses. Toys in yards. Rusted trucks on blocks. A stray cat sneaking by. The place was tired. Dying. Maybe already dead. Like the Reynoldses. Wiped out.

However, what Puller wasn’t seeing was the most disturbing of all.

There was police tape hanging in front of the door telling everyone to keep the hell away. And someone had fashioned a jury-rigged barricade to the driveway using two five-gallon buckets turned upside down and more yellow police tape strung between them.

But there wasn’t a cop in sight. No perimeter guard and yet the scene was barely fourteen hours old. Not good. It was unbelievable, in fact. He knew the legal chain of evidence could be blown out of the water by leaving a crime scene unsecured.

He didn’t really want to do this, but not doing so would be derelict and might cost him and others their careers. He took out his phone and hit the numbers from memory.

She answered on the second ring. “I swear to holy God I am going to shoot whoever this is.”

“Sergeant Cole, it’s Puller again.”

“Do you have a death wish?” she shouted into the phone.

“There’s no guard here.”

“Where?”

“At the crime scene.”

“How the hell do you know that?”

“Because I’m parked outside the house.”

“You’re wrong. There’s a patrol car with a deputy in it on duty. I ordered that myself.”

Puller gazed around. “Well, unless he’s hiding in the woods and ditched his ride, he must’ve turned invisible. And isn’t the point of a perimeter guard to be
visible
?”

“Shit. Are you really out there?”

“I really am.”

“And there’s really no patrol car there?”

“There’s really not.”

“I’ll be there in thirty-five minutes.”

“Not faster than that?”

“If I tried to drive faster than that on these roads in the dark, I’d end up wrapped around a tree or off a mountain.” She paused and Puller heard her clomping around in her bare feet, opening drawers, pulling out clothes, no doubt.

“Look, Puller, can you do me a favor and temporarily secure the crime scene? I’m going to call the deputy who’s supposed to be there and chew his ass out.”

“I can secure it. Are the bodies still inside?”

“Why?”

“If they are I want to see them.”

“The bodies are still in there.”

That was a long time to keep the bodies at the scene, but Puller
decided not to comment on why that was. In a way he was glad. He wanted to see everything just as the killer had left it.

“I don’t want to screw up your crime scene. Have you dusted for prints? Searched for trace?” he asked.

“Pretty much. Going to do more this morning.”

“Okay. Was there forced entry?”

“None that we could see.”

“So I can go in the front door?”

“It’s locked. At least it should be.”

“Then I’ll go in the front door.”

“Puller—”

“Thirty-five minutes.”

She said slowly, “Okay, see you then. And… thanks for the assist.”

Puller closed the phone and looked around. There were eight houses on the short dead-end street. Each one was dark. That was unremarkable at this time of the morning. Cars in the driveways of each of them. Woods at the rear of the houses on both sides.

He grabbed some items from his rucksack and put them in a collapsible backpack he always carried with him. He slipped on an ear mic and connected it to a recorder that he dropped into a pouch on his belt. He slapped on his light blue gloves.

He walked to the front of the house, glanced down at the gravel shoulder, and hit it with his Maglite. Tread marks. Could be any of the vehicles that had come here to investigate. He went over the chronology in his head.

Mailman found the bodies at about 1400 and called it in. First responders showed up at half past. The call to the Army had come in ten minutes later. That was fast. Someone out here was on the ball. He wondered if it was Cole. He’d gotten the heads-up in Kansas and hopped his flight back. The plane had had a hell of a tailwind and they’d gotten in forty minutes early. After a brief stop at home he’d pulled in to CID at 1840. He was wheels out at 1950. He’d driven like a rocket and hit Drake a bit after three; it was now going on 0500.

Puller eyed the wheelchair ramp. Matthew Reynolds was in his late forties and in good enough shape to be in the Army. His wife was five years younger with no health problems. Her insurance records were clean. The kids were sixteen and seventeen with clean health records. They weren’t using the ramp. This wasn’t their house. They were here for another reason. A reason that might have cost them their lives.

He studied the tread mark on the shoulder again, and then his gaze traveled to the dark patch. Right where the engine would be if the car were pointed to the east. Careful not to impact the tread mark, he squatted, touched the liquid. Warm. Oil. Recent. The perimeter cop? Probably. If so, where was he?

He moved swiftly up to the front door, noted the broken glass. He slipped on his shoe covers. The front door was locked but it wasn’t a deadbolt. It took him all of three seconds.

He moved forward, shining his light around with one hand, the other gripping his front-side M11 pistol.

Puller figured you go into a house where four people had been murdered and the guard who’s supposed to be out front isn’t, certain possibilities come to mind. He reached the living room and his light hit them.

On the couch.

Lined up in a row.

Four bodies, the weight of one holding up its neighbor.

He holstered his weapon and, keeping well back, spoke into the mic, recording everything he was seeing.

Dad to the far right, teen daughter to the far left. Mom and brother in the middle. Mom next to Dad. He hit the carpeted floor in front of them with the Maglite. No blood spatters. He glanced up, aimed his beam at the heads.

Dad had taken a heavy ordnance load right in the face; a near contact wound.

Mom’s face was relatively intact but her torso was destroyed. Puller glanced down at the dead woman’s hands and saw that they were nearly obliterated. She’d held them up, he surmised, right
before they shot her. The hands had no chance of protecting her from the blast, but it was just instinctive to block whatever part of the body the gun was aimed at.

The two teens’ kill wounds were not evident. Maybe they’d taken it in the back. The parents had not been killed here. The spatters would have covered the room. Killed somewhere else in the house, moved here, lined up like a family watching TV together.

Pretty sick. But then you had to be pretty sick to take out a family.

Sick or a professional without a conscience
.

And maybe it was the same thing
.

He drew closer, careful not to step on anything marked with an evidence number on the carpet. Dad was in his old green Class Bs that could be officially worn for a few more years. The right side of his face was mostly gone, his spine exposed through the gaping wound in the neck. Bone and a hollow eye socket looked back at Puller. No wounds in his torso. He’d taken it all in the face and neck at close range.

A shotgun was pretty much the only firearm that did damage like that.

He could see bits of white in the wound tracks. Wadding from the shell. Hopefully they’d be able to tell the gauge from measuring the diameter of the wadding or by the name of the maker on top of the wad, if it was still readable.

Mom’s eyes stared back at Puller. For an observer given to melodrama it would have appeared that the woman’s look was pleading.

Find my killer
.

Puller illuminated her chest with the Maglite. Dozens of punctures, randomly distributed. Shotgun as well, but different in the way it had been deployed.

He drew a ruler from his pocket and measured the distance between the punctures on Mrs. Reynolds’s blouse that had once been white but was now mostly crimson. He did the calculation in his head and put the ruler away. He felt the man’s arm and then the woman’s. Still in rigor, though it was well on its way down and the muscles were relaxing. The bodies were the temperature of the
room or lower. He pulled his air thermometer and took a reading. Blood had pooled to the lower extremities. Bowels and bladders long ago emptied. Skin greenish blue, rotting smell, faces dissolving. In death everybody was ugly.

He turned his attention to the teens.

Then he stopped, swiveled. A noise. From somewhere in the house.

Apparently he wasn’t the only living person in here.

T
HUMP-WHOOSH-THUMP
. Thump-whoosh-thump.

Down the stairs, basement level.

Of course it is
.

Puller eased to the doorway.

He sniffed the air. The scent of decomposing bodies was heavy, but Puller was not focusing his nose on that. He was trying to detect something else. Sweat. Cologne. Cigarettes. The molecular signature of bad breath. Anything that would give him an edge.

Nothing.

He moved the door open with his foot. The passageway down was dark.

Of course it is
.

Thump-whoosh-thump.

The mechanical nature of the sound did not cause Puller to relax.

If he were leading someone to his death he would employ deception. In fact, in Iraq and Afghanistan he’d done it many times, just like the other side had been trying to do to him.

He pulled a pair of night optics from his knapsack, slipped them on his head, flipped down the eyepiece, and fired them up. The tunnel of darkness immediately flamed to life, albeit a green, somewhat hazy life. He squatted and pulled his other pistol from its holster. Both handguns were double-single action, racked and ready. Ordinarily he would not use two pistols at the same time, for the simple reason that his aim and accuracy could be diminished if he fired at two targets simultaneously. However, in a contained space
like this, where accuracy was not so critical, he needed as much firepower as possible.

Two of the main differences between MPs and CID special agents were that MPs carried their weapons without a round chambered. CID agents went through life with racked guns at all times. MPs turned in their weapons when their shift was done. CID agents didn’t draw a breath without their guns in easy reach.

When Puller applied twelve pounds of pressure on the trigger and fired, the slide would push the hammer back and his weapon would become a single-action pull. Twenty-round mags, so forty shots total, though he normally only needed one. He had never been a spray-and-pray kind of guy. But he could empty both pistols in about ten seconds if need be and lay down a man-sized target at fifteen meters with no problem. Now he just needed to acquire a target, preferably before it acquired him.

With his silhouette narrowed and lowered he began to proceed down the carpeted stairs. He squinted along the iron sights of the right-hand pistol. He did not like being in an enclosed space. The “fatal funnel,” the Army called it. He had decent firepower, but they might have more.

Thump-whoosh-thump.

Mechanical. But someone had to hit the start button.

The file had mentioned a dog. Cole and her folks had to have confiscated the animal. They wouldn’t have been so stupid as to leave a dog alone to mosey through the crime scene, particularly with bloody dead bodies around. Dogs, though domesticated, were carnivores after all.

Thump-whoosh-thump.

He hit the bottom step and crab-walked over to a far corner and did a recon.

Unfinished space.

Poured concrete floor, both studded-out and concrete foundation walls, exposed ceiling. Wires snaking up the naked walls. Mildew hit his nostrils. It was far better than the smell upstairs.

Against one wall he saw the marks. And on the floor in front.

Blood. The killing had been done down here. At least for Mom and Dad.

Thump-whoosh-thump.

He scanned the area once more. The room doglegged at the other end. There was a space he couldn’t see because of a jutting concrete load-bearing wall.

Thump-whoosh-thump.

Of course the sound is coming from there
.

Both guns aimed at this spot, Puller advanced, keeping low and his torso turned to the side.

He reached the corner, backed away parallel to the wall. Corners were problematic. “Dynamic corners” were how the Army referred to them, because situations could change quickly once you stepped around one. He said, “Federal agent.”

Nothing.

“Federal agent.”

He eyed the wall. Concrete. If it were wood or drywall he would have fired some shots through it, to get the attention of anyone on the other side waiting to ambush him. With concrete his rounds were more than likely going to ricochet right back at him.

“Slide any weapon out, then follow it with hands on head, fingers interlaced. I count to five, noncompliance will get you a flash-bang right up your ass.”

He counted off, wishing he had a flash-bang with him.

Thump, whoosh, thump.

He holstered one pistol, slipped off his backpack, aimed, and tossed it in front of the opening.

Thump, whoosh, thump.

Either there was no one there, or he was one cool customer. Puller crouched, tensed, and did a quick turkey peek. In that momentary flash he took in a lot. None of it was good.

He edged around the corner. Following the sound, he looked down. The floor fan was on its side. The whoosh sound was the fan. The thump was the fan oscillating from side to side where the frame made contact with the concrete on each revolution.

But something had turned it on. And now he knew what that was.

Puller glanced up. The man was in uniform. He was hanging from the ceiling. The strap used to hold him there had loosened. His body had dropped down, though it was still suspended. It had hit the fan, knocking it over and turning it on.

Puller had just discovered what had happened to the perimeter guard.

He eyed the man through his optics. Clearly dead. Eyes bugged out and glassy. Body hanging limp. Hands bound. Feet the same. Puller approached, touched the man’s skin. Somewhat warm but rapidly cooling. Hadn’t been dead all that long. He checked for a pulse, just to be sure. There was none. Heart had stopped beating and everything else had stopped working instantly. He was past the point of no return, but not by much.

They had taken his police wheels. Warm oil, warm body.

The dead guy looked young. The low man on the totem pole, he’d drawn the crap post assignment. Guarding stiffs in the nighttime, and now he was a stiff too. Puller eased his gaze over the uniform. Looked to be a deputy sheriff. Drake County, the shoulder badge said. He eyed the holster. No gun. No surprise. Man has a gun he’s not going to let you string him up without a fight. The face was swollen enough from the strangulation to where Puller couldn’t tell if he’d been beaten.

He reached down and turned the fan off.

The thump-whoosh-thump symphony ceased.

Puller drew closer to the body and used his optics to read the nameplate.

Officer Wellman
.

That was ballsy, thought Puller. To come back here and kill a cop. To come back to a murder scene once you’d done the deed.

What had they missed? Or left behind?

The next moment Puller was sprinting up the steps.

Someone else was coming.

He glanced at his watch.

It might be Sergeant Samantha Cole.

Or it might not.