It was dark and hot inside Ruth Cajuste's house. All the curtains had been pulled shut, the windows closed. The stench was intense, close to unbearable; even behind their masks and the Vicks ointment they'd rubbed under and in their noses, hints of its extremity wriggled through.
Max closed the door and Joe flicked on the light. They were wearing gloves and plastic covers on their shoes. The scene would be examined by forensics and they didn't want to leave even a hint of their presence.
They saw the first three bodies immediately: still, dark bundles lying very close together, to the right of the door. There were two more bodies about twenty feet away.
They checked the rooms: kitchen on the right, empty; two bedrooms on the left, both empty. Last there was the bathroom. The door had been kicked or bashed clean off its hinges. Another body was in a seated position on the end wall, right under a small rectangular frosted-glass window.
There was no back door. They'd checked before going in the front.
Six bodies.
They went back to the beginning and examined the house.
They were in a wide open-plan space which served as both front room and dining area, tiled pale yellow. The area around the bodies was moving, armies of black beetles scurrying and swarming to get a piece of what palatable flesh was left. This wasn't the orderly disciplined stripping and carting off they'd witnessed at the Lacour house, but a frenzied free-for-all. The beetles sensed that time was running out. The temperature in the house had accelerated the process of decomposition.
'What's the date today?' Max asked.
'Third of June.'
'These look well over a month old. I'd say they were killed on the twenty-sixth of April.'
The five-week-old bodies had passed the bloated stage and were liquefying from the inside. Puddles of shiny translucent slime had formed about the torsos, mingling with the halos, commas and wings of dried and now black blood that had poured out of the wounds; skin was slipping off bone and turning into grey-green mush. Each body had its own cloud of blowflies hovering right above it.
Joe named the ashen-haired woman as Ruth Cajuste, the man two feet away from her as Sauveur Kenscoff, and the girl lying face down in the red and white gingham dress, he initially mistook for Crystal Taino, except that her hair and body type were wrong. She looked more like a teenager. He corrected her identity to Jane Doe.
Ruth Cajuste had been shot in the forehead. A writhing nest of yellowy blowfly maggots filled the hole. She was lying on her back, in the corner, hands folded across her chest. Max and Joe agreed she'd most likely been killed first, way before she could realize that her son Jean Assad had just put a bullet in her brain.
Sauveur had realized what was happening and had tried to fight back. There was a silver.38 Special next to his right hand, but the safety was still on. He'd had just enough time to pull his weapon before being hit in the shoulder, chest and through the left eye. That last shot had voided his cranium and splattered the contents over the wall behind him. He too was lying on his back.
The blood-wipe pattern between the edge of the door and the teenager's head told them her body had been moved post-mortem. There was an upward arc of high-velocity spatter covering the inside of the door; stray spots of blood had hit the wall above and touched the ceiling, indicating that the girl had been close to the door handle when the bullet struck the back of her head. There were shell fragments studding the wood and wall, along with pieces of bone and two teeth. She'd been shot at close range, the circle of singed hair around the entry wound suggesting the barrel had been mere inches away.
'No one heard it,' Joe said.
'Silencer-must've been,' Max suggested. It was the only explanation he could come up with. The house was in the middle of a row of one-floor homes, each about fifteen metres apart. The walls were on the thin side of functional.
Max looked around the scene. He thought he'd seen something unusual about the bodies, but he couldn't find it again.
The two other corpses in the middle of the room were those of Neptune Perrault and Crystal Taino. Neptune's right leg was slung across both of Crystal's, his puffed-up, rotting right-hand fingers were interlocked with those of Crystal's left, and his ruptured head-shot clean through the temple-was leaning into Crystal's neck, as if he'd been nuzzling her when he'd died. Crystal was lying face down, shot through the crown.
Max stared at them a good long while, unable to take his eyes away from the sight, as touching and tender to him as it was grotesque.
'He didn't even try to get away, or resist,' he said to Joe. 'He just lay down and grabbed her hand. He couldn't live without her, but he could die with her. They deserve justice.'
'That's why it's just the two of us here, right?' Joe said, looking at Max quizzically, seeing an altogether new side to him. They'd seen far worse than this-a comparatively clean straight kill and relatively painless for the victims, no signs of torture, no dismemberment-and Max hadn't blinked out of turn. He'd studied the bodies, read the scene, come to initial conclusions. The only thing that upset him was when they found children, but that got nearly all cops. They usually got angry, some cried, some couldn't do their jobs. Max was in the first category. But how he was now was new to Joe. Max looked sad, as if he had known the victims. Joe wondered if this new girl Max had started meeting for lunch hadn't opened up his emotional side, if he wasn't a little bit in love with her. He'd been awful quiet about her, which was really unusual for him. He hadn't even told Joe her name.
There were half a dozen spent shells on the ground near the bodies. The shooter had reloaded. Joe bagged two of them and left the rest for forensics.
Up ahead of them was the bathroom, a mess of smashed tiles and blood stains everywhere. Madeleine Cajuste had been shot at least five times in the torso and once through her right hand. The bathroom door had been dead-bolted from the inside.
The window was unlocked and opened out from the side onto a view of the garden-a small strip of lawn, rose bushes and a palm tree at the end.
Max noticed small scraps of white fabric stuck to splinters at the edge of the sill. He plucked one and showed it to Joe.
'You said she had a baby? I think she dropped it out of the window. When the shooting started she ran in here, bolted the door and put the kid out of the way of the bullets. Maybe she screamed for help too. Either way, they took the baby. Let's take a look at the other rooms.'
Joe went to the kitchen. Dry dishes and cutlery on a rack by the sink, rotting and withered fruit in a large bowl on the counter. Everything in the refrigerator had gone off.
Max looked through the bedrooms. Ruth Cajuste's was nearest the bathroom. She'd slept in a double bed, with a Bible and a wind-up alarm clock at her side. The curtains were drawn. There were bars on the windows. Next door was where the teenage girl had slept. Her name was Farrah Carroll. She was fifteen. He found her Haitian passport and return-flight ticket for 5 June. In two days' time her parents would be expecting her home. By her bedside was a photograph of her, Ruth and Mickey Mouse taken at Disneyland. She had kept her room neat and tidy.
Max made for the front door.
He went and stood where he'd been when they'd first come in and scanned the scene of slaughter one more time, first casually, then body by body, trying to find what he'd missed.
The bugs were crawling up Farrah's right leg but not her left.
He looked at her feet. There was a small pile of dead beetles by her shoe. He bent down and studied the sole. There were white stains on it, absent from the other shoe.
She'd trodden in something, maybe slipped. He turned around and looked behind him.
There, that was it: a small circle a few feet away, clearly defined by the crust of dead black beetles all around it. It was a white splash with scraps of dark green matter in it, shredded leaves or herbs, and something small, shiny and dark brown, but unmistakeably part of a bean.
'I think the shooter puked here,' Max told Joe.
Joe went back to the kitchen, got a knife and spoon which Max used to scrape the dried mess into an evidence bag. Then they left the house, turning off the light as they went.
'I'll call it in from a payphone,' Max said.
'Say you heard gunshots,' Joe suggested. 'Otherwise it'll be another year before they send someone round.'