We’d missed supper, but Jake and I swung through a gas station and grabbed some snacks to tide us over. Now, I crumpled up my Snickers bar wrapper, set it between the seats, and turned onto the long winding driveway that led to the Pickron house.
A frozen marsh bordered the house on the north and west sides, and in the headlights I could see vast clumps of dead marsh grass cutting through the crust of snow. From the maps Jake had pulled up, I knew a forest lay south of the house.
The closest residence I’d seen on the way here was about half a mile down the road.
The house lay at the top of a rise that would have given the family a beautiful wide-open view to the north. We parked beside one of the cruisers out front, I grabbed my laptop bag, and as we walked up the snow-packed path toward the porch, I took a moment to note the snowmobile tracks on the side of the house closest to the woods. In the brisk moonlight I noticed that two pairs of boot prints led to them from the side door.
Deputy Ellory, a baby-faced twentysomething guy with sandy-colored hair and slightly vacant eyes, was waiting for us by the front door.
Two state troopers flanked him, and I asked them to wait outside. They nodded without saying a word, but the hard look on their faces told me how deeply the murders had affected them. How committed they would be to catching the killer.
Good.
Ellory, Jake, and I entered the home. No sign of forced entry. The temperature in the house was cool. Fiftyish. I set down my computer bag.
To avoid tracking dirt or snow into the house and contaminating the scene, the three of us took off our shoes, or in my case, boots, in the mudroom just inside the entrance. Ellory asked me, “So, you gonna process the scene then?”
“An agent will be here shortly to do that,” I answered. Eight pairs of shoes and boots were positioned neatly against the wall-some men’s, some women’s, two for a little girl.
Lizzie will never use those pink boots again, never again run out into the snow to play.
I looked away, asked Ellory, “Any other officers here? Any other troopers?”
“We tried to keep the scene clear, like they said.”
“What about the sheriff?”
“He’s down with the flu,” Ellory told me.
Down with the flu? With a case this big?
He must have been deathly ill or remarkably negligent.
“So,” Ellory went on, “if you’re not processing the scene, you’re here to…?”
I slid my boots toward the wall and donned a pair of latex gloves. “I’m here to take a look at the temporal and spatial aspects of the crime. See where that leads us.”
He looked at me quizzically.
“I’m a profiler,” Jake offered. “We track violent serial offenders: arsonists, rapists, mostly murderers.”
“So you two hunt serial killers?”
“Yes,” Jake said.
“So you’re like a team or something? Like on TV? Like on Criminal Minds?”
Jake straightened out his shirt. “We work together whenever we’re called upon to do so.” He sounded like he was at a press conference.
“And you think this crime is… that there’s a serial killer?”
“You never can tell on these things.”
“Actually,” I cut in, “at this point we have no reason to believe that the killer or killers are linked to any other crimes.”
Ellory looked at me, then at Jake. “Okay,” he said. “Good.” He indicated the doorway to the main part of the house. “It’s right through here.”