Shock and awe.
The rifles I’d borrowed from Tomás had done their jobs, temporarily throwing off the intruders with big booms and splatter damage. But for hard men like this, shock-and-awe was a very temporary thing. It just compressed their timeframe and gave their mission imperative more deadly immediacy.
We were in close quarters now and a rifle was no good.
Glass shattering.
I brought up my Smith & Wesson .38 and ran into the sunroom. The third man had been careful not to get hung up in the razor wire concealed in the low shrubbery. By the time I entered the sunroom, he had clambered in. Seeing me, he leveled his gun. He was quick enough to pop off a round that found the flesh of my upper right shoulder.
I fired two shots in quick succession and dropped him.
“Splash three,” I said into the walkie-talkie. Outside, the engine of the Ford pickup revved and the house trembled.
“Splash four.”
Colleen’s voice. She had been in the shed to the back southern end of the house. Her mission had been to jam her foot down on the accelerator of the truck and drive the snow plow hot and heavy into any intruders making entry on that side of the house.
A scream.
It wasn’t Colleen or Vivian.
I ran to the office on the opposite side of the house and saw one of the men thrashing about, engulfed in flame. Frank had lit him up with two sticky bombs. I leveled my S&W.
“He’s mine!”
I turned.
Colleen.
I nodded to her and ran upstairs. Behind me I heard Colleen shout at the man on fire, “This is my house, motherfucker!” Then three loud pops.
Upstairs, automatic rifle fire chewed against wood.
I mounted the steps two at a time.
I wasn’t quick enough. The man put a black boot to what remained of the door that led to Vivian. He disappeared quickly into the room. Two, three, four loud pops. Automatic rifle fire. Another single pop.
The man backed out of the room, his rifle at his side. He slumped against the hallway wall, then slid to the floor in a sitting position.
Dead.
Vivian came out, my Glock leveled rock-steady in her right hand. She held it over the dead man.
“Wet burrito!” I yelled.
She didn’t hear me. Or chose not to hear me. Instead she knelt by the dead man, whispered into his ear, then fired one more shot into the man’s left temple, his body quivering as it took the shot and toppling over on the floor.
“Goddammit—wet burrito!” I yelled again.
Colleen edged past me at the top of the staircase.
“Viv?” she called out. “Baby?”
Vivian stood from the side of the dead man and looked at Colleen. Her eyes were not her own. They were the eyes of a killer. Vacant. Cold. It was the look of someone suddenly absent from their own life, untethered and floating between a moment in an unspeakable past and its present echo.
Vivian leveled the gun at Colleen. Rock steady, finger curled around the trigger. I brought my gun up and put Vivian Paget’s chest in my site.
“It’s me, baby,” Colleen said, walking slowly toward Vivian. “It’s Colleen.”
“You cool?” I said.
“I’m cool,” she quickly replied. “We’re cool—right, Viv?”
“Colleen?” Vivian finally said.
The gun in Vivian’s hand began to quiver. She blinked slowly. Soon the weight of it brought her arm down quickly to her side.
“It’s all right, baby,” Colleen said, cautiously moving forward. “Everything’s all right.”
Vivian let the gun slip out of her hand. It landed with a thud to the hallway floor. The two women embraced tightly, Vivian weeping on Colleen’s shoulder.
“What’s happening?” Vivian asked as she sobbed into Colleen’s shoulder. “What’s going on?”
I lowered my gun and began breathing again. “So much for goddamn safe words,” I muttered to myself. I called out to Colleen, “One more. Get her in another room. Now.”
Colleen looked back at me and nodded.
I ran downstairs just in time to see the last man. He was standing in the foyer and had a forearm tightly clamped around Frank’s neck, his black Glock pressed hard against Frank’s temple.
The man saw me and calmly said, “We get to my car and I leave.”
“Sorry, August,” Frank managed to say through the man’s tight grip. “Now stop fuckin’ around and put a bullet in this asshole’s eye, Marine.”
“Hoo-raa,” I said before firing a single round from my S&W. The bullet found the man’s left eye, spinning him backwards, away from Frank. He fell hard to the floor, dead.
Frank rubbed his neck, then gave the dead man a kick in the ribs.
“We get ’em all?” Frank said.
I nodded. “We got ’em all.”
Frank and I put out the fire that was consuming the body of the fifth man. Then we checked each of them for identification, knowing we wouldn’t find any. The man Colleen had driven the truck into was mounted on the truck’s snow plow, pinned against the side of the house, nearly cut in half. Nothing on him either.
Frank and I found two rental cars parked beneath an old oak near the end of Vivian and Colleen’s tree-lined road.
“Jesus,” Frank said.
Inside the first car’s trunk were eight gallons of hydrochloric acid in plastic containers. Apparently the men had gone in heavy, the objective being to quickly kill them, dissolve them down to sludge then let what had been their bodies flow away in the sluice of the sewer system. Taking souvenirs, of course. Proof of a job well done.
Collected around the kitchen table, I told Vivian and Colleen that Frank and I had to bug out fast. I was reasonably sure the immediate threat to them was over. They would have to explain to the local and state cops what had gone down at the house. Save for the fact that Frank and I had been there.
“You’re bleeding,” Vivian said to me, a vacuous look in her eyes. “There’s so much—blood.”
“They’re not gonna believe we took these guys out all by our lonesome,” Colleen said.
I nodded. “I know, but you’ll need to buy time until the FBI gets here. Ask for Special Agent Megan O’Donnell out of the Detroit field office. Tell her everything.” Then I drew in a deep breath, slowly exhaled and said to Colleen, “I need to talk to you. In private.”
In the hallway outside of the kitchen, I told Colleen what I suspected.
She didn’t flinch.
Instead Colleen led me to the attic and turned the lights on. Past the boxes covered in dust and cobwebs, past the furniture huddled in a forgotten corner were paintings covered with sheets and leaning against attic beams. Tentatively, Colleen lifted the sheets.
The first was the most revealing; a watercolor portrait of Vivian’s father, his lifeless eyes staring out, blood trailing down from a large bullet hole above his left eye near the temple. His mouth was agape and his canine teeth elongated like those of a vampire.
There were others, always with her father lying naked and dead in the riverfront condo bed in which he was found. And there was one of the young girl who had been found with him, lying in quiet angelic repose, her chest soaked in blood.
“They’re maybe five years old,” Colleen said, her voice choked and halting. “I—thought they were—just dark fantasies.”
“It’s the way we found them, her father and the girl.” Then I asked, “Any of her mother like that?”
Colleen searched my eyes for a few seconds before shaking her head. “No. I—I don’t think so.” After a moment’s hesitation, she said, “What should I—”
“Burn ’em,” I said. “Burn ’em all.”
Anger seared across my chest.
Anger at myself for not having put everything together nine years ago. Anger for having gotten caught up in the momentary adulation of peers and superiors—my father—for having closed out my first high-profile case quickly and neatly.
Vivian, then eighteen, had murdered her father. As the lead detective, I watched hours of black-and-white surveillance video from the lobby of the riverfront condo high-rise. I’d cross-referenced everyone who entered and exited with residents and visitors. Everyone save for the elegant woman—long legs, black dress, long black hair, briefcase. The one who charmed the elderly black concierge into using his keycard for the elevator. The woman who had exited the condo thirty minutes later.
“You knew,” Colleen said, her voice a trembling whisper.
“I had a feeling,” I said, staring at the paintings. “I was the lead investigator. Took my suspicions to my captain. Ray Danbury. He told me I was being reassigned from her father’s murder to lead investigator following the money Vivian’s father had embezzled. A reassignment that had the stink of politics on it. But I sucked it up. Pretty soon I had media lights in my face and stars in my eyes. I—liked it. Liked the recognition. Danbury told me the woman in the black dress was just a resident who’d mislaid her access card. And you know what? I didn’t care about that any more ’cause I gave my dad what I thought would make him proud: his son’s face in the newspaper and on TV as the cop who recovered millions of stolen dollars. I’d made my bones.” After laying bare the ignominious truth, I looked at Colleen and said, “I’m guessing her father was a sick, miserable bastard. I’d guess Vivian was abused as a young girl.”
“God,” Colleen said.
“The bullet for Viv’s father was deserved,” I said. I thought about the sixteen-year-old girl who died at Vivian’s father’s side. “The bullet for the girl—maybe Vivian shot her to kill what she saw in herself. Two bullets for stolen innocence.” I held Colleen’s eyes steadily in mine. “Listen, this doesn’t change anything between you and Viv—if you don’t want it to. But you’ve got to get her help. Serious help.”
Colleen, her eyes watery, nodded.
Sirens were approaching in the distance. We rushed back downstairs.
“Helluva time to take a tour of the house,” Frank said with some irritation.
“Helluva house,” I said. I turned to Colleen. “How much time?”
“Five minutes,” she said. “Six, tops.”
Colleen quickly patched up my shoulder. A couple splashes of hydrogen peroxide and a fast gauze wrap. No bullet to dig out, no broken bone. Frank and I threw our gear in our separate cars and said hasty goodbyes.
Frank called me ten minutes after we hit the road, racing south through the cold darkness.
“What was that all about back there?” Frank said, his voice coming through the car’s speakers. When I was done explaining what I could, he said, “Holy shit. His own goddamn daughter?”
“There are devils that walk amongst us,” I said.
“No shit,” Frank said. “So what’s that make us?”
“The sword in God’s left hand,” I said.