Clapper and I paused at the threshold to the Barons’ office.
At the center of the room was a sturdy, antique partners desk, made for two people to work facing each other. Behind the desk was a wall of casement windows. There was art on the opposite wall, a large TV screen, an exercise bike, and a water cooler, but my eyes turned quickly to the deceased.
Clapper said, “Paul Baron took a shot to the back of his head.” The dark-haired man in plaid and jeans had fallen across his desk, facing the doorway. He had bled copiously over the desk and everything on it. Coffee and blood mixed together and dripped onto the carpet.
Continuing, Clapper said, “Looks to me like Ramona saw her husband fall toward her. She stood up, and that gave the shooter a good clean shot to her chest.”
I followed his line of reasoning.
Ramona had dropped and toppled out of her chair, and was lying faceup on the carpet with her eyes open, blood spilling across her chest. I stooped down to get a closer look. She was wearing tights, a pink V-neck sweater, several diamond rings, diamond stud earrings, and a gold chain with a ruby cabochon pendant hanging just above the neat bullet hole through her sternum.
As with Ramona’s husband, it looked like one shot had taken her out. The shooter had to have been trusted and standing only feet away. Did he or she have a house key? Know the alarm code? Had Gretchen—had she done this?
It didn’t matter how many times I’d seen murder victims, it always hurt. What plans had this couple made? What would happen to their children? How had it come to be that this was their day to die?
I was staring at the small, bloody handprint on Ramona’s cheek—looked like it belonged to DeeDee, who was about my own daughter’s age—when I heard Clapper say, “Boxer. Boxer. Look at me.”
I looked up. He was holding up two fingers of his right hand. He moved his hand back and forth until I focused, then he pointed to the multipaned windows beyond the desk, kept pointing until I saw two bullet holes surrounded by crazed tempered glass. On the floor beneath was a spray of tiny shards.
“There. See that?”
This time I couldn’t miss it. The two shots must have come through the windows. But we were on the second floor. How the hell had the shooter managed two perfect kill shots from outside the house?
I “grabbed the wall,” meaning I walked carefully around the murder tableau and looked out through the windows. There was a pretty brick patio below but no ledge outside the window, no purchase for a shooter to stand and take his shots.
Could the shots have been fired from a neighboring house? Or, more likely, from the top of San Anselmo, two streets over?
I turned back to Clapper. “A sniper,” I said. “A damned good one.”
Clapper was on to the next. He said, “Look over here, Boxer. I’d like to get into that closet.”