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Six bodies.
They were lying face down on the floor, hands bound behind them with flexicuffs, each executed with a single gunshot to the back of the head.
From the way they were positioned, it looked like they’d been forced to kneel before the inevitable slaughter.
God Almighty.
Kendra shifted their heads to check on their faces, and their necks moved easily. Minimal rigor mortis, which meant they had been dead for only a few hours.
She studied the entry wounds. They were small in diameter, and there were no exit wounds. That indicated a .22 calibre. An assassin’s weapon.
She scanned the carpet. She looked for spent casings, but she found none. That meant the killer had cleaned up after himself.
God Almighty.
This felt like a bad dream.
The worst possible dream.
Kendra had spent years on the global circuit. Finding, fixing and finishing threats in souks and madrasas and back alleys. Spilling blood in every jihadi stronghold from Baghdad to Kabul to Islamabad.
But nothing – absolutely nothing – had prepared her for how she felt right here, right now, because she knew these people.
The driver.
The cook.
The gardener.
The butler.
The maids.
They had served the Hosseini family for years.
Kendra fidgeted. She felt bile clawing at the back of her throat, sticky and hot.
Did Ryan do this?
She stared hard at the bodies, and that’s when something else occurred to her. The air conditioning had been switched on specifically to slow the rate of decomposition. And blocking out all the sunlight? It amounted to the same thing.
He wanted to preserve his handiwork. Preserve the scene of the crime.
Kendra knew that there were two kinds of killers.
The first was the psychopath – the one who killed his victims because he thought they deserved it. And the other was the sociopath – the one who killed his victims because he just didn’t care.
The way the household staff had been executed was ruthless, expedient, completely devoid of any kind of passion. And that pointed more to a sociopath, not a psychopath.
No, Ryan wouldn’t just snuff out the people he grew up with. Not without displaying emotion. It doesn’t make any sense.
Yet Kendra found a contradiction with that line of reasoning. The aftermath of the killing indicated some kind of perverse emotion at work; some kind of intimacy.
Why is he trying to preserve the bodies? Is this his way of showing affection? Does it even count as affection?
Kendra hated to admit it, but her knowledge of behavioural profiling was rudimentary at best, and despite her best efforts, she was grasping at straws here.
All she knew was that she had to find Ryan.
She had to lock him down before anyone else got hurt.