would be dead on the floor, usually with a gun in his hand that he didn’t know how to use. I doubted that was going to be the case this night.
The door was partially closed and a beam of light cut across the parking area. Kenny didn’t wait for me or Bill to say anything. He just got right to it. That was Kenny. All business, but it always seemed like he had too much coffee in his system.
“Jim, Bill, how ya doing? This is bad. We got two kids down just inside the door. A third one is over on the other side of the storage room. There was a fourth victim who the shooter left for dead in the bathroom. He ran out after he thought the shooter was gone. How that kid made it, I got no idea. He was hit pretty bad—shotgun blast almost took his arm off.”
“So who got here first?” Bill asked as he looked around the area.
“Deputy Humann was dispatched....” Kenny looked at his notebook, “at 8:15 in response to a shots fired call. He said he was here within five minutes. There was one man down by the corner over there.” He pointed to a lawn area near the northwest corner of the market. “He says the guy down was a Jack Abbott, a neighbor. I’ll say this for him, the guy’s got guts. He yelled at the first guy he saw and then he saw the second one. He fired a shot and thinks he hit the second guy. But the guy turned toward him and Abbot saw he had a gun, so he started to run for cover, but the shooter got him in the ass. When Humann got here, that’s where he found Abbott, down on the ground. He went inside and found the other victims, a white female and two males.”
Bill was already looking around. “Any description?”
“Not much. Just a white male adult, maybe six feet tall.”
“What about the kid that got out? Anything from him?”
“Yeah, Deputy Mendosa talked to him before the ambulance got here. He ran to a house where he knew the people. He told Mendosa that a white male, about six feet, 170–175, wearing a bandanna on his head, and a white female adult, approximately five feet, five inches, 125 pounds, brown hair, also wearing a bandanna, robbed them. He says the male was the shooter and the female was armed as well.”
“So you think the woman that they found in the bathroom could be involved?” I asked as my eyes were panning the scene, taking it all in.
Kenny shrugged. “Maybe. Who knows. She had blood all over her and she was in the bathroom in hysterics. We won’t know until we talk to her. We’ve asked for the hospital to do a drug screen.” He looked over at me. “Like you asked.”
So Bill had told him that I asked. That’s it, the way it always was; dump it on the lawyer. Cops always stick together. No matter what you do, they never forgive you for being a lawyer. At least I had reached the point where they were willing to overlook it most of the time.
Bill and I headed to the door. “Let’s take a look.”
Kenny slowed me down. “Take it easy. There’s a lot of blood.”
I was used to blood, more used to it than I ever wanted to be, but I wasn’t prepared for this. Just inside the door there were two people, a young man, maybe nineteen or twenty, and a young girl, maybe sixteen or seventeen. There were only a few dry spots on the cement floor. Blood was everywhere, thickening as it began to congeal. On television and in the movies, the blood is always bright red. I guess that’s so you will know it’s supposed to be blood. But in the real world, that isn’t how it looks. It doesn’t take very long before it starts to turn dark red, and by the time it dries it is a dark reddish-brown. Sometimes it is almost black, especially when the sun has dried it. So, when a television program shows the bright-red puddle on the floor, or the guy they find out in the woods three or four hours or even days after the homicide has a crimson stain on his chest—that isn’t what it really looks like.
Right now, less than two hours after the incident, it was just pooled blood that spread out into a dark red stain across the floor, only it was thick and the edges were dark where it had begun to dry. Bill and I moved carefully around the blood. Bright light flooded the storeroom, and we had no problem seeing. The problem came when we had to actually look at what was there to be seen.
The girl was lying on her back, with her head propped against the wall next to what I guessed was the bathroom door. A plastic plug from a shotgun shell and shotgun wadding lay near her head. The boy was lying near her feet. If you didn’t know better, you would think that it was the way two kids would look lying on the grass at a picnic. If you didn’t know better.
Nobody looks very good when they are dead and lying on the floor. But she was a pretty little thing—somebody’s baby girl. Somewhere a mom and dad were going to go through the worst moments of their lives and it was going to happen in the next few hours when they learned what had happened to their little girl. I’ve seen a lot of bodies and most of the time I just looked at them and then started to examine them to see what would be important for evidence. But this time I paused for several moments. It was her eyes—they stayed with me. She had gray-blue eyes, and they reflected nothing more than a vacant stare. I can’t describe it any better than that. She just had these pretty gray-blue eyes. One thing you discover about people who have just died is how their eyes look. You can just see those eyes and you know they are dead. The color is there and the shape is there but the shine isn’t there anymore. There is a light in a person’s eyes that tells you they are alive. When they are dead, that light is gone. The light was gone from her eyes. In the movies, when people die, they close their eyes. In real life, when people die, their eyes are almost never closed. They just stare sightlessly. I resisted the temptation to reach down and close her eyes. As long as I live, I will see those gray-blue eyes. She had a large wound to her upper left chest—it looked like a shotgun wound. I remember thinking, so little of life lived; so much of life taken. She was just a kid.
The boy lying near her had his eyes almost closed. He had on a brown knit shirt. There was a hole about the size of a half dollar in his throat—shotgun blast, probably a twelve-gauge at close range. There wasn’t much of a spread pattern, and you could see the powder tattoo on the shirt left by bits of burning powder as they hit him. Sometimes, those burns are on the skin if the gun is fired from a close enough range. This shotgun was fired from very close range, probably no more than two or three feet at most, or else the pellet spread would have taken his head off. These kids knew what was coming after the first shot. So why did they just stand there?
Fortunately, neither the responding officers nor the paramedics had made much of a mess of the crime scene. Usually, they rush in and do what they’re supposed to do, which is save lives. They don’t pay attention to moving things around that might be evidence. That isn’t their job. This time they hadn’t made any quick gestures. They, or the first deputies on scene, had turned the bodies to check for vital signs. It was obvious both kids were dead. The blood from the two bodies spread out all over the floor. It always amazed me how much blood there is in one human being.
Bill was standing behind me. “Look over here behind the shelves. We have another one. Maybe a little older, but still a kid.” Bill had been around a long time but I could tell that even he was shaken. They were just kids and I could hear him muttering “Goddamn” over and over again. When you have your own kids and you see something like this, it really brings it home.
I looked over and could see the feet sticking out from behind the shelving that was along the back wall of a walk-in freezer. The body was lying on its side, the back to a desk along the wall. The room was obviously used as an office area. His face, or what was left of it, was turned in the direction of a small safe. It was a young man in his mid-twenties. Even though the top of his head was gone, I knew him. It was the owner’s son, Bryon. He had been a witness for me several years before in the other murder that came out of a burglary of the store. Now, he was a murder
