a thing happened, but there was no telling in that market.
“I’ll be damned if I know, but I doubt it. Get gloves and booties. We’re trying to keep it down to a small parade going through,” Larue said.
Quinn raised his brows. It was almost impossible to protect evidence from being compromised when that many people were involved. But Larue was a stickler; he’d set up a cordoned path to the porch. There were officers in the yard, and they were holding back the onlookers who’d gathered nearby. The van belonging to the crime scene techs was half on the sidewalk and cop cars crowded the streets, along with the medical examiner’s SUV. The only people who had passed him were wearing jumpsuits that identified them as crime scene investigators.
“Dr. Hubert is on,” Larue said.
Quinn liked Ron Hubert; he was excellent at his job and looked beyond the norm when necessary. He wasn’t offended when another test was suggested or when he was questioned. As he’d said himself, he was human; humans made mistakes and could overlook something important. His job was to speak for the dead, but hell, if the dead were whispering to someone else, that was fine with him.
“First things first, I guess. The entry hallway,” Larue said.
There was no way to avoid the body in the entry hall. The large man lay sprawled across the floor in death. Hubert was crouched by the body, speaking softly into his phone as he made notes.
“The victim is male, forty-five to fifty years. Time of death was approximately two hours ago or sometime between 6:00 and 7:00 a.m. Cause of death appears to be multiple stab wounds, several of which on their own would prove fatal. Death seems to have taken place where the victim has fallen. There are abundant pools of blood in the immediate vicinity.” He switched off his phone, stopped speaking and glanced up. “Please watch out for the blood. The lab folks are busy taking pictures, but we’re trying to preserve the scene as best we can. Ah, Quinn, glad to see you here, son.” Pretty much anyone could be “son” to Dr. Ron Hubert. He was originally from Minnesota and his Viking heritage was apparent. His hair was whitening, but where it wasn’t white, it was platinum. His eyes were so pale a blue they were almost transparent. His dignity and reserve made him seem ageless, but realistically, Quinn knew he was somewhere in his mid-sixties.
“He was stabbed? Have you found the weapon?” Quinn asked.
“No weapons anywhere,” Larue answered. “This is—we believe but will confirm—Mr. James A. Garcia. His family has lived in the area since the nineteenth century. He inherited the house. He was a courier who worked for a specialty freight company.”
“The woman in the kitchen, we believe, is his wife, Andrea. It looks as if she was slashed by a sword,” Hubert said. “Make your tour quick, Detective,” he told Larue while nodding grimly at Quinn. “I need to get the bodies to the morgue.”
Quinn accompanied Larue to the kitchen. He couldn’t begin to determine the age of the victim there; only her dress and the length of her hair suggested that she’d been a woman. To say that a sword might have been used was actually a mild description; she looked like she’d been put through a meat slicer. Blood created a haphazard pattern on the old linoleum floor and they moved carefully to avoid it. “There’s more,” Larue told him, “and stranger.”
Upstairs, another body lay on a bed.
“Mr. Arnold Santander, Mrs. Garcia’s father, as far as we know. Shot.”
“Gun? Calibre?”
“Something that blew a hole in him the size of China. And there are two more.”
Another bedroom revealed a fourth body—this one bludgeoned to death. Quinn couldn’t even guess the sex, age or anything else about the remains on the bed.
“Maggie Santander, the wife’s mother,” Larue said.
The fifth body was downstairs by the back door. Compared to the others, it was in relatively good condition.
“This one is a family aunt—Mr. Garcia’s sister, Maria Orr. What I’ve been able to gather from the neighbors is that Maria Orr picked up the Garcia children to take them to school. She was the drop-off mom and Mrs. Garcia was the pickup mom. Maria often stopped by for a coffee after she took the kids to school and before heading to her job at a local market. Mrs. Garcia was a stay-at-home mom and looked after all the children in the afternoon.”
Quinn hunkered down by the body and gingerly moved the woman’s hair. He frowned up at Larue. “Strangled?”
“That’s Hubert’s preliminary finding, yes,” Larue replied.
Quinn stood. “No weapons anywhere in the house? The yard?”
“No. Obviously, the techs are still combing the house. I have officers out there questioning neighbors and going through every trash pile and dump in the vicinity and beyond. The city’s on high alert. I’m about to give a press conference—any words of wisdom for me before I cast everyone into a state of panic?”
One of Larue’s men, carefully picking his way around the corpse, heard the question and muttered, “Buy several big dogs and arm yourself with an Uzi?”
He was rewarded with one of Larue’s chilling stares. “All I need is a city full of armed and frightened wackos running around,” he said. “Quinn, what sort of vibe are you getting here? Anything?”
Quinn shrugged. “Was there any suggestion that they could have been into drugs or any other smuggling?”
“The poor bastard was a courier, a baseball coach, a deacon at his church. The mom baked apple pies. No, no drugs. And it sure as hell doesn’t look like one of them killed the others and then committed suicide.”
Quinn spoke to Larue, describing the situation as he understood it. “The grandparents were in bed—separate beds and rooms, but I’m assuming they were old and in poor health. The wife was cleaning up after breakfast, while the husband appeared to be about to leave the house. I think the aunt had just arrived and saw something—but didn’t make it out of the house. She was running for the rear door, I believe. You’d figure she’d be the one shot in the back, but she wasn’t. She was caught—and strangled. The different methods used to kill suggest there was more than one killer in here. What’s odd is that the blood pools seem to be where the victims died. No one tracked around any blood, and there are no bloody fingerprints on the walls, not that I can see. Yes, we have blood spatter—all over the walls.” He shook his head. “It should be the easiest thing in the world to catch this killer—or killers. He or she, they, should be drenched in blood. Except...your victim trying to escape via the back hallway was strangled. There’s no blood on her whatsoever, and you’d think that if the same person perpetrated all the murders, there’d be blood on her, as well. Unless she was killed first, but that’s unlikely. It looks like she was running away.”
“So, the bottom line is...”
“Based on everything I’m seeing, I’m going to suggest more than one killer,” Quinn said. “Still, they should be almost covered in blood—unless they wore some kind of protective clothing. Even then, you’d expect to find drops along the way. It seems that whoever did this killed each of these people where we found them—and then disappeared into thin air.”
Larue stared at him, listening, following his train of thought. “You didn’t tell me anything I don’t already know,” he argued.
“I’m
