“Your men should be searching the city for people with any traces of blood on them. It should be impossible to create a bloodbath like this and not have it somewhere. And the techs need to keep combing the house for anything out of the ordinary.”
“This much hate—and nothing taken. Implies family, a disillusioned friend...or a psychopath who wandered in off the street. They say this kind of violence is personal, but there are plenty of examples to the contrary. To take a famous one, Jack the Ripper did a hell of a number on his last victim, Mary Kelly, and they believe that his victims were a matter of chance.”
“They were a ‘type,’” Quinn reminded him. “Jack went after prostitutes. What ‘type’ could this family have been? My suggestion is that you learn every single thing you can about these people. Maybe something was taken.”
“Nothing seems to have been disturbed. No drawers were open, no jewelry boxes touched.”
Quinn nodded, glancing at his former partner. Larue was in his late thirties, tall and lean with a steely frame, dark, close-cropped hair and fine, probing eyes. There were things he didn’t talk about; he was skilled at going on faith, and luckily, he had faith in Quinn.
“That’s why I called you,” Larue said. “I’m good at finding clues and in what I see.” He lowered his voice. “And you, old friend, are good at finding clues in what we don’t see. I’ll have all the information, every file, I can get on these bodies in your email in the next few hours. Hubert said he’ll start the autopsies as soon as he’s back in the morgue.”
“Mind if I walk the house again?” Quinn asked him. “There’s something I want to check out.”
“What’s that?”
“Like I said, I’m surprised more blood wasn’t tracked through the house. But what I do see leads back to James Garcia.”
“One would think—but you’re trying to tell me that James Garcia butchered his family—and came back to the hall to slash himself to ribbons?”
“No, I’m not saying that. I agree with you that it’s virtually out of the question. I’m just saying that the only blood trails there are lead back to him. There’s no weapon he could have done this with, so...that tells me someone else had to be in the house. They got to the second floor first and murdered the grandparents, headed down to the kitchen and killed the wife, then caught either the aunt or James Garcia. But you’ll note, too, that there’s no blood trail leading out through the doors. Like I said, whoever did this should have been drenched. It seems obvious, but surely someone would’ve noticed another person covered in blood. Yes, this is New Orleans—but we’re not in the midst of a crazy holiday with people wearing costumes and zombie makeup. And even if the killers were wrapped in a sheet or something protective, it’s hard to believe they could escape without leaving a trace.”
“What if they had a van or a vehicle waiting outside?” Larue asked.
“That’s possible. But still...I’d expect some drops or smudges as the killer headed out. I’m going to look around, okay?”
“Go for it—just keep your booties on and don’t interrupt any of my techs. Oh, and, Quinn?”
“Yeah?”
“Thank God you’re back.”
Quinn offered him a somber smile. “Glad you feel that way.”
He left Larue in the hallway, giving instructions to others, and supervising the scene and the removal of the bodies.
At first, Quinn found nothing other than what they’d already discovered. Of course, he was trying to stay out of the way of the crime scene unit. They were busiest in the house; he knew they’d inspected the garage but concentrated on the house, so he decided to concentrate on the garage.
He was glad he did. Because he came upon something he considered unusual.
It was in between two cans of house paint.
He picked up the unlabeled glass container and studied it for a long time, frowning.
There’d been something in it. The vial looked as if it had been washed, but...
There was a trace of red. Some kind of residue.
Blood? So little remained he certainly couldn’t tell; it would have to go to the evidence lockup and then get tested.
He hurried back in to hand it over to Grace Leon, Larue’s choice for head CSU tech when he could get her. She, too, studied the vial. “Thanks. We would’ve gotten to this, I’m sure. Eventually we would’ve gone through the garage. But...is it what I think it is?”
He smiled grimly. “We’ll have to get it tested. But my assumption is yes.”
* * *
The giclée—or computer-generated ink-jet copy—first drew one’s gaze from across the room because of its coloring and exquisite beauty.
Foremost in the image was a dark-haired gentleman leaning over a love seat where a beautiful woman in white lay half-inclined, reading. He could be seen mostly from the back, with only a hint of his profile visible, and he presented her with a flower. The scene evoked the type of mysticism and nostalgia that could be found in the work of the pre-Raphaelite painter John Waterhouse.
Movement, life, seemed to emerge from the image. It was complex; the viewer felt a sense of belonging in the scene, being part of a living environment.
Behind the love seat was a great hearth, like that in the hall of a medieval castle. Above the hearth was a painting of a medieval knight, sans helmet; to each side of the image were massive plaques that bore the coat of arms of the House of Guillaume, with crossed swords below each. To the left, a massive stone staircase went up to the second floor and to the right, a hallway leading to another region of the castle, presumably the kitchens. It was guarded by a pair of 1500s suits of armor, standing like sentinels. And yet it felt like a scene of modern—nineteenth-century modern, at least compared to the medieval background of the castle—bliss.
Near the couple, on a massive wooden table, a boy of about twelve and a girl of maybe eight engaged in a game of chess. On the floor, a smaller child played with a toy. The pigments used were striking—even in the print, which was a copy of the original. Crimsons were deep and used throughout; the castle was dark and shadowed but the shadows were tinged with the same crimson and offset by mauves and grays. The little girl’s clothing added a splash of blue. Just inside the giant doors to the far left in the painting, a silver-colored wolfhound barked as a proper butler opened the door to official-looking men about to make a call.
The allure of the courtly man and the beautiful woman first entranced the viewer. The scene was so lovely, so romantic.
The painting didn’t, at first glance, seem to fit the title chosen by the artist—Ghosts in the Mind.
But then, even as the viewer studied the beauty and serenity of the scene, his or her perception of it would begin to change. If he or she shifted to a slightly different angle, looked at the painting from a different perspective, the hidden details became evident.
Beneath her book, the woman held a dagger. While he offered a rose to the woman, the man concealed a pistol behind his back.
