All but three of the partygoers in the room looked irritated—two vamps and a human. Vamps tended to expressionless faces unless they were irritated or hungry, both of which were a sign of danger. The human was sitting on an ottoman, and he looked devastated, face pale, his tie undone, a crystal glass in one hand, dangling between his knees. I figured he was the husband of one of the dead. There was blood spatter on his shirt and dark suit coat. A man who didn’t belong in the expensively dressed crowd stood beside him, taking notes. A fed, I figured as I slipped away, before I got caught, to wander some more.
I passed uniformed and suited LEOs here and there, two I recognized as local and one unknown wearing a far better-fitting suit. Probably another fed. The firefighters left through the front door, big boots clomping, and gathered on the street. Two crime scene techs raced into the room off to the side, carrying gear. No one paid any attention to me except to note that I had a badge on a lanyard around my neck. I hooked my thumbs into my pockets and moseyed over, probably a failure at looking as if I belonged.
The action was in the game room and the stench of fire grew heavier. Inside was a pool table, comfy reclining sofas, and a TV screen so big it took up most of the wall over the fireplace. On the opposite wall were antique guns in frames behind glass. Cast metal that might have been machine parts was protected within smaller frames. What looked like an ordinary wrench was centered on the wall in a heavy carved frame as if it was the most important thing hanging there. People commemorated the strangest things.
There were also lots of old, black-and-white photographs of stiff-looking people wearing stiff-looking clothes. Their hats and the way the women’s clothes fitted said they were rich and pampered. The men’s mustaches and thick facial hair made them look imposing, at least to themselves; they had that self-satisfied look about them, the expression of a hunter when he was posing with a sixteen-point buck. However, their expressions also made them look like their teeth hurt. Dental care was probably not very common back whenever these were taken.
Standing in the doorway, I spotted Rick LaFleur, the special agent in charge of Unit Eighteen, talking to Soul, his up-line boss, the newly appointed assistant director, and another woman. If body language was a clue, the PsyLED agents were arguing with the African-American woman in the chic outfit. She wore the tailored clothes as if they were part of her, as much as the scowl and the aura of power. I figured she was the new VIP in charge of the Knoxville FBI. They were too busy to pay attention to me, so I strolled in. Saw things. Smelled things. Touched things with the back of my hand, here and there.
The gas logs had been on, but were now only warm to the touch. A game of pool had been interrupted and balls were all over the tabletop. The solids were mostly gone. One cue stick lay on the floor in two pieces. Drinks of the alcoholic variety were on every available surface.
The entire room smelled of fire, the sour scent of a house fire—painted wallboard and burned construction materials, lots of synthetics. The stench was tainted with what might have been the reek of scorched flesh. Icy night air blew in through the busted windows; blackened draperies billowed. Charred furniture and rugs spread into the room from the window. The fire seemed to have started there.
There were bullet holes on the wall opposite the windows. And there was a pool of blood on the floor. A body lay in the middle of it. She had taken a chest shot. Dead instantly if I was any kind of judge. There was no taped outline. No chalk outline. Just the blood and the body, still in place.
I stared at her. The victim was middle-aged with dyed blond hair and blue contacts drying and wrinkling, shrinking over her gray eyes. She was wearing a pale blue sweater top and black pants, three-inch black spike shoes. Diamonds. Lots of them. There was blood spatter on the wall in an odd outline, as if someone had been standing behind her. Blood on a chair and small table. Blood on a shattered glass on the mantel near her. That bloody pool beneath her was tracked through by the shoe prints of the people who had tried to save her. There was a lot of blood.
My gift of reading the land—and feeding the land with blood—was less reticent now, more focused. Hungering. But I had been working with it, trying to harness it, and I stroked the need like the hunting cat I compared it to, flattening its surface, pushing it into stillness. Proud of myself that I had the strength of will to not feed my hunger and the earth beneath the house, I turned from the body.
By now, the crime scene had been captured in photos and video and cell cameras and drawn out on paper by hand. Multiple redundancies. Crime scene techs were still working, but oddly, there were no numbered evidence markers in the room. I had to wonder why. Maybe they had been placed there, then already removed as CSI gathered up the physical evidence.
I approached the broken windows. Outside, a coroner’s unit waited, lights not flashing, not in an upscale neighborhood. The EMTs and their vehicles had left with the wounded, three, I had heard, one critical. Farther beyond, a media van waited, a camera on a tripod and a reporter in front of it, filming for the morning news. In the dark of the driveway, where the cameras couldn’t get a shot, two uniformed figures lifted a gurney with a body bag into the coroner’s van. There was already one gurney inside. Three dead, three wounded at this scene.
The window glass was shattered, in pellets all over the floor. It reminded me of the automobile glass outside, but this was clear and the vehicle glass had been tinted and well ground into the asphalt.
The cloth blinds were burned and tattered, the drapery seared. The walls were scorched all around them, and up to the ceiling. A table by the window was mostly shattered charcoal and candles had melted across the surface. A blackened glass was on its side. It looked as if the shots had smashed the glass, spilling the alcohol and toppling the lit candle. I guessed that the fire had spread quickly, but I wasn’t a fire and arson investigator. I knew to keep my opinions to myself unless asked. Opinions went into the evidentiary summary report in the “Opinion” box, where they were mostly ignored. They weren’t facts.
I slipped out before someone asked me what I was doing. Next door was the master bedroom. Master suite. Yes, that sounded right. It was full of people. Instead of pushing my luck, I slowly went up the staircase onto the second level.
On the second floor were six bedrooms and four full baths. Counting the servants’ powder room, the en suite in the master, and the two guest powder rooms on the ground floor, that was a lot of bathrooms. I had grown up in a house that technically had more square footage and more bedrooms than this one, but it was nowhere near as fancy. The Holloways’ home was luxurious, what T. Laine probably called “new-money decadent.” They probably paid their decorator more than the yearly income of most American families.