I gave a quick shrug and pulled the uni out where they could see it. “Got one. I measured the goose pond. I wanted to measure the newest sites too.”
“Goose pond,” a female tech repeated. “I hear there’s bodies there.”
“Lots,” I said, instantly seeing the bodies in the pond. On the ground. My chest went tight for a moment. “It was pretty bad.” And I realized that I had put my feelings on hold, my thinkingabout the deaths on hold. Stuffed it all back into some dusky, nameless part of my mind, to deal with later. Much later. Not now.
“Get dressed out and get in here,” she said. “I’m Karen Lynne, FBI CSI, and this is my partner, Amanda Gray. We’re dying to know what’s going on.”
I lifted a hand in a half wave.
The man said, “I’m Special Agent Kevin Riley, FBI. I’m not lead, but I’m the only one here who thinks the yard is just as important as the house.”
“Of course it is,” I said, agreeing. “Lemme get outfitted.”
***
It wasn’t like it was portrayed on TV, all solemn and tense or, conversely, full of wisecracking. It was all about the evidence we had seen and cataloged, the tech we were using, and about the victims and what they had in common—which was nothing but the location and bloodlines. It was sharing info, which was unusual in law enforcement, because every agency and every well-established agent wanted the collar, wanted any arrest to be listed under their name and badge number, wanted to be the one on camera at a news conference. But it turned out that we were all newbies, probies, too excited being “on the job,” too eager learning and doing to hoard info and data. And because there were no bodies here, we were having too much fun. Not something that TV showed, that the job could be fun. And maybe I needed this after the pond and the hospital.
I showed them the psy-meter 2.0, took readings in the tent and outside in the rest of the front yard, the driveway, and the backyard. I listened to the scuttlebutt that they had overheard from the agents inside. They told me about the violent scene inside that I hadn’t heard about until now. There were two bodies inside the house, two twentysomethings, probably killed by the father, who had been naked in the front yard, walking with the rest of his family, covered in blood spatter. The two young men had died from blunt force trauma. I was glad I was outside, not in the house with Occam.
We chatted. I got help setting up a grid in the tent and a bigger one in the yard. I took measurements and they searched for physical evidence.
Just before I finished working up the grounds, I noticedsomething about the landscaping that had escaped detection on first glance. Something on the plants.
It was a coating of black mold, crawling up the exposed roots and larger stems of several well-pruned boxwoods, planted between the front porch and the evidence tent. The mold discoloration stopped there, but the shrubs didn’t look like they had been treated, so it was likely to spread. Oddly there was no evidence of mold on the boxwoods in the backyard or the other plants or trees in the yard. And it didn’t resemble black knot, slime flux, or sooty mold. It was slimy in places, with little antennae-like things in other places, and there were things like fruiting bodies lifting on the slick but pebbled surface. Maybe some form of fungal mycelia, not that I knew much about molds. I never got them like this on my land except on deadwood—fallen limbs or trees, decaying in the shadows. Molds were necessary in decay, and some symbiotic relationships that helped both plants, but there was no decay here, at least aboveground, and this didn’t look beneficial to the host plant. Fungal diseases can affect roots, leaves, needles, trunks, and vascular systems of living trees and shrubs. They were a sign that something else was amiss in the environment: the soil, or the water.
If I had to guess, the front boxwoods were dying, yet the leaves were still green, the inside of the stems appeared healthy when I broke one, and when I dug into the soil, there was no indication of deeper root problems. It seemed important, but I couldn’t say why, and I was, admittedly, a plant person, not an experienced agent. I was likely to think inside a plant box when none existed.
When I couldn’t verbalize why the black mold was important, the other techs wandered away, uninterested in my discovery. And they had a point, summed up by Riley. “What could mold have to do with three families going whacky?”
Molds did a lot of bad stuff, including causing hallucinations, but three families? All at the same time? In exactly the same way? When it wasn’t affecting the rest of us? It wasn’t likely. I made a note in my tablet—not the easiest thing to do wearing the uni’s gloves—took a photo, and, just to be on the safe side, I scraped off some mold into an evidence bag and sealed it. Then I went to get Occam. I wanted to see the other houses.
I wasn’t lead agent. I had to check in. I felt tethered. And stubbornly resistant to being tethered. But I remembered something my mama had often said when I was young.“I may not always like it, but I can work in the system.”For her, “the system” had been church and an extended family and sister-wives and many,manychildren to help raise. For me, the system was law enforcement.
Occam caught my eye at the back door of the house, changing out of his uni, and putting on a new one. His face was set into hard lines, cool and unemotional, and the sight of his expression made me even happier that I had stayed outside. “You okay?” I asked.
“No. This sucks. The kids were beaten in a circular pattern. He used a crowbar. Started at their heads and worked his way around the beds in clock patterns, twelve blows ending back at their heads.”
“Clockwise or widdershins?”
“Bloodstains suggest clockwise.” Clockwise was a direction used in witch workings. He cursed softly and rubbed his forehead. “I’m glad Rick made Tandy sit this one out at the office. Even the fish in the aquarium are swimming in a circle.”
Silent after the terse words, Occam led the way to the next house, both of us wearing clean antimagic unis. The next house was Point B, Alisha Henri’s two-story home, with an open, empty double garage and three family cars parked in the drive, two of them from out of state. Occam paused at the driveway and said, “The FBI SAC just spoke with the hospitalist at UTMC. Two people from this house are currently asymptomatic. They don’t have a theory yet why only the two from this one house seem to be fully recovered, when the rest of the people from all three houses are still exhibiting psychosis.”
The SAC was the special agent in charge, a deliberate reminder that we didn’t have true lead on this site. The FBI did. I stuck out my tongue at him and he laughed, the shadows in his eyes vanishing for a moment, the dimple popping into place. “Thanks. I needed that.” He lifted a hand in a half wave and went inside Alisha’s house. I walked around the yard, taking readings, this time alone and without a tent. The area where the family had been walking in a circle was taped off with crime scene tape and was still redlining. Before I could get more than that accomplished, Occam shouted, “Ingram! In here.”
Ingram. Not “Nell, sugar.”Good. I jogged to the porch and when I entered, found Alisha’s place to be much more empty than I expected. Only two middle-aged feds, wearing wrinkled suits, unis zipped open, half off and hanging on their hips, suitcoats sweat-stained, ties pulled loose at their necks, were in the house.
“I want some P 2.0 measurements inside too,” Occam said to me. To the two others, he said, “Ingram. Probie. A whiz with the new tech.”
The feds grunted without looking up. Occam placed a hand-sketched floor plan into my free fingers. “Read each room and record the results,” he instructed, his face less grim than earlier, his eyes holding something I couldn’t place.
“Probie work,” I muttered, as if it bothered me. Occam snapped his fingers three times, fast, as if telling me to hurry up. “And when you get through, we can chat.”
I didn’t know what he thought I might find, but I started the readings at the front door, working around the two agents, who were both human. The first floor took less than half an hour, and I ended on the second floor, in what looked like a man cave, with a minikitchen, wide-screen TV, chips in bowls, two colas open on side tables. A cat sat in the corner on a cat climber stand that went to the ceiling, the carpeted leap shelves crossing in front of the window where the cat could stare out at birds by day. As I did the readings, I began to get a feeling that Occam wanted me to pick up on something. And I did. I rechecked the levels on both floors before I found him in the kitchen with the feds, looking over the evidence footage—because without a crime being committed here, they couldn’t be called forensic photography or crime scene photos—collected by the first responders. The shots were of Alisha; Kirsten Harrell; her partner, Sally Clements; and Sharon Sayegh, and her husband, Adam Sayegh.
I pushed my way between Occam and a cop and studied the video too. The family all wore nightclothes and were barefoot, walking in a circle. All five had their eyes open, shoulders rounded, stumbling as if sleep-walking. In the vid, police and paramedics approached slowly. The five kept walking. Until a city police officer touched one of the men on the shoulder as if to pull him around. The cop stopped, his back rigid. The man kept walking. Seconds passed. The cop stepped toward thegroup and tried to join the walkers. Another cop yanked him back, across the yard, and the rest of the officers pulled them both away.
That was interesting. “Is the cop who touched one of them, without a uni, okay?”
