The porch ran the full width of the house—wide and deep, built for rocking chairs and slow conversation. White columns at even intervals. Hanging ferns on either side of the front door. The brass knocker caught the afternoon light, and a cardinal was perched on the porch rail like it had no idea what it was sitting next to.
The body was crumpled against the front door like somebody had tossed him and walked away. He was on his side, one arm pinned beneath him and the other flung out across the welcome mat. His legs were bent at odd angles, and his head was turned so that those open, empty eyes stared straight at anyone who walked up the porch steps. Maybe that part was intentional. Maybe it wasn’t. Either way, the message wasn’t in how they’d left him. It was where.
I sighed. “I’m sorry, T-Bone,” I said quietly.
A bee drifted past, aimless, bumbling toward the ferns. Down the street a lawn mower sputtered to life, and the ordinary sound of it made the scene in front of me feel sharper and more wrong.
I pulled on gloves and got to work. I grabbed the camera out of my bag and took wide shots of the porch to establish position, then moved in tighter, working in from the perimeter. Then the door behind him and the blood pooled beneath his head, dark and tacky on the brick. Finally the drag marks on the steps where someone had hauled him up without caring how he landed.
Jack came up the steps a few minutes later. He stood over the body for a long moment, hands on his hips, his face giving away nothing.
“What are we looking at?” he asked.
I sighed. “Visually identified as Terrence James. Will confirm with prints. Black male, mid-twenties. Two gunshot wounds to the back of the head, base of the skull. Small caliber. A .22 or .25 based on entry wound diameter. Contact range or close to it. Stippling and powder tattooing at both wound margins.” I pointed without touching. “Exit wounds through the forehead, both of them. Slightly larger, more irregular—the rounds tumbled through bone and brain before they punched out. Blood from the exits ran down his face and pooled in the eye sockets.”
Jack crouched beside me. “Defensive wounds?”
“Nothing. No split knuckles, no bruising on the hands or forearms, no skin under the nails. He didn’t fight back. Either he never saw it coming, or he wasn’t given the chance.” I sat back on my heels. “This was an execution, Jack. Someone walked up behind him, put a gun to the back of his head, and pulled the trigger twice.”
I moved to his pockets while Jack watched. Front left held a cheap prepaid phone with a cracked screen, the kind you could buy at any gas station for thirty dollars. Front right had eleven dollars in cash, a stick of gum, and a key ring with three keys and a faded Parris Island keychain. The back right pocket held a slim leather wallet with a military ID, a debit card from a credit union in King George, and a photograph.
It was creased and worn soft at the edges, the kind of picture someone carried every day until the colors started to fade. Two young men in dress blues, standing shoulder to shoulder in front of a barracks and grinning at the camera with the cocky invincibility of boys who hadn’t yet learned what the world could take from them.
Dre was on the left and T-Bone was on the right, and their arms were around each other’s shoulders, and they looked like they owned the future.
I bagged the photo with the rest of the personal effects. My hands were steady.
I moved to his feet. The sneakers were clean on top, but the soles caught my attention—reddish-brown dust ground deep into the tread pattern, the same color and texture as the residue I’d found on Dre’s bare feet. I couldn’t confirm it was the same material without the lab, and we were still waiting on Richmond for Dre’s results, but the visual match was close enough to make the hair on my arms stand up.
“Look at this,” I said, and held the sole up so Jack could see. “I can’t say for certain until we get it tested, but that looks an awful lot like what I scraped off Dre’s feet.”
Jack leaned in. “Possible material from the tunnels?”
“If the composition matches, it puts him underground before he died. Same as Dre.” I scraped samples into evidence bags, labeled them, and sealed them. “I’ll send these to Richmond with a rush request, but either way, it’s one more thread tying these two murders to the same location.”
Jack stood and looked out past the crime-scene tape at the neighbors gathering across the street. I could see him putting it together behind his eyes, fast and quiet and relentless.
“Whoever did this didn’t bother cleaning out his pockets,” I said. “They left his phone, his wallet, his military ID, a photograph of him and Dre together. That’s not sloppy, that’s deliberate. They didn’t care if we identified him because identification was the whole point. They wanted us to know they killed a man who talked to us, and they wanted to leave him on my porch so we’d understand how close they can get.”
“The deputy I had watching T-Bone followed him from his sister’s house this morning,” Jack said, and the anger in his voice was cold and calculated. “Tailed him to the Sunoco on the Kings Highway, sat in the lot while T-Bone went inside for about ten minutes, then followed him back out toward the interchange. Six blocks later a truck cut between them at a traffic light, and by the time the deputy cleared the intersection, T-Bone’s car was gone.”
“What time?”
“Around nine thirty. Right about the time we were getting shot at in the Towne Square.”
That landed hard. The shooting hadn’t just been an attempt to kill us. It had been a distraction. Every cop in the county responded to that call. And while they were all racing toward the square or sitting in a hospital waiting room, Stavros’s people had intercepted T-Bone away from the deputy following him and put two bullets in his head.
“So we’re looking at a window of two, maybe three hours between the gas station and this porch,” I said. “That’s not a lot of time to grab someone, kill them, and deliver the body.”
“It is if you already know exactly where he’s going to be.” Jack’s jaw tightened. “I’ve got the deputy writing a detailed report. Every turn, every time stamp, every vehicle he can remember seeing. We’ll go through it with a fine-tooth comb.”
He looked down at T-Bone one more time, and something settled in his face, not grief, but the acknowledgment of a debt he intended to collect. Then he stepped off the porch and pulled out his phone, and I heard him talking to Martinez as he walked toward the patrol cars. He already had the pieces in motion. Martinez was taking over Cole’s caseload. Chen and Riley were running the Towne Square crime scene. And Jack was doing what Jack did, managing the chaos.
I went inside through the side door, back through the mudroom and down the narrow stairs to the basement lab. I washed my hands at the big steel sink and prepped the table and laid out the instruments in the order I’d need them. Then I went back upstairs and out to the porch with the gurney. Officer Plank helped me lift T-Bone onto it and maneuver it through the side door and down to the lab. He was still considered a rookie by years on the job, but somewhere in the last six months he’d lost that fresh-faced enthusiasm, and his eyes had changed. He had cop eyes.
I laid T-Bone on the stainless-steel table under the fluorescent lights, tied on a fresh apron, snapped on a new pair of gloves, and switched on the overhead surgical light.
Two hours. That was all I needed. Two hours to find whatever T-Bone’s body could tell me about the people who killed him, and then I’d have something to give Jack that was more useful than anger.
