“You think it was an intruder? Maybe when you picked apart the ME’s report you forgot to compare it with mine. There was no indication of forced entry, no signs of a struggle. The fella just lost his head! We think the injuries were self-inflicted. The pistol butt had his DNA on it. I’ve seen it before, a suicidal person working himself into a frenzy before pulling the trigger. He’s out of his mind, he hits himself to overcome his panic. Physical pain helps him focus.”
Amaia changed the subject. “Detective, there are some things in the ballistics report I don’t understand. A comparison was made between a bullet fired in the lab and a twenty-two-caliber slug taken from the younger son.”
“That’s right.”
“Why did the lab compare only one bullet?” Johnson asked.
Amaia answered that. “I see here they tried to recover bullets from the wife and the daughter, but the bullets fragmented when entering the skull. The medical examiner was able to extract an undamaged bullet only from the boy.”
“Like she says,” Nelson agreed. “They couldn’t match those bullets, but they confirmed the shots were of the same caliber.”
“How about the father?” Amaia challenged him.
“Well . . .” Nelson seemed to be searching for words.
“They didn’t compare that bullet,” Amaia declared.
“They already knew that it was a twenty-two because the residue is less extensive than that left by higher caliber firearms. The lab subjected the swabs from his hand to exhaustive analysis. They tested for lead, barium, and antimony. Positive results for all three, and on the left hand; the man was a lefty. How could an unknown attacker know that? The father fired the gun.”
“And the bullet?” she insisted.
“We didn’t recover the bullet.”
Dupree interjected, “It couldn’t be found at the crime scene?”
Amaia knew the answer. “It’s still inside the father’s skull.”
“For God’s sake! It wasn’t needed. We have the residue, the bullet from the kid’s head was whole, and we had the shattered bullets from the wife and daughter. The slug in the father’s head must have been just as fragmented.”
“It isn’t,” Amaia stated flatly. “We just received the autopsy report. The X-ray of the man’s skull shows the bullet’s intact.”
They waited for Nelson’s response. Several long seconds passed.
“That changes nothing. He fired the gun, he killed his whole family. All the evidence supports that conclusion. I’m starting to get the feeling you want to accuse me of sloppy work. I’m a professional, an experienced homicide detective. We investigated that case just as thoroughly as any other.”
Amaia’s inquiry was quiet, almost offhand. “Detective Nelson. Could you answer one last question?”
“If it’s the last one, you bet I can!”
“There was another bullet recovered at the crime scene . . .”
“From the door frame, yes. It was undamaged. A twenty-two-caliber slug fired from the same gun.”
“I’m looking at a close-up photo. I can’t make out the height of the impact, but I’m guessing it’s just inches above the floor.”
“Yeah. How’d you know?” Nelson’s astonishment was mirrored in Johnson’s and Dupree’s faces.
Amaia tapped a button and put Nelson on hold. “Everything went wrong for the Composer. The storm turned out to be less destructive than expected; not all the family were on site; and the father resisted. But either our man decided to proceed as planned, or for some reason he couldn’t stop what he’d started. We’ve speculated that the Composer murders other family members but leaves the father till last. But Andrews fought him, and the Composer had to shoot him to get the twenty-two. The killer had to have been carrying a different gun. Maybe he didn’t need it for the other murders, but he had to be prepared in case things went wrong. In this case they did. He killed the father with his own gun and then murdered the others with the father’s gun.”
“What about the bullet in the door frame? You think Andrews managed to get off a shot?”
“It’s from Andrews’s pistol, but I think it was fired after the father was dead. Suicides typically shoot themselves in the head or, in rare cases, in the heart. No one intending to kill himself would be able to shoot himself twice. If he had two bullets in his skull, that would literally have been a dead giveaway. The killer had to place the twenty-two in the father’s hand and fire it to leave powder traces, but Andrews was dead and lying on the floor. That’s why the trajectory was low.”
Johnson inhaled deeply and let out a long, slow sigh. “And the Composer had seen he was left-handed.”
Dupree punched the call button. “I want an exhumation order for Andrews Sr. If I can convince the judge it’s urgent, we might get it by tonight.”
Amaia muttered, “I need to tell Joseph Jr.”
Dupree rejected that idea. “Salazar, we don’t need the boy’s permission. We know from experience that sometimes it’s better for the families not to know until it actually happens. They suffer less that way.”
“Salazar’s right,” Johnson said. “It may be painful to young Andrews, but it’s the closest thing to a victory he’s had in a long time.”
19
MARY WARD
Cape May, New Jersey
The ring of the telephone broke the quiet of the Ward Funeral Home. It startled Mary and made her look up, half-annoyed and half-amused. She’d been in the profession for forty years, and she still jumped like a scalded cat at any sudden noise. She preferred to work in silence. That’s how her father had done it, and she’d followed his example, at least until the day Ben, her son, decided to accept tradition and dedicate himself to mortuary work. She was happy to work with Ben, but their conflicts over the heavy metal music he blasted at work had come close to wrecking their relationship and ruining the family business.
They’d negotiated a compromise. Ben could stay with the firm, but he’d have to listen to his music through headphones only. There was one disadvantage to having him wear headphones all day long, though: he couldn’t hear anything else. The problem with all this was that someone might call requesting services and he wouldn’t hear the phone ring. Ben had solved that problem by installing a commercial-grade notification system like they had down at the firehouse. Whenever the phone rang, loudspeakers blasted the sound throughout the building. Ben heard it despite his headphones, and Mary practically went through the roof.
Mary gestured to her son to keep on working. She picked up the phone and smiled when she heard a young woman identifying herself as an FBI agent. How things had changed! Mary was a bit disappointed, because she doubted they’d be able to help. After the storm killed the Miller family, Cape May’s city government had declared their place a ruin and ordered it bulldozed as a safety measure. Nothing from the house had been preserved. But her son and several of their employees had removed and transported the bodies after the judge released them. Her Ben had taken violin lessons from age five. He had poor coordination and a terrible ear, so he finally gave up at age ten. But his memory was excellent; if there’d been a violin in the room, he wouldn’t have missed it.