King of Swords

Most of them were strewn around the living-room floor, contorted, twisted, bloated, skin stretched out to a greyish near-translucence, big balloon people, bursting out of their clothes — tuxes for the men and glittering designer gowns for the women — threatening to float off up out of the room, over the house and into the Miami sky.

The room was decked out for a party. A gold and red tinsel banner was strung from either wall over the room reading 'Felicitations Prevail'. Bunches of balloons, wilted and wrinkled by the evil heat and poisoned air, hung from pieces of string fixed to the four corners of the room. A lot of the furniture - armchairs, a sofa, a black granite coffee table — had been moved out into the hallway. They'd been planning to dance after dinner.

They'd been shot dead to a record called The Joys of Martinique by the Swingin' Steel Band. It was still playing, after a fashion, because the needle was stuck in the run-off groove and the album had warped a little so the turned-down edge was scraping the side of the turntable, making a sound like a spitball hitting a hotplate - TAK! -pffsssttt. . . TAK! - pffsssttt. . . TAK! - pffsssttt. . . TAK! - pffsssttt - a warped metronome keeping time over the scene.

Max and Joe walked around the room with plastic covers on their shoes, rubber gloves on their hands, nets over their hair and menthol-scented surgical masks over their noses and mouths. The window hadn't yet been opened because a woman from forensics was dusting it for prints. Plenty had turned up under the black powder.

Max picked up a spent shell casing from its chalked circle, numbered with a marker on the floor and compared it to a blown-up photograph of one of the casings found at the

MartinMorales murder scene. Same strike marks on the end.

'Six bodies. Twelve shots fired — at least,' Max said, holding up a glassine evidence bag with a fragment of the shell that had been dug out of the windowsill. As with his previous two murders, Preval had used hollow-points on his family — bullets with quartered tips, which fragmented on impact, flying off at four different angles, causing maximum damage. Back in patrol Max had known a cop who'd been shot in the kneecap with a hollow-point. It had blown his lower leg clean off. 'Someone musta heard something'

'These houses are too far apart.'

'He killed his whole family, Joe, with a .38. That's a lotta noise.'

'Then there's the time of day this happened. Late enough and everyone woulda been sleepin'. Dunno 'bout you, but when I sleep, man, I sleep. I'm La2arus. Take Jesus himself to rouse me.' Joe looked out of the window at the activity in the driveway — paramedics with stretchers, uniformed cops keeping back a news crew, curious neighbours.

“What about the guard? What they pay him for?'

'Keep the bad guys out,' Joe said.

Lacour had been as systematic as he'd been merciless.

He'd killed them anti-clockwise, beginning with the old woman in the black and green dress to his left nearest the door. She'd been sat at the end of the table. He'd shot her twice in the forehead, once from a distance and then the second time from very close up, the muzzle practically touching the skin. Then he'd turned on his two teenage sons, sitting side by side in the middle, their backs to the window. The first — and oldest — had tried to shield his brother and had been shot first in the shoulder, and then executed like the woman he'd been sitting close to. His brother had been grazed in the neck by the bullet fragment Max had found embedded in the windowsill. He'd crawled

under the table Max guessed, following the small morse code of bloodstains on the floor. The old man in the wheelchair had then tried to protect him by swinging one of his two thick walking sticks at the gunman. Lacour had shot at the man mid-swing and blown his stick apart. There were splinters and slivers of wood buried in the old man's face, as well as part of a bullet which had entered his head through his eye. He'd then been shot one more time for good measure, before his murderer had dispatched the boy on the floor. Most of the corpses still had the gold cardboard party hats they'd been wearing at the time of their deaths stuck to their ruptured heads.

Apart from the turntable and Max and Joe's whispering, it was utterly quiet in the room. Five forensics staff were working on the scene, scraping, bagging, stoppering glass tubes, lifting prints, lifting hair, lifting lips to look at teeth, lifting hands and legs, lifting bodies to one side, left and right. They measured holes in the wall, distances between bodies, sizes of entry and exit wounds, range of spatter.

Everyone worked efficiently and precisely, but also very quickly and without pause, as if they couldn't wait to get away.