On Harrow Hill

A woman in coveralls and gloves was using a razor knife and tweezers to probe a bullet hole in the staircase newel post. He recognized her as the hardscrabble patrol officer who’d been keeping an eye on Lorinda Russell the day after Angus’s murder. She’d apparently been drafted by Barstow into helping with the massive task of bullet retrieval.

He watched as she extracted the slug, placed it in a pre-labeled envelope, then proceeded to another hole, this one in the staircase stringer board. He assumed she’d been instructed to collect as many slugs as she could, not only as pieces of evidence that could be linked ballistically to specific firearms in future legal proceedings, but as a way of determining the number of firearms used in the attack.

“Are they coming out clean?” he asked, meaning suitable for ballistics.

“Yes, sir. They’re all FMJs.”

There was something military in the tone of her voice that reinforced a thought he’d had at their first meeting, that she was probably one of the many police officers who found their way into law enforcement via the armed forces, having discovered a comfort zone in a world of rules, lines of command, and secure employment.

He headed up the stairs to a broad landing with a wet carpet and five open doorways leading to three partially destroyed bedrooms, a bathroom, and an enclosed staircase to the third floor. Deciding to check the third floor first, he found that it was just a large unfinished attic. The halogen light coming through the windows was weaker here, but he could see that the space was empty, apart from a gauzy lacework of cobwebs.

Returning to the second floor, he spent the next hour going through the bedrooms and bathroom. The first bedroom was the one used by Billy Tate, or at least by a male with a fondness for gray hoodies and black jeans. It exhibited a disarray familiar to him from his own son’s teenage years—socks, underwear, and tee shirts on the floor, one sneaker on a chair and one under it, an open bureau drawer, a lamp with its shade askew, gum wrappers on the floor.

A heavy-metal band poster was taped to one of the walls. On another wall there were several eight-by-ten nude photographs of a woman. Looking closer, Gurney recognized the face of the black-haired beauty with three silver studs in her lower lip who he’d spoken to at the opening in the fence the day before.

“Love to my Billy forever, forever, forever, from Lena” was scrawled in girlish handwriting across the bottom of one of the photos.

On a nightstand by the unmade bed, there was a superhero comic book and a printout of the sideways figure eight symbol for sulfur and hellfire.

In the nightstand drawer, there was a flashlight, a jackknife, a box of condoms, a small plastic bag containing some pot, a pack of rolling papers, and three more comic books.

One of the room’s three windows was open. Its curtain had been reduced by the fire to blackened strands of melted polyester fabric. There was ashy water on the floor and on the table under the window.

The next bedroom was more severely damaged, but enough of its contents were recognizable to identify it as Selena’s. A bureau with a buckled top and scorched drawer fronts had remained intact inside—preserving an assortment of black lipsticks, black nail polishes, black panties, silky black gowns like the one he’d seen her in, and silver jewelry in the shapes of common Wiccan symbols. In the bottom drawer there were four books—The Pagan Path to Saving the Earth, The Yogic Path to Beauty, and biographies of Joan of Arc and Madonna.

In place of a closet, there was a tall armoire whose doors had been mostly burned away and whose contents were unrecognizable. The inside of the bedroom door was covered with heat-discolored photos of a young man with a smirky mouth and brooding eyes, wearing a gray hoodie and black jeans. He struck Gurney as an aging juvenile delinquent, trying to look dangerous.

The third bedroom, presumably used by the girl called Raven, had been almost entirely consumed by the fire. Apart from charred and cracked pieces of furniture and burned pieces of women’s clothing, he noticed one fairly intact item—a handwritten note, stuck in the frame of a mirror that had fallen to the floor. Gurney bent over to read the message in a girlish script: “Remember the corn for the crows.” It was signed, “Lena.”