“Bodies!” managed the man. “All in pieces. Arms, legs, heads... Fuck!”
“Anyone alive?”
The officer kept shaking his head in disbelief. “Don’t think so. I don’t even know how many there are. I counted two heads. Kids.” He began to shake all over.
The sergeant gripped his elbow and signalled to a nearby paramedic. “Go sit down, son.”
One by one the paramedics and tactical officers emerged from the house, pale as ghosts and unsteady on their feet. Green heard the same muttered disbelief over and over. “War zone in there. Blood fucking everywhere.”
The patrol sergeant looked at Green expectantly, as if to say it’s your case now. Your call, and good luck. Green fought his own dizziness and nausea as he tried to think. He needed to get his own partner over here. He had sent Sullivan home for the day, because he had three little kids and a soccer game to coach. Green kept the details to a minimum on the phone as he gave Sullivan the address. The man would know soon enough.
The call seemed to ground him, for once he hung up, he felt his training kick in. “Call Ident, the coroner and the duty inspector,” he told the patrol sergeant. “I want everyone out of the house, and the scene secured. Don’t let anyone in but Ident, the coroner and myself. And I want the boots of every officer and paramedic who went into the house.”
The orders given, he pulled on gloves, steeled himself, and stepped over the threshold. He had never seen so much blood. He knew the human body contained about five litres, and he’d seen much of it spilled on the floors and walls of previous crime scenes, but nothing prepared him for this. The blood was smeared all the way up the staircase, pooled in lakes at the foot of the stairs, and sprayed in a pulsing arterial line across the walls and ceiling of the living room where the husband lay.
He stared at the ceiling, his throat gaping open and his thinning hair drenched in the blood that spread beneath his head. By his outstretched hand lay a long kitchen knife so covered in blood that it was barely recognizable.
Green barely had time to turn away before vomiting on the hardwood floor at the foot of the stairs. He leaned on the bannister a moment, rested his forehead on his arm and tried to suck fresh air into his lungs. But the air stank of death. The stench of urine and feces mingled with the coppery scent of blood and the acrid smell of gasoline. His stomach rebelled again, but this time he fought the bile down.
The rest of the downstairs was surprisingly neat and undisturbed. The small kitchen was packed with artwork and children’s toys. Yellow post-it notes were stuck on the fridge, the microwave and the cork board, containing reminders of doctors’ appointments, soccer games, homework assignments and even routines for cooking and cleaning up. Pinned to the wall by the back door, which was broken open by the tactical team, was another note. Remember to take your lunch and lock the door. At the bottom of the note, as on the others, was xxoox and a happy face.
Green backed away, his breath catching, and turned to continue his systematic search of the downstairs. Everywhere he saw evidence of a neat, frugal lifestyle. Scuffed, mended furniture, homemade bookcases brimming with secondhand paperbacks, and child-like drawings on the walls. When he could no longer reasonably put it off, he took a deep breath and headed up the stairs, careful to avoid the blood on the walls and stair treads.
At the top of the stairs, the bedroom doors were ajar, spilling light into the hall. Lamps were smashed, tables overturned, and bedding strewn about. Everything was bathed in blood. He almost tripped over a cast-iron pan in the middle of the floor. Through the half open front bedroom door, he caught sight of the chainsaw, glistening red. He nudged the door back with his toe. Stepped in. And stared at the carnage.
He felt a door swing shut in his mind. Felt its refusal to grasp, to absorb, to comprehend. Aware only of his crumbling legs, the heat and salt of tears upon his cheeks. He didn’t speak, didn’t move.
Then, very faintly above the sound of his own ragged breath, he heard a sob. He turned. A closet door stood half open in the corner. Instinct flooded him and he dropped to a crouch behind the blood-soaked bed and unsnapped his holster.
“Police. Come out with your hands out.”
Nothing.
He edged around the bed and shoved open the closet door.
Nothing.
Then from the interior of the closet, from behind the snowsuits, the hockey gear and the boxes of Lego, a pale face emerged. Eyes huge with shock, greying hair plastered with blood, lips slack with disbelief.
“I killed him,” she whispered. “I killed him.”
* * *
Green bolted awake, as he always did, his sheets soaked with sweat. His heart hammered against his ribs as he panted to catch his breath. He drank in the reassuring shadows of his darkened bedroom; the maple tree against the window, the dresser in the corner, the glint of the mirror on the closet door. And his wife’s black curls tumbling over the pillow next to him. She opened her eyes, luminous in the dark, and reached for his arm.
“The nightmare?”
He nodded, and she tightened her grip. “You haven’t had that in a long time.”
“I guess it’s this case and worrying about Twiggy.”
She sat up, pushing her hair out of her eyes. “Do you want some tea?”
He hesitated. When the nightmares had come every night and the visions of body parts plagued his waking hours, Sharon had been there to comfort him. To listen endlessly to his rants about mental health and legal loopholes, and to try to explain— not excuse—what Sam had done. She had known Sam during his two hospitalizations the previous winter, supported his wife’s futile efforts to have him committed. She had watched him struggle in vain to get well, she had even met the two holy terrors who were his sons. They had come to the ward for visits, ricocheting off the walls, racing the length of the corridors, bouncing off the sofas in the sunroom and spinning the chairs in the nursing station like their own personal merry-go-rounds.
“The stress alone of keeping up with them would tax a healthy parent,” she’d said. “And you factor in the loss of his job at the university due to his illness, the financial pressures of the kids’ private school, the efforts to hang onto the family house... I think he couldn’t see any other way out. He couldn’t cope any more, but he couldn’t leave his wife with the burden of managing them by herself.”
“And he thought killing them would be easier on her?”
She’d shaken her head, looking dissatisfied. “I can only guess, but I think in his delusional state, he thought they’d be better off dead. He felt he had to put them out of their misery.”
That was the theory proposed by the trio of forensic psychiatrists when the case finally wended its way through the legal circus. Homicide-suicide was the verdict of the coroner’s inquest. Sam Calderone, in the grip of a psychotic delusion, had hacked his twin sons to pieces with a chainsaw, and while his wife hid for her life in the closet, he went downstairs and stabbed himself in the throat.
Green had his own private theory about the mad workings of Sam Calderone’s mind. He had been cutting deadwood, hoping perhaps that what was left of his sons’ bodies and minds would grow healthy and strong. He had not intended to die that night, he had planned to be around to witness their cure.
With the knife too smeared with blood to yield usable prints, Green had never told anyone what Jean Calderone had said to him in the closet that night. She had faced a homicidal lunatic who had just sawn their two sons to pieces. Whatever she had done to him, whether in self-protection or in retribution, she had already paid dearly enough.
Now he snuggled down into Sharon’s arms and pressed her fingers to his lips. “Just hold me awhile,” he whispered.
He was grateful that she didn’t utter pointless reassurances about Twiggy’s disappearance, but recognized