3

Piper settled into the chair across from Tom. He leaned back and said, “Got your other cases spread around to the rest of the team. You should be good for a few months.”

“Thank you for doing that.”

“No problem. You look nervous. You all right?” Tom said.

“Just ... something new. Change isn’t easy for me.”

“I get you. But you gotta play the game to get what you want.”

He reached down by his desk and came up with a cardboard box. Inside were files, folders, and discs. “You’ve worked cases involving homicides, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, this is a double homicide. There was one survivor, Sophie Grace, who’s fifteen. I guess the judge wants to make sure Sophie’s protected in all this. It’s actually the first case applied to the grant, so you’re like a legal astronaut or something.”

“Great,” she said as she stared at the thick folders in the box.

“Don’t sweat it. I’m sure you’ll be fine.”

She rose, lifting the box, which was heavier than it looked, and said, “Have some reading to do I guess.”

Piper sat at her desk and slowly took the contents out of the box. It was copies of all the evidence in the criminal case, which was still pending. The murder book, a collection of evidence used by the police to keep track of everything in one file, was thick and took her a couple of hours to read through and analyze.

The basic outline of the case was simple: an unknown assailant had gotten past the Grace family’s alarm and video monitoring systems and killed the mother, Emily Grace, first in the hallway, then her son, Sullivan, who probably rushed out to see what was going on. Both bodies were then posed by the front door, leaning against the wall.

Sophie Grace was out at the school dance and didn’t come home until later that night. She walked through the front door and slipped on her family’s blood before seeing someone in the shadows watching her. She ran.

She got upstairs and jumped out a window before the assailant could get hold of her. A family had found her wandering the streets and talking to herself. A note was made by one of the responding officers who said the girl was confused and in shock and couldn’t speak at the hospital. The assailant was gone by the time the police arrived.

Piper glanced at the photographs the forensic team had taken while she read the detective’s narrative.

Emily Grace’s stab wounds were focused on the face and throat. Fourteen in total. The wounds were ragged, not clean entries like a blade. The ME guessed a Phillips-head screwdriver.

Her son was no different. Twelve stab wounds to the face, neck, and shoulders, many of them on the back side. The detective on the case, a man Piper had never met named Lazarus Holloway, conjectured that the boy was running away while the assailant continued to stab him.

Sophie’s injuries were inflicted by the shattered glass of the window and the jump down. Forensics had taken photos of Sophie covered in blood at the hospital. One shot had the teen staring into the camera.

The photograph caused Piper to stop and lean back in her chair. She had read that soldiers left for war with the eyes of boys but came back with the eyes of old men. That’s what Sophie Grace looked like.

She went back to the forensic reports.

The blood spatter analysis was good; it was done by John Dante at the state crime lab, who Piper had been on one date with. He was a terrible date, showing up an hour late, taking her to Hooters for dinner, and then miraculously forgetting his wallet when it came time to pay. But he knew blood.

Emily Grace’s blood spatter analysis showed the general direction of the stab wounds, but it was so chaotic and disorganized it was difficult to make heads or tails of what happened. Some epithelial cells were found on the walls, possibly by the killer leaning against the wall with one hand for support while he stabbed the woman to death with the other hand.

They assumed the killer was nude so he wouldn’t have any clothes to get rid of after the slayings. Some traces of blood had been found in the shower.

No fingerprints, shoe prints, hair, or fiber that wasn’t the family’s. No bodily fluids or signs of burglary or sexual assault. Nothing from the home appeared to be taken. A few glass fragments were found, but may have been from some broken dish or were tracked into the house by one of the family members.

The “listed suspects” form the detectives were supposed to fill out was blank.

She skipped the autopsy photos.

When Piper had a good sense of what happened, she bought a Diet Coke from the machines on the ground floor and went out to a bench in between the buildings. It was tucked in a corner, away from any entrances and exits, and most people didn’t know it was there.

Bees were swarming around vibrant yellow flowers. She watched them for a long time, until Sophie Grace’s face began to fade in her mind.

After her soda was finished, she went to Tom’s office and took a Post-it note and wrote “I’ll do it for now” on it and taped it to his computer screen, the only place in the office that didn’t have other things stacked on top of it.

She lifted the box and took it home to read again that night.