Lover Arisen (Black Dagger Brotherhood #20)(4)

The second she entered a shallow foyer, she smelled both vanilla-scented candles and fresh blood—and her brain went to a hypothetical episode of Cupcake Wars where one of the contestants got their hand stuck in a mixer.

Care for some plasma with your Victoria sponge?

Wait, that would be The Great British Bake Off, wouldn’t it.

While her brain played chew toy with all kinds of stupid connections, she let it warm itself up and glanced to the right. The disrupted living room was what she expected in terms of furnishings and decor. Everything was solidly middle class, especially all the framed pictures of two parents and a daughter in the bookshelves, everybody aging up through the years, the kid getting taller and more mature, the parents getting grayer and thicker around the middle.

Those photographs were her first clue as to why Trey had tried to put his foot down.

Well actually… there had been a couple of others when she’d been getting basic details from dispatch.

Ignoring the alarm bells that started to ring in her head, she stepped around a broken lamp. In spite of all the homey-homey, the place looked like a bar fight had gone down in front of the electric fireplace: The flowered couch was out of alignment and its cushions scattered on the rug, one armchair was knocked over, and the cheap glass coffee table was shattered.

There was blood splatter on the gray walls and the low-nap carpet.

The facedown body in the center of the sixteen-by-twelve-foot room was that of an older white male, the bald spot on the back of the head identifying him as the father according to one of the candids taken at a field hockey game. He had one arm up, the other down by his side, and his clothes were vaguely office, a button-down shirt, it looked like, tucked into polyester-blend slacks. No belt. Shoes were still on.

Two long steps brought her in close, and her knees popped as she dropped onto her haunches. The knife sticking out of his back had done quite a bit of work before before being left deep inside his rib cage: There were a good four to five other stab wounds, going by the holes in the shirt and the bloodstains on the cotton fabric.

As she took a deep breath, she had a thought that half the oxygen in Caldwell had mysteriously disappeared.

“Erika.”

Her name was said with an exhaustion she was familiar with. She’d heard that special brand of tired in a lot of people’s voices when they were trying to talk sense into her.

“Frenzied attack.” She indicated the pattern of stabbings, even though it wasn’t like there was any confusion about what she was addressing. “By someone strong. While this victim was trying to run away after they’d scuffled.”

Erika rose up and went farther into the house. As she passed through an archway that opened into a kitchen, she was careful not to step on any bloodstains. The second body was faceup on the wood laminate flooring in front of the stove, the wife and mother sprawled in a pool of her own blood. The victim had extensive head and neck trauma, her facial features totally unidentifiable, the bones all broken, the flesh pulverized. So much blood covered the front of her that it was hard to make out the pattern on her t-shirt, but the leggings had to be LuLaRoe, given the garish repeat of peaches against a bright blue background.

Above her on the cooktop, a glass-lidded saucepan full of what appeared to be homemade Bolognese had boiled over, a black-and-brown halo of the stuff toasted around the heating element’s coil. Behind it, a big pot filled with only two inches of water sat on the largest of the burners, and next to the mess, on the counter, an unopened box of generic-brand spaghetti was beside a cutting board that had half a diced onion on it.

The woman had had no clue as she’d chopped the onion, browned the beef, and filled the boiling pot that it was the last meal she’d ever cook for her family.

Bile rose into the back of Erika’s throat as she glanced across at the open cellar door, the stairwell lit by an overhead feature mounted to the side wall.

“The killer had two weapons,” she said to no one in particular. Mostly so she could get her goiter to calm down. “The knife used on the father and a hammer used here. Or maybe it was a crowbar.”

“Hammer,” Trey interjected grimly. “It’s upstairs in the hall.”

“She started the water boiling.” Erika went over to the basement steps and breathed in deep. “Then she went down there to the washing machine—which explains the vanilla fragrance. It’s not scented candles. It’s Suavitel laundry detergent. My college roommate, Alejandra, used it all the time.”

“Erika—”

“She hears the commotion upstairs. Runs up to see what’s going on. By the time she’s on this floor, her husband is dead or in the process of dying and the killer is on her with that hammer.” Erika met Trey’s dark eyes. “There was no damage on the front door so the father let the killer in. Do we have a Ring?”

“No.”

“Where are the other two bodies—upstairs?”

Trey nodded. “But listen, Erika, you don’t need to go—”

“You’re on my last nerve saying my name like that. Anytime you want to cut out the pity, I’m ready to be treated like the adult I am instead of the child I was.”

She went back out through the living room and took the carpeted steps to the second floor. As soon as she got to the top landing, all she had to do was look down the dim, narrow hallway. At the far end, in a bedroom that was the color of Pepto-Bismol, two bodies were in full view, one on the bed, the other propped up against the wall on the floor.