Lover Arisen (Black Dagger Brotherhood #20)(5)

Erika blinked. Blinked again.

And then she couldn’t move any part of herself. She wasn’t even breathing.

“Let’s go back downstairs,” Trey said softly, right by her ear.

When her colleague took her arm, she pulled free of the compassion and went forward. She stopped when she got to the open doorway. The body on the bed was half naked, a t-shirt shoved up above her pink-and-white bra, her black Lululemon leggings yanked down and hanging off of one foot. She had dark hair, just like both her parents, and it was long and pretty, curling at the ends. In her right hand… was a gun. A nine millimeter.

For some reason, the pink polish on the fingernails on the grip stood out. There were no chips in the finish, and as Erika glanced over at the cluttered top of the dresser, there was a little bottle of OPI in the exact shade. The girl had probably done them earlier in the day, or at least very recently.

Right next to the nail polish on the bureau was a framed picture. The girl who was now dead was standing next to a young man who was a good head taller than she was. She was looking into the camera with a wide smile. He was looking at her.

Erika’s eyes shifted over to the second body. The teenage boy in the photo was propped up against the pink wall, his legs straight out in front of him like he was a scarecrow that had fallen off its pole-mount. He had the muscularity of an athlete, with broad shoulders and a thick neck, and he was handsome in the way of a quintessential jock, square-jawed with deep-set eyes. There was a big patch of blood on the front of his Lincoln H.S. Football shirt and some splatter up his throat as well as under his chin. His hands were stained red, likely from when he’d killed the mother by beating her face in with the hammer.

His jeans were open at the fly.

Focusing on the gunshot wound, she noticed a second one, lower down, just under the diaphragm.

You got him twice in the torso, Erika thought numbly. Attagirl.

As she took a step forward, she noticed that the door to the room was busted in. Between one blink and the next, she heard the pounding, the crying, the screaming, as he’d broken the thing down after the daughter had locked herself inside, after her parents were murdered right under her—

Erika covered her ears as they began to ring.

“It’s fine,” she mumbled as Trey stepped in front of her again. “I’m fine.”

“I’ll walk you out.”

“The hell you will.”

Leaning to the side, Erika looked at the girl’s face. She was staring at the ceiling, the makeup around her now-vacant eyes smudged, the sooty rivers down her cheeks and smeared lipstick making a clown mask out of what had no doubt been very expertly applied, given the amount of brushes and compacts on that dresser top.

There was one other mark on her visage, but it wasn’t from MAC or NARS or whatever. The bullet hole at her temple was a circular penetration, and the entry wound was relatively neat, just some powder residue around a small pink-and-red extrusion of flesh. It was what was on the other side of her skull that was more gruesome, the bone, blood, and brain matter splattering across her pink duvet.

“He came with three weapons,” Erika heard herself say. “The knife, the hammer… and this gun.”

Had she gotten the nine millimeter away from him as he’d attacked her? Yes, that was how it had to have gone down. He had broken in here after he’d killed both her parents, and he’d gotten on her… and she’d somehow disarmed him… maybe because she’d pretended to go along with the sex?

She must have listened to the slaughter downstairs, heard her parents’ panic and pain. At least one of the pair of them, probably both, had no doubt yelled up at her to lock herself in and call for help—

“The parents don’t know yet,” Trey said. “His, I mean. We just sent a squad car over to the address.”

“Who found them all?” she asked roughly.

“We did. She called nine-one-one before she shot herself.”

Erika’s eyes quickly scanned the bed—there it was. A cell phone was on the bloodstained duvet cover, right by her.

The girl had held on to the nine millimeter, but not the phone.

“The operator who took the call heard the gun go off.” Trey went over and knelt by the boy’s body. “The girl was crying so hard, she could barely speak. But she managed to give his name, and tell the operator that he’d broken in and killed her parents. Then she provided her own address and… pulled the trigger a third time.”

“But it wasn’t her fault,” Erika whispered as she leaned across the bed to meet that vacant stare. “It wasn’t your fault, sweetheart. I promise you.”

As her voice broke, she cleared her throat. And cleared it again.

Without conscious thought, her hand went to a spot below her left collarbone. Through her jacket, she couldn’t feel the scars, but they were there.

Surrounded by the black-hole stillness of death, Erika’s own past came on her like a mugger, stealing reality from her, sucking her back to the one night she never wanted to relive and always did. Always. She had fought back, too, during the worst moments of her family’s life. And God knew, there had been so many times in the last fourteen years that she had wished she had killed herself—or could.

Trying to control the urge to vomit, she listened to a surge of voices down below by the front door. Some more people were entering the scene. No doubt the photographer. Maybe it was CSI already.