“Just that she’s never seen them, but a friend in the real estate business told her it was someone from down in Grinton.”
“How’d she feel about that?”
Bascomb shrugged. “About like you’d expect. ‘Grinton’ is not a popular word on this side of town.”
“How about the neighbor on the other side?”
“Hollis Vitter. Piece of work. Pissed off at the grass not being mowed, pissed off at ‘the Grinton element’ moving into Bluestone, pissed off at ‘gun-control faggots.’ Lot of things piss him off.”
“Has he ever seen the people who rented the house?”
“No. But he thinks they must be foreigners.”
“Why?”
“Some bullshit about them not cutting the grass. He wasn’t making a lot of sense.”
“Jesus,” muttered Torres. “Did he tell you anything that could be relevant to the case?”
“Actually, yes. And that part’s more interesting. Like the lady on the other side, he heard a sharp ‘bang,’ but he didn’t get to the window right away. Says he was locked in the shitter.”
“Locked?”
“That’s the word he used. The point is, the window was open, and he’s sure what he heard leaving wasn’t a car. He says it was a motorcycle and that the sound didn’t come from the street, it came from the weedy little hill that drops off in back of these houses.”
Torres looked uncertain. “Do we trust what he says about the sound?”
Bascomb sucked at his teeth. “I kinda pushed him on that, and he said he used to be a motocross mechanic down at Dortler’s Speed Sports.”
Torres appeared puzzled by the conflicting vehicle descriptions. “We’ll have to get that sorted out. Right now we need Garrett up here. And we need to get into that house. I’ll call in a request for a search warrant.”
“If you want to, for the record,” said Gurney. “But we have justification to go in immediately. We have reason to believe a shot was fired from the premises, and we have to ensure that the evidence techs aren’t blindsided when they go in, which they need to do ASAP.”
Torres made the warrant call, then a call to Garrett Felder, the head crime-scene tech.
“Okay,” he said, putting away his phone. “Let’s do it. How many doors does that house have?”
“Three,” said Bascomb. “Front, back, and left side.”
Torres looked questioningly at Gurney.
“Your show, Mark. Put us where you want us.”
“Right. Okay. You take the back. Bobby, you take the side. I’ll take the front and give the signal for going in.”
One of the two cops taping off the area looked over. “You want us somewhere?”
Torres thought about it for a moment, then pointed. “Go to diagonal corners of the yard, so you can each see two sides of the house, and keep an eye on the windows.” They nodded and went to their assigned positions. Bascomb, Gurney, and Torres did the same.
As Gurney was passing the side door, he noted that it was slightly ajar. The back door, he discovered a few seconds later, was wide open. He reached down to his ankle holster, pulled out his Beretta, slipped off the safety, and waited for the entry signal.
A moment later he heard Torres’s knocking at the front door, a pause, then more insistent knocking, followed by “Police! Open the door now!” Then several seconds of silence, followed by “Officers going in! Now!” And the sound of glass breaking.
Gurney stepped through the open back doorway into a narrow hall that led past a small bathroom into a stale-smelling kitchen. The layout was similar to that of the Steele house, but everything here was duller, dustier. He passed through the kitchen into a small dining room, separated from the living room by a wide arch.
In the living room there were no rugs, one flimsy-looking floor lamp, and very little furniture—a shabby couch, an armchair, an end table—adding to the uninhabited feeling. In the dim light coming through the partially closed blinds, he could see a stairway to the second floor. A hall behind the stairway led to the side door. He assumed that the door he saw beneath the stairway would lead to the basement.
Torres was at the foot of the stairs to the second floor, his Glock in a two-handed grip close to his chest. Bascomb was in the hall, a similar weapon in a similar position.
Torres called out, “This is the police! Anyone in the house, show yourself now!”
The response was a dead silence. In a low voice he directed Bascomb to check out the basement and asked Gurney to come with him to check out the upstairs.
There was no carpet on the stairs and the creaking of each tread was sufficient to give anyone who might have been lurking up there a step-by-step sense of their approach.
The upstairs turned out to be as bleak and deserted as the downstairs. There were three bedrooms, each containing a double bed. There was a bathroom with a dusty bathtub, a shower stall with no shower curtain, and a towel rack with no towels.
