“And the games begin again,” Sampson said.
“This is the sickest game I’ve ever heard of,” I said angrily, showing my identification to the troopers.
Once we were beyond the police barrier, Sampson said, “We know numbers?”
I shook my head. “The maid saw the grandmother and backed out.”
A short man in his mid-forties with sandy hair and wearing a blue FBI windbreaker came down the driveway toward us.
“You been inside?” Sampson asked.
“Waiting for you,” said Ned Mahoney, FBI special agent in charge. “You’re the only ones who’ve been to all the earlier crime scenes, and I wanted your eyes on the place first. See if Family Man has finally made a mistake.”
“Hope springs eternal,” I said. We walked up the driveway and saw a white Porsche Cayenne in one bay of the carriage house and a red Corvette in another.
“Big money?” Sampson said.
“The whole neighborhood is big money,” Mahoney said.
“What’s the maid’s story?” I asked.
Mahoney said she’d arrived at six a.m., her normal time, and came in through the kitchen door to find the family dog whining. After feeding the dog, she went into the mother-in-law’s apartment, also her routine.
“The maid saw grandma and got so upset, she had chest pain and couldn’t breathe after she called 911,” Ned said. “She’s in the ER with a uniformed officer now.”
We put on hazmat suits, blue booties, latex gloves, surgical masks, and hairnets so as not to contaminate the house with our own DNA.
The assassin the media had dubbed “the Family Man” had attacked twice before in the DC area, and twice before, we and a great team of forensic investigators had scoured the crime scenes top to bottom and did not come up with a single strand of DNA that did not belong to the victims or their immediate families or friends.
There had been no unidentified fingerprints either. And no footprints. No alarms triggered. No signs of tinkering at the locks. And the killer had left no witnesses and no suspicious footage of any kind on the security cameras in the surrounding areas.
Mahoney adjusted his mask and said, “Let’s go catch the perfect killer.”
“There’s no such thing,” I said.
“I don’t know, Alex,” Sampson said. “He hasn’t thrown a ball off the plate yet.”
CHAPTER 4
I HAD GROWN TO hate entering the Family Man’s crime scenes.
In my line of work, it was normal to come upon a murdered adult. It was all too common to encounter multiple victims. And while it was always shocking and disheartening to face slain children, it wasn’t unusual.
But it was almost unheard of to find three and sometimes four generations of a single family murdered, one after another, in the same house over the course of the same night. So far, the killer had given no reason, left no note, offered no insight whatsoever into his mind.
It enraged me and everyone else assigned to the case. Indeed, as we went into the house, I could see grim anger in the faces of every agent, detective, and forensics expert on hand.
Who shoots old people and children like that? With no emotion? And why? Goddamn it, why?
I had never seen anything like this case. The killings were all cold, technical, no signs of passion or obsession.
The seven newest victims—Mr. and Mrs. Carpenter, Granny Pearl, twelve-year-old twins Alice and Mary, nine-year-old Nick, and five-year-old Alan—had all been executed the same way the others had: shot at close range through the upper part of the skull.
Seeing the victims angered me even more, especially the kids, particularly the boys. Nick was a year younger than my son Ali, and Nick’s younger brother, Alan, had cerebral palsy. Mahoney and Sampson were equally shocked.
“What kind of sick, unfeeling bastard executes a special-needs kid?” Ned said.
“Or the grandmother of a special-needs kid?” Sampson said.
Those questions spun in my mind as I tried to suppress my anger and see the crime scene on its own and in relation to the others.
“A careful, sick, unfeeling bastard,” I replied. “I think he did it bottom to top—mom and dad first, grandma second, the four kids last.”
“Makes sense,” Mahoney said. “Biggest threats first.”
I nodded. “And he polices his brass as he goes.”
Sampson said, “The more I think about the lack of DNA evidence in the other cases and probably here, the more I figure he’s got to be dressed like us.”
“You mean in PPE?” I said.
“It’s the only explanation I can come up with,” he said. “I mean, we’re seeing no signs of recent cleaning up here.”
Mahoney said, “The maid says Mrs. Carpenter was a neat freak, so we might not know if he cleaned anything.”
“PPE, I’m telling you,” Sampson said. “Gloves plus gown plus hairnet plus mask plus eye protection equals no DNA.”
“I think we should operate on that assumption until proven otherwise,” I said. “And I need to get out of this gear for a bit. I’m getting claustrophobic.”
“Let’s take a break,” Mahoney said. “Get forensics in here.”
We left by the back door and stood by the pool stripping off our protective equipment, feeling renewed outrage at these deaths and a little defeated by the lack of evidence around them.
“However he’s dressed, he’s a pro,” I said. “Gotta be.”
“Hundred percent trained assassin,” Mahoney said, nodding.
“I agree,” Sampson said. “If he were an ordinary sicko, he might have done it in a different way each time and then hung around to play a little. This guy is on a mission, in and out. Absolutely ruthless. I mean, again, who shoots a special-needs kid?”
“Someone who’s getting his own needs met,” Ned said as he waved to a crew of FBI techs waiting to enter the house.
I said, “Sure, but what needs? What does he get out of this? He’s certainly not doing it for jollies.”
Sampson shrugged. “Money? Power? Revenge?”
“Maybe,” I said. “But there were no connections whatsoever between the Hodges family and the Landau family, and I doubt the Carpenter family will break that pattern. What links them? How does he choose his victims? What’s his motivation? We’re no closer to knowing that than we were a year ago when these killings started.”
“Then we need to work harder,” Sampson said, looking down the driveway at a growing crowd of neighbors across the street. “Go back to basics. Pound some shoe leather until something gives.”
“I’m with you,” I said. “Let’s go.”
Mahoney said, “I’m staying put. Let me know what the locals say.”
We walked down the driveway and across the street to the police tape, behind which about twenty people were gathered. The media was being kept off to the left.
Sampson and I knew several of the reporters, and they began shouting at us. But we ignored them, split up, and tried to talk to the neighbors, who were upset and firing more questions at us than we were at them.
When we informed them that the entire Carpenter family was gone, several of the women broke down sobbing. Carrie Baldwin, who lived up the street and claimed she and Sue Carpenter had been BFFs, almost fainted in her husband’s arms when we confirmed that Alan had also been murdered in cold blood.