King of Swords

It was dark and hot inside Ruth Cajuste's house. All the curtains had been pulled shut, the windows closed. The stench was intense, close to unbearable; even behind their masks and the Vicks ointment they'd rubbed under and in their noses, hints of its extremity wriggled through.

Max closed the door and Joe flicked on the light. They were wearing gloves and plastic covers on their shoes. The scene would be examined by forensics and they didn't want to leave even a hint of their presence.

They saw the first three bodies immediately: still, dark bundles lying very close together, to the right of the door.

There were two more bodies about twenty feet away.

They checked the rooms: kitchen on the right, empty; two bedrooms on the left, both empty. Last there was the bathroom. The door had been kicked or bashed clean off its hinges. Another body was in a seated position on the end wall, right under a small rectangular frosted-glass window.

There was no back door. They'd checked before going in the front.

Six bodies.

They went back to the beginning and examined the house.

They were in a wide open-plan space which served as both front room and dining area, tiled pale yellow. The area around the bodies was moving, armies of black beetles scurrying and swarming to get a piece of what palatable flesh was left. This wasn't the orderly disciplined stripping and carting off they'd witnessed at the Lacour house, but a frenzied free-for-all. The beetles sensed that time was

J29° running out. The temperature in the house had accelerated the process of decomposition.

'What's the date today?' Max asked.

'Third of June.'

'These look well over a month old. I'd say they were killed on the twenty-sixth of April.'

The five-week-old bodies had passed the bloated stage and were liquefying from me inside. Puddles of shiny translucent slime had formed about the torsos, mingling with the halos, commas and wings of dried and now black blood that had poured out of the wounds; skin was slipping off bone and turning into grey-green mush. Each body had its own cloud of blowflies hovering right above it.

Joe named the ashen-haired woman as Ruth Cajuste, the man two feet away from her as Sauveur Kenscoff, and the girl lying face down in the red and white gingham dress, he initially mistook for Crystal Taino, except that her hair and body type were wrong. She looked more like a teenager. He corrected her identity to Jane Doe.

Ruth Cajuste had been shot in the forehead. A writhing nest of yellowy blowfly maggots filled the hole. She was lying on her back, in the corner, hands folded across her chest. Max and Joe agreed she'd most likely been killed first, way before she could realize that her son Jean Assad had just put a bullet in her brain.

Sauveur had realized what was happening and had tried to fight back. There was a silver . 3 8 Special next to his right hand, but the safety was still on. He'd had just enough time to pull his weapon before being hit in the shoulder, chest and through the left eye. That last shot had voided his cranium and splattered the contents over the wall behind him. He too was lying on his back.

The blood-wipe pattern between the edge of the door and the teenager's head told them her body had been moved post-mortem. There was an upward arc of high-velocity

spatter covering the inside of the door; stray spots of blood had hit the wall above and touched the ceiling, indicating that the girl had been close to the door handle when the bullet struck the back of her head. There were shell fragments studding the wood and wall, along with pieces of bone and two teeth. She'd been shot at close range, the circle of singed hair around the entry wound suggesting the barrel had been mere inches away.

'No one heard it,' Joe said.

'Silencer — must've been,' Max suggested. It was the only explanation he could come up with. The house was in the middle of a row of one-floor homes, each about fifteen metres apart. The walls were on the thin side of functional.

Max looked around the scene. He thought he'd seen something unusual about the bodies, but he couldn't find it again.

The two other corpses in the middle of the room were those of Neptune Perrault and Crystal Taino. Neptune's right leg was slung across both of Crystal's, his puffed-up, rotting right-hand fingers were interlocked with those of Crystal's left, and his ruptured head — shot clean through the temple — was leaning into Crystal's neck, as if he'd been nuzzling her when he'd died. Crystal was lying face down, shot through the crown.

Max stared at them a good long while, unable to take his eyes away from the sight, as touching and tender to him as it was grotesque.

'He didn't even try to get away, or resist,' he said to Joe.

'He just lay down and grabbed her hand. He couldn't live without her, but he could die with her. They deserve justice.'