TANNENBERG - opening scene, first few pages

I believe in Fate--that the universe has ways of saying: Stop. Reverse course. 

Equally, I hate being told what to do. 

The day didn’t start well: I overslept, poured sour milk over the last of my cereal, smashed my hand in the sliding door, and limped to a standstill on a flat tire I could not afford to fix. If not for my stubborn middle finger to Fate, I’d have taken a personal day before things got worse.

Instead?

Instead I found myself where I did not belong: standing just inside the threshold of a small hot bedroom saturated in blood. I’d transcribed police and witness statements describing crime scenes, everything from mummified remains to fresh brains transported separately in a box. But this was the first one I’d stood inside and I’d have thought the blood was fake if not for the smell. There was just too much of it, like an overdone haunted house on Halloween: walls, ceiling, pooled on the floor, soaked into the mattresses of the matching twin beds in which lay two women, both early- to mid-twenties, both dead between two and six hours.

Detective Sergeant Brian Berger crouched beside the bed under the window. “We have IDs?”

Sergeant Ron Croft flipped a page on his notepad. I could feel his breath on the back of my neck. I’d watched him try to make sense of me getting out of Berger’s SUV at that hour of the morning, a look that said I should have had the sense to wait inside. He’d centered himself on the threshold, trapping me in the bedroom, so I’d regret that decision. 

“Blond is Chloe Adams,” he read. “Redhead is Saoirse Quinn—” 

Berger looked up. “Say that again.” 

“SHEER-sha. It’s Irish. She’s from County Cork. Adams is from New Zealand. According to the surviving housemate, this room is used every year by international interns who come to town to work the wine grape harvest.” 

Chloe Adams had hair as pale blond as my own, but longer and straight as falling water. She lay on her side, uncovered, her sheets and duvet folded neatly against the wall. Her pajama top—once white with a blue toile pattern, now mostly deep reddish-brown—and matching shorts were undisturbed. If not for the fact that her throat had been so deeply slashed she’d been nearly decapitated, she might have been asleep. 

Saoirse was another story. Sheets wound around her legs, satin camisole—an unstained section showed it had been pale green, and matched her panties--hanging in ribbons. Her blood-smeared face was mostly obscured by a matted mass of wavy auburn hair. I glanced at her hands. Both were deeply lacerated and bloodstained—defensive wounds--whereas Chloe’s fingers and palms showed only the purplish tint of grape juice, stains that spoke of hot days picking grape berries, crushing them in Ziplocs...I’d worked a few harvests. I knew firsthand the grit behind the romance.

Berger used gloved fingers to lift a pair of Gucci sunglasses from the nightstand, look them over, and put them back down. “If they came to work the harvest they’ve only been in town what, five, six weeks? Not much time to make enemies.”

“Doesn’t take time these days,” countered Croft. “Entitled rich kids breeze into town, look down their noses, treat the local guys like dirt, everyone’s drinking, sooner or later someone’s gonna go off. Not blaming the victims,” he held up a hand, palm out, to negate the lie, “I’m just saying people have lim...”

“Saoirse wasn’t rich,” I said. “Chloe was, but not Saoirse.”

“...its.” Dumbfounded that I’d dared speak, Croft fell silent.

Berger caught my eye. “What makes you say that?”

“What they’re wearing. Saoirse’s satin camisole and panties—fancy style, but polyester satin and inexpensive construction.”

“They’re harvest interns. Crush is dirty, sweaty work,” Berger said. “Everyone wears crappy old clothes.” 

“To work in, yes. Rich girls don’t sleep in them. See the label on the waistband of Chloe’s shorts? OVH stands for Olivia von Halle, a high-end brand. Looks like a cotton/silk blend. I’d guess that shorty set cost around four hundred bucks. Soairse’s...” I shrugged.

Croft snorted. I could see Berger wondering if I could really identify fabrics like that, so I said, “Silk and cotton fibers are absorbent. Polyester isn’t. Liquids soak into natural fibers but wick along synthetics. You can see the different patterns at the edges of the, ah...the stains.”

Croft said, “You do a lot of bleeding into different fabrics?” 

“A fair amount.” 

I always spoke carefully to Croft, few words, no inflection. I’d worked for the police department for six years, and he’d hated me from day one. I’d never figured out what I’d done or said to make him despise me, but he had power within the hierarchy, and I did not, so he was always trying to needle me into a spat we both knew he’d win.

An iPhone chimed on the dresser. Berger picked it up and checked the screen. “Alarm’s gone intermittent,” he said. “Originally set for five-thirty.” He silenced the chime, reached around me and handed the phone to Croft, forcing him at last from the doorway to bag it. 

But I couldn’t move. Much as I wanted out of that room, I stood frozen, alert as any prey animal to a sense of ongoing threat. It had been there from the moment I set foot in this house: a low growl in tall grass, impossible to pinpoint.

“This feel like rage to you?” 

Berger had spoken so quietly, and the question was so unexpected, I didn’t reply. As precinct Administrative Assistant, I was only at the scene because I’d gotten that flat tire on my way to work. Valley Brake and Tire had been winching my truck onto their flatbed when Berger happened by and offered me a lift. It was safe to say he hadn’t noticed me standing beside the road. He’d recognized my lime green 1977 Ford F-150. There could hardly be two in town.