had long since exited the premises, but assumptions were dangerous in
the police business.
Four officers went to the front, two more covered the back. Working in
pairs, the four policemen proceeded to make their way in. They noted
that the front door was unlocked, the alarm off. They satisfied
themselves with the downstairs and cautiously moved up the broad
staircase, their ears and eyes straining for any trace of sound or
movement.
By the time they reached the second-floor landing, the nostrils of the
sergeant in charge told him that this would not be a routine burglary.
Four minutes later they stood in a circle around what had recently been
a young, beautiful woman. The healthy coloring of each of the men had
faded to dull white.
The sergeant, fiftyish and a father of three, looked at the open window.
Thank God, he thought to himself; even with the outside air the
atmosphere inside the room was stupefying. He looked once more at the
corpse, then strode quickly to the window and sucked in deep gulps of
the crisp air.
He had a daughter about that age. For a moment he imag ABSOWTE POWER *
99 ined her on that floor, her face a memory, her life brutally over.
The matter was out of his bailiwick now, but he wished for one thing: he
wished to be there when whoever had done this atrocious thing was
caught.
CHAPTER SEVEN
SETH FRANK WAS SIMULTANEOUSLY MUNCHING A PIECE OF toast and attempting
to tie his six-year-old daughter’s hair ribbons for school when the
phone call came. His wife’s look told him all he needed. She finished
the ribbon. Seth cradled the phone while he finished knotting his tie,
listening all the while to the calm, efficient tones of the dispatcher.
Two minutes later he was in his car; the official bubble light
needlessly stuck to the top of his department-issued Ford and aqua blue
grille lights flashing ominously as he roared through the nearly
deserted back roads of the county.
Frank’s tall, big-boned frame was beginning its inevitable journey to
softness, and his curly black hair had seen more affluent days. At
forty-one years old, the father of three daughters who grew more complex
and bewildering by the day, he had come to realize that not all that
much in life made sense. But overall he was a happy man. Life had dealt
him no knockout punches. Yet. He had been in law enforcement long enough
to know how abruptly that could change.
Frank wadded up a piece of Juicy Fruit and slowly chewed it while
compact rows of needle pines flew past his window. He had started his
law enforcement career as a cop in some of the worst areas of New ‘York
City where the statement “the value of life” was an oxymoron and where
he had seen virtually every way one person could kill another.
He had eventually made detective, which had thrilled his wife. At least
now he would arrive at crime scenes after the bad guys had departed. She
slept better at night, knowing that the dreaded phone call would
probably not come to destroy her life. That was as much as she could
hope for being married to a cop.
Frank had finally been assigned to homicide, which was pretty much the
ultimate challenge in his line of work.
After a few years, he decided he liked theJob and the challenge, but not
at the rate of seven corpses a day. So he had made the trek south to
Virginia.
He was senior homicide detective for the County of Middleton, which
sounded better than it actually was, since he also happened to be the
only homicide detective the county employed. But the relatively
innocuous confines of the rustic Virginia county had not lent itself to
much demanding work over that time. The per capita income levels in his
jurisdiction were off the scale. People were murdered, but other than
wives shooting husbands or vice versa or inheritance-minded kids popping
off their parents, there hadn’t been much excitement. The perps in those
cases were pretty selfevident, less mental work than legwork. The
dispatcher’s phone call promised to change all that.