“Dogs love me,” I said. “Watch.”
I walked up to the dog, saying, “Hi, buddy,” and put out the flat of my hand. He wagged his tail, backed up, walked up to the door, and lifted his head toward the knob.
Conklin joined us. He pressed the doorbell. I knocked and called out, “Shirley? Anyone home?”
We were turning to go back down the walk when the lock clattered, the doorknob turned, and a little boy wearing pajama bottoms stood inside the doorway. I remembered the child’s name.
“Brett? I’m Sergeant Boxer. I met you a couple of days ago. Do you remember me?”
He looked up at us and burst into tears.
I pushed the door open. The boy’s PJs were wet and his footprints on the wooden floor from the kitchen to the front door were red.
His hands and feet, his chest, and the sides of his face were red.
Brett Chan was covered with blood.
CHAPTER 32
“GIVE ME YOUR hand,” I said to the little boy. I remembered Shirley Chan telling me that Brett was seven. He was small for his age. Dark hair, his glasses askew, tears sheeting down his cheeks.
He held out his hand, which looked rusty with dry blood.
I grabbed his little wrist to pull him outside the house, closed the door, dropped to a crouch, and looked him over.
“Where do you hurt?” I asked him. He cried—bawled, actually—but I saw no injuries. The blood wasn’t his.
“Who’s inside the house?”
“My mom. And Haley.”
“No one else?” I asked. “Are they hurt?”
The little boy just sobbed.
Had the perp or perps fled? Or had Shirley Chan gone mad, shot up the place, including her daughter and herself? Had Brett been sent to the door under a threat: Don’t say anything or I’ll kill you?
Conklin said, “Brett? Let’s go out to our police car, OK, buddy? I’m going to call for more police. I need you to stay in the front seat and listen to the police band for us. OK?”
Brett Chan nodded.
Conklin put his hand on the boy’s small back and walked him twenty feet out to our unmarked. I saw my partner talking into the mic, locking up the car, getting a couple of vests out of the trunk, then coming back up to the front steps.
“Local PD is on the way,” he said. “We can’t wait.”
Brett Chan was covered in blood. He might be the last living member of his family, or someone inside could be bleeding out right now. No one would blame us if we waited for backup before going into a hot situation, but my partner and I would blame ourselves if someone died because we were too late.
We got our vests on and our guns in our hands, and I shouted at the doorway, “This is the police! We’re coming in.”
Then I nodded to Conklin and he kicked open the door.
The foyer and front room floors were crisscrossed with bloody footprints. Conklin took a right toward the bedrooms and I followed the tracks to the left.
As I approached the kitchen, the hair at the back of my neck lifted like I’d been brushed by cold, dead fingers. What would I find at the intersection of all those small footprints? Was I walking into a room where a shooter had his gun braced and was ready to fire again?
I hugged the doorway, and with gun extended, I peered into the kitchen.
Shirley Chan was lying faceup on the floor between the counter and the refrigerator, her blood forming a wide red halo around her head. I stooped beside her and felt for a pulse that I knew I wouldn’t find. Her skin was still warm, and the smell of gunpowder lingered in the air.