Jack Reacher 01 - Killing Floor

ALL QUARTERS FOR change. The guy still had no dollar bills. Then I told Finlay I needed to see the Morrison place. Told him I needed all the details. He just shrugged and led me outside. We turned and walked south. Passed by the village green and put the town behind us.
    “I was the first one there,” he said. “About ten this morning. I hadn’t seen Morrison since Friday and I needed to update the guy, but I couldn’t get him on the phone. It was middle of the morning on a Monday and we hadn’t done anything worth a damn about a double homicide from last Thursday night. We needed to get our asses in gear. So I went up to his house to start looking for him.”
    He went quiet and walked on. Revisiting in his mind the scene he’d found.
    “Front door was standing open,” he said. “Maybe a half inch. It had a bad feel. I went in, found them upstairs in the master bedroom. It was like a butcher’s shop. Blood everywhere. He was nailed to the wall, sort of hanging off. Both of them sliced up, him and his wife. It was terrible. About twenty-four hours of decomposition. Warm weather. Very unpleasant. So I called in the whole crew and we went over every inch and pieced it all together. Literally, I’m afraid.”
    He trailed off again. Just went quiet.
    “So it happened Sunday morning?” I said.
    He nodded.
    “Sunday papers on the kitchen table,” he said. “Couple of sections opened out and the rest untouched. Breakfast things on the table. Medical examiner says about ten o’clock Sunday morning.”
    “Any physical evidence left behind?” I asked him.
    He nodded again. Grimly.
    “Footprints in the blood,” he said. “The place was a lake of blood. Gallons of it. Partly dried up now, of course. They left footprints all over. But they were wearing rubber overshoes, you know? Like you get for the winter up north? No chance of tracing them. They must sell millions every year.”
    They had come prepared. They’d known there was going to be a lot of blood. They’d brought overshoes. They must have brought overalls. Like the nylon bodysuits they wear in the slaughterhouse. On the killing floor. Big white nylon suits, hooded, the white nylon splashed and smeared with bright red blood.
    “They wore gloves, too,” he said. “There are rubbery smears in the blood on the walls.”
    “How many people?” I asked him. I was trying to build up a picture.
    “Four,” he said. “The footprints are confused, but I think I can see four.”
    I nodded. Four sounded right. About the minimum, I reckoned. Morrison and his wife would have been fighting for their lives. It would take four of them, at least. Four out of the ten Hubble had mentioned.
    “Transport?” I said.
    “Can’t really tell,” Finlay said. “Gravel driveway, washed into ruts here and there. I saw some wide ruts which look new, maybe. Could have been wide tires. Maybe a big four-wheel-drive or a small truck.”
    We were a couple of hundred yards south of where Main Street had petered out. We turned west up a gravel driveway which must have been just about parallel with Beckman Drive. At the end of the driveway was Morrison’s house. It was a big formal place, white columns at the front, symmetrical evergreen trees dotted about. There was a new Lincoln parked near the door and a lot of police tape strung at waist height between the columns.
    “We going in?” Finlay asked.
    “May as well,” I said.

    WE DUCKED UNDER THE TAPE AND PUSHED IN THROUGH Morrison’s front door. The house was a wreck. Gray metallic fingerprint powder everywhere. Everything tossed and searched and photographed.
    “You won’t find anything,” Finlay said. “We went over the whole place.”
    I nodded and headed for the staircase. Went up and found the master bedroom. Stopped at the door and peered in. There was nothing to see except the ragged outline of the nail holes in the wall and the massive bloodstains. The blood was turning black. It looked like somebody had flung buckets of tar around. The carpet was crusty with it. On the parquet in the doorway I could see the footprints from the overshoes. I could make out the intricate pattern of the treads. I headed back downstairs and found Finlay leaning on a porch column out front.
    “OK?” he asked me.
    “Terrific,” I said. “You search the car?”
    He shook his head.
    “That’s Morrison’s,” he said. “We just looked for stuff the intruders might have left behind.”
    I stepped over to the Lincoln and