Posessed

Have a wee read and let me know what you think of this opener:

The call came in at 10.34am. The death call. It was an unusual time of day for such a call as the death calls mostly came in at night, often waking Robbery Homicide detective John Connolly from his sleep. The shrill ringing of the bedside telephone in the middle of the night no longer startled him, such a regular part of his life it had become, although much less so since he had moved to Santa Barbara. Born in Kingman, AZ, son to an Irish Cop father and a Polish homemaker mother Connolly had never intended following his father’s footsteps in to the force. As a child he was less the academic and more practical with his hands, happiest building LEGO and later tinkering with motorbikes and cars. His childhood dream was to become a racing driver with his own crew in the Nascar Sprint Cup Series. Connolly was making a little headway in his chosen career starting off working part-time at the local Karting track, later as a mechanic in the local Ford dealership and also taking part in some small time kart races, but then life in Kingman fell apart and Connolly drifted through a number of towns before settling in L.A. where, with no more education than a GED he became a beat cop working out of Hollywood station before his 22nd birthday. Fast forward 15 years and he was married with children and working Robbery Homicide out of Santa Barbara.
Connolly was not asleep when the call came in, nor was he in his marital bed. He was at his desk in the Santa Barbara Police Department on East Figuero and the call was from Lieutenant Woods in the Fish Bowl. He was tieing up a few loose ends on the Williams case in order to have everything ready for the prosecution when the case came to trial when his desk phone rang, at 10.34am.

‘I’ve got a case for you John’, Woods said, ‘can you step in to my office?’ Connolly shifted his bulk up from his desk and made his way towards his boss’ glass walled office. Connolly liked Lieutenant Woods, he was a no bull**** guy, firm but fair with many years Homicide experience himself – not just an administrator and numbers cruncher trying to keep his solved case load figures up. ‘What have you got for me Loo?’, Connolly asked. ‘Take a seat John’, the Lieutenant answered, gesturing at one of the chairs in front of his desk. After Connolly sat down, the chair creaking under his weight Woods began. ‘Got five DB’s in a Condo on Gregory Way, Mexican family, mother; father and three kids looks like. The mother’s sister called it in, Luisa Aguillera, works the lunch time shift at the Canary and was due to have coffee with her sister en route to work. She has a key to the condo and let herself in thinking mommy had taken the kids for a walk and would be back shortly. Found the whole family dead upstairs in the bedrooms. Looks like a murder / suicide from the get go, the mother was found with a shotgun just beside her in the master bedroom. Get your ass down there John, see what’s what – and keep an open mind.’

Connolly took State Street north as far as Hitchcock driving south again for a couple of blocks before taking a left in to the semi-circular street that was Gregory Way. As soon as he turned he could see the blue strobes of two cruisers that had taken the initial call and were securing the perimeter waiting for the Dicks to arrive. Connolly had called his partner en route to the scene and could see Austin Keys getting out of his unmarked Crown Vic up ahead. Together they badged the officer at the perimeter and made their way in to the complex. Neither of the detectives had ever been there before and found a well kept complex that surrounded a pool and gardens. It was nice enough but very much at the lower end of the scale by Santa Barbara standards. A lot of the service workers who cleaned rooms, served lunches, tended to gardens and maintenance in the cities hotels and restaurants lived in the area, most of them renting as minimum wage workers could hardly afford real estate in Santa Barbara or it’s environs.

Connolly and Keys gave their names to the officer at the door of the condo and Connolly asked them what to expect inside looking at the officers name tag first. ‘What’ve you got for us today Thompson?’ ‘It ain’t pretty’, Thompson replied, ‘five dead bodies upstairs in the bedrooms, three young kids with multiple holes in them, the father with his brains splattered all over the wall and the mother with a bullet in her brain, looks like she killed the rest of them first with the shotgun before finishing herself off with the Glock that was found beside her on the bedroom floor’ Connolly and Wyse took the information in but knew they would hold off on judgement until they saw the scene for themselves and got the ME reports back. It had been known in the past for detectives to jump the gun on what looked like apparent suicides only to discover later that other forces were involved. The problem with that is that most murders are solved within the first forty-eight hours and by the time the ME reports come back and toxicology reports are returned that too much time has passed and the perpetrator is in the wind.

Connolly pointed his forefinger up and Wyse knew instinctively that he meant that he would take the top floor and Wyse would take the first floor. SID and the ME had yet to arrive so they could only take a cursory look first taking care not to touch anything or contaminate the scene until the ME released it to them. Connolly donned booties and gloves and mounted the stairs going up the left of the condo. He reached a small square landing with four open doors, two directly in front of him and one on each of the adjacent walls with the stairs to his back. The door directly in front of him was a bathroom and appeared empty. To his right seemed to be a kids bedroom and sticking his head in the door it also appeared empty. Moving to his left he came up to the third doorway and looked in on the first horror scene. This room appeared to be the master bedroom, neatly but sparsely furnished. A latino was sprawled half on the bed, half on the floor with half his head missing from his body, the rest of it splattered all over the wall behind the bed. Blood was everywhere. In front of the male on the floor lay the latina, face down, looking like she collapsed right where she had been shot, or shot herself. Connolly couldn’t see her wound, only the mass of dark hair at the back of her head. She obviously wasn’t shot with the Ruger that lay to her right but there was a Glock on the floor close to her left hand. Odd, Connolly thought, blow the husband away with a shotgun and use the handgun on yourself? Moving on to the final room he was greeted with horror scene number two. This wasn’t good, wasn’t good at all. Three children, all appeared to be under ten years old with buckshot wounds all over their bodies. Three young innocent children. Again, blood was everywhere. All over the walls, the beds and the floor. A bloody handprint on the wall made his stomach turn. Obviously the sight of the bodies were worse but having three young children himself the handprint brought home to him that these children were only hours ago full of life, probably running around playing, jumping, squealing. In the end they would have been screaming. Working homicide you dealt with death every day and tried your best to distance yourself from it as much as possible. Every cop had their own way of dealing with it. A lot of them turned to humour, or black humour. Homicide was not a joking matter. The DB could feel no more pain but their mothers, brothers, sisters, fathers felt it. Even still it was not unusual to enter a crime scene and find the cops, scientific investigation and more rarely the medical examiner joking about the vics. It wasn’t a lack of empathy, it was just their way of dealing with it. It was either that or the bottle, and a lot of cops did that too. Scraping dead bodies off the floor took its toll and you had to deal with it somehow.

‘Holy Mother of ****!’ Connolly was so deep in thought that he hadn’t heard Roberts from SID come up the stairs behind him, Wyse at his side. ‘The **** is wrong with people?’ Roberts continued. ‘ This isn’t freaking L.A.!’ As a scientific investigator Roberts attended crime scenes all over the county but mostly dealt with burglaries, thefts and arson. The murder rate for Santa Barbara was well below the national average and with its population of just 90,000 there were normally only two or three murders a year, sometimes none. Connolly himself was responsible for both robbery and homicide in Santa Barbara while back in L.A. he was solely on the homicide table. But like Roberts had said – this wasn’t L.A. and the odd homicides they had to deal with did not normally deliver this amount of gore. The Medical Examiner arrived next and officially declared the bodies deceased. Connolly asked the ME for an approximate time of death but Smyth was reluctant. ‘You know the drill Connolly, I can’t give you that until I get them on the table’. Connolly did know the drill but persisted and eventually Smyth grudgingly approximated TOD as between six and nine am of that day. Connolly and Wyse then had to back out and let SID and the ME get to work.

Downstairs Wyse volunteered to begin canvassing the neighbours in the complex and Connolly went to talk to the sister who was sitting with a female officer on the couch in the living room warming her shaking hands around a cup of coffee. ‘Mrs. _____’, Connoly began, forgetting the womans name that Woods had given him. ‘Aquillera’ she filled in for him. ‘Of course’, he resumed, ‘Detective Connolly, I work Robbery Homicide with Santa Barbara PD. Sorry to be meeting you under such circumstances. ‘Aguillera said nothing. ‘Do you think you would be able to answer a couple of questions for me at the moment or would you prefer to wait a while?’ Aguillera agreed to talk there and then and officer Carole gave them a bit of space without having to be asked. Connolly nodded his appreciation to her as she left the room. ‘Anything I can get you before we begin?’, Connolly asked. Aguillera just shook her head. He took the armchair opposite her so he could look her in the face and began his questions. ‘Mrs. Aguillera, can you talk me through what happened this morning?’ ‘I work in the Canary’, she replied, ‘normally do breakfast and lunch but they cut the OT so on Thursday’s and Friday’s I just do lunch. They want to keep my hours below forty a week. So for the last couple of months I usually meet Maria for coffee before I go to work on Friday mornings. We don’t have a fixed time for it, usually between nine and ten as I have to be in the Canary by eleven. This morning I got here about 9.30 and there was no answer at the door which wasn’t all that unusual as Maria could be coming back from walking the kids to school or have run down to the shops with the kids if they’re on summer break like now. I have a key to the condo on my bunch as I call in here to feed Bonzo, their dog if they go up state for a few days and just for general security. It’s not the first time I’ve got here before Maria got back and let myself in so when I rang the bell and no one answered I opened the door with my key.’ Luisa stopped then, seemed lost in thought and Connolly had to prompt her to continue. ‘Soon as I got in I knew something was wrong. I don’t know why but I just felt it straight away. I opened the door and called out for Maria but there was no answer. The house felt cold for some reason, it’s the middle of summer but it’s still cold’, she shuddered. ‘I put on some coffee and went upstairs to use the bathroom and that’s when I found them’.