“Okay. Set up a command post on the street — not in the yard, Sergeant. I want officers at the front and back doors, and another at the neighbor’s house. Anyone wants to get into either place, they go through you first — and then the answer is no. Not until I’m on-site. This is an MPD crime scene, and I’m ranking Homicide. You’re going to see FBI, ATF, maybe the chief, too. He lives a lot closer than I do. Tell him to call me in the car if he wants.”

“Anything else, Detective?” Fleischman sounded just a little overwhelmed. Not that I blamed him. Most 2D officers aren’t used to this kind of thing.

“Yeah, talk to your first responders. I don’t want any jaw jacking with the press or the neighbors — no one. As far as your guys are concerned, they haven’t seen a thing, they don’t know a thing. Just keep the whole place locked down tight until I’m there.”

“I’ll try,” he said.

“No, Sergeant. You’ll just do it. Trust me — we have to keep this thing locked down tight.”

Chapter 24

UNFORTUNATELY THE PRESS was going berserk when I got there. Dozens of cameras were jockeying for an angle on Mel and Nina Dlouhy’s white stone house, either out front at the barriers that Sergeant Ed Fleischman had established, or over on Thirty-first, where a separate detail had been dispatched just to keep people from coming in through the back, which they certainly would do.

Most of the looky-loos on the street, if they weren’t press, were probably wandering up from Cleveland Avenue. The neighbors seemed to have stayed home. I could see silhouettes in the windows up and down the block as I drove in. I signed up with crime-scene attendance and immediately ordered a canvassing detail to start knocking on doors.

Sampson met me at the scene, straight from a faculty thing at Georgetown, where his wife, Billie, taught nursing. “Can’t say I’m glad this happened,” he told me, “but, shit, how much wine and cheese can a man eat in one lifetime?”

We started in the living room, where the Dlouhys had reportedly been watching an episode of The Closer. The TV was still on, ironically with a live news shot of the house now. “That’s creepy,” said Sampson. “The press like to talk about invasion of privacy — except when they’re doing the invading.”

Mrs. Dlouhy’s initial statement was that she’d heard a tinkle of glass, looked over at the broken window, and only then noticed her husband’s head slumped over with his eyes wide open in the recliner next to hers. I could still hear her crying in the kitchen with one of our counselors, and my heart went out to her some. What a nightmare.