“That’s another criminalist, Amy Slovak. She’ll be up there a while.”

Pike followed Chen through the entry to a large, open family room adjoining a dining area. An irregular pool of drying blood covered the floor midway between the dining table and the hall. Bright green yarn had been stretched from the blood pool to two metal stands in the living room, two strands to one of the stands, a single strand to the other. These stands marked the probable location of the shooters. A jumble of footprints crossed and crisscrossed the drying pool where one or more of the shooters had walked through the blood. A second, smaller stain was visible across the family room.

Chen nodded toward the big stain at their feet.

“Mr. Meyer was here. His wife and one of the boys there by the French doors. The nanny was in her room. I can give you a pretty good take on how it unfolded.”

A blue three-ring binder was open on a nearby table where Chen had been making sketches. He flipped to a scaled floor plan showing the location and position of the bodies, along with recovered shell casings.

“The family was probably having dinner when the shooters broke in. You saw the door. Bam, they scared the shit out of everybody. Meyer probably advanced on them, brief struggle, boom, boom—he had cuts on his face like they hit him with a hard object, probably a gun—and that’s when they killed him.”

Pike studied the three strands of yarn.

“They shot him three times?”

“Yeah, once high on his hip, once in the side, and once in his back. Two shooters, like they were trying to put him down fast. This suggests he was fighting. The others were shot once in the forehead at close range, which suggests a deliberate execution.”

The others. Cindy and the boys.

The ugly stain where Meyer bled out looked like the Salton Sea. Meyer had been a good fighter. He had superb training and great instincts, else Pike would never have made him part of his team.

“How many men all together?”

“Four, which makes this one a little different. The earlier invasions, there were only three guys. They added a fourth.”

“Four guns?”

“Looks like, but we’re still running the casings and bullets. It’s the shoe prints. We’ve got four distinct shoe prints.”

Pike glanced at the black smudges on door jambs and handles.

“Fingerprints?”

“Gloves. We didn’t get anything from the earlier crime scenes, either. No identifying prints, no DNA, no nothing except the shoes. C’mon, I’ll show you where we found the nanny.”

Chen led Pike across the dining room, through the kitchen, then past the laundry room to a tiny bedroom where the door and jamb were split.

“See how they crunched the door? It was locked. She was probably trying to hide.”

Chen glanced at his notes.