The monitor next to Connie Tullock’s bed at Alden Memorial Hospital displayed her vital signs in a spectrum of colored waves.

She was unconscious, having undergone emergency surgery for the stab wounds she’d received to her stomach, chest and neck. After operating for nearly four hours, the surgeon put Connie’s likelihood of surviving at less than 10 percent.

She was the best lead—maybe the only lead—investigators had to solve the murders of her son, her daughter, her husband—and probably her own, thought Sergeant Bill Jurek of the Eternity Police Service.

Since Connie had come out of surgery, Jurek had waited at her bedside with the nurse in case she regained consciousness. He was prepared to obtain a dying declaration, hoping she could identify whoever was behind the killings.

The knot in his gut had tightened because he knew the Tullock murders were going to hit the community hard. The town had never seen anything like it. Eternity’s last homicide was seven years ago when a trucker, Lenny Troy Boghin, smashed Rodney John Street, a biker, in the head with a chair at Harry Hoyt’s Bar because he spilled beer on him. Before that, Manford Ellerd Wiebe, a farmer with a gambling problem who’d lost everything at blackjack in Las Vegas, set his home ablaze killing himself, his wife and son in 1972.

To be sure, in 2000, Eternity got its run of crimes, domestic assaults, drug dealing, vandalism and thefts. It also saw its share of traffic and farming deaths, drownings, fire fatalities and occasionally people who froze in the winter. But never anything of this magnitude.

When the call came in, Jurek had been at his desk, earlier than his shift. He’d been awake thinking how his son needed braces, and how even with their dental plans Jurek and his wife, a teacher, faced an out-of-pocket bill of 2500 dollars. It weighed on his mind as he’d arrived at the office, got a coffee and was looking at the overnight log when the radio crackled. Dustin Meyer, a new constable, called in from 1721 Old Pioneer Road, which Jurek knew was the Tullock home.

“We’ve got three 10-32s, possibly a fourth,” Meyer said with urgency.

Eternity’s alphanumeric code defined a 10-32 as a sudden death, meaning not by natural causes.

Three 10-32s? That can’t be. Jurek got on the radio and called Meyer’s unit.

“Say again, 1-8.”

Meyer confirmed what he had said, setting everything in motion.

Activating the emergency lights and siren on his marked Dodge Charger, Jurek blasted across town to the address on Old Pioneer Road. Meyer was in front of the house with Marv Lander, who had his arm around Fran Penner, her face contorted in anguish, her knuckles white from squeezing the tissue in her hands.