Germaine felt like he’d arrived late to a party. Blue and white lights wiggled and jiggled on the houses up and down the street. Someone had played a game in which they tried to see how many police cars they could fit inside the festive yellow police tape which cordoned off the upper portion of Hillside Street. But most of the neighbors had gone back inside to finish their now-cold breakfasts and get into work before it was time to go home again.

He could see other FBI agents up the driveway, congregated around the hood of an 80s Buick, a box of Munchkins and a few cup carriers full of coffees laid out like the spread in a post-game locker room. A statie and a handful of local cops were gathered around, too. When he lumbered up the driveway conversation ceased, for a moment, before the group turned to him. He’d had to fight a few of them before, but relations were civil, these days, if not overly friendly.

"Hey fellas, where’s the chief?"

"Odd Crimes are over there." Blondie stepped toward Germaine, planting his body in front of the spread on the hood, his hands clenching and unclenching in and out of fists. The first time they’d met Germaine had to break three of his ribs. Blondie was a normal special agent, trained and raised down in Quantico, whereas Germaine was part of the new class out of Shrewsbury who were trained in slightly... different methods.

Blondie, Agent Blondie pointed towards the garage. He looked as if he were afraid to leave his rib cage exposed again. An older gentleman wearing the green windbreaker of their special branch held the unit chief  deep in conversation inside the rickety old garage. Almost literally held him, his meaty hands wrapped around the chief’s shoulders.

Germaine ducked as he approached the door and hunched inside next to the two men. "Heya chief. What have you got for us?" Germaine nodded his head back at the three decker, as if to indicate that he knew they were at least talking about something in that building.

"Whoa. Whoa there." The guy talking to the chief broke off from his conversation to focus on Germaine.

"Special Agent Bousquet, this is our Executive Assistant Director Phillips."

"Agent, your signature is way, way off." He waved his hands in the air, as if intent on carving out another Germaine solely from the air in front of them. "I don’t know that this is a good fit for you. You knew this guy, this family, didn’t you?"

"Well, I do, sure."

"Did. We’re thinking murder-suicide. The male took out the wife and child and then turned on himself."

Now it was Germaine’s turn to ’whoa.’

"Hang on a second," said the chief. "We don’t know that, where are you coming up with that? Sir." He turned to face Germaine. "There are no bodies, no real bio-mess up there, not even much household mess. Well, there’s a hand. But, other than that, we’ve just got windows on the second floor blown out, with no glass left anywhere, I mean anywhere around. No sign of any of the residents, and the downstairs and upstairs neighbors said they saw nothing. Heard a whole heck of a lot feet stomping around like they were running army drills in there, an explosion that might have been a small nuke going off, a fair bit of yelling, but no sign of the family who usually occupy the floor. ’A whole squadron of blacksmiths,’ they said, that’s it."

"Listen, Unit Chief Wilkins, I don’t think Germaine is a good fit, he’s too close to the family in this case to be effective. It’s going to skew his ch’i."

Germaine was close to the family. He and William Murphy had been friends since they’d met on the ice, gloves off, tiny ten year old fists raised. As the black kid playing a predominantly white sport, Germaine endured a lot of abuse, but few kids worked up the guts to fight him because he was big for his age, even then. But William did. He and Germaine twirled around the ice for a few minutes, no real punches landed, and neither of them harbored any hard feelings once it was all said and done. They were both sent off the ice for the day, and worked up a friendship in the locker room.

The two played on traveling teams together for a time and played together their last year in the American Hockey League for their hometown club in Worcester. They even took jobs downtown at the tinsel factory together, before Germaine moved on to the FBI. He’d have dinner with the Murphys every couple of weeks, sitting just upstairs from where he stood now. Probably in the middle of the crime scene.

The unit chief put his hand on the Executive Assistant Director’s shoulder. "Listen, I think that’s what’ll make him the best choice for the job. Consider him your bloodhound -- he’s already got a good sense, a good sniff of the family before he goes off and hunts them down." The chief nodded to Germaine. "Right, agent? You’re up to the task on this one, aren’t you? We’re expecting you to find this family, bring them back in. Safely. And we’re not," he shot a look at the director, "assuming they’re deceased at this point in time."

"Sure thing."

Germaine headed to the back stairs. The gang of enforcement officers at the Buick all faced him, watched him cross the driveway towards the building.

#

Two local officers had been stationed at the back door, talking about the Red Sox. Germaine wasn’t particularly surprised to see that one of them was Officer Gregory.

It was Bureau protocol that an agent like Germaine was paired with a normal agent or a local law enforcement representative, and it always seemed, to Germaine, anyway, that Gregory was the cop who pulled the duty on his crime scenes. He was on the short side and, unlike most of his police brethren, full of questions about what it was Germaine did. Or his uniqueness came from verbalizing the questions that most of them probably had, but were afraid to ask. Germaine figured the escort policy was there because, deep down, their methods scared the folks trained in more classical methods of analyzing a crime scene.

But this time Gregory gave a respectful nod and trudged up the stairs ahead of him in silence.

There was another policeman from the Worcester force stationed outside the apartment, sleeping in a chair next to the back door, the screen of which was hanging askew from its hinges.

"Heya Fox, how you doing?" Gregory gave the sole of his boot a little kick.

He didn’t miss a beat. "Good. Good. Kids, you know?"

"No kidding," said Gregory.

Officer Fox rubbed a hand over his face. "Bill. Agent Bousquet."

"What happened to the door?" asked Gregory.

"Nope. Not from the crime," Germaine said. "Been like that for a while." He opened the back door and headed inside.

Hell, Laura had asked him to fix it a few times, that’s how long it had been like that. But neither he nor Will nor Laura got around to it, they just talked about it a lot.

The back hallway was a mess of boots and shoes and a broom or two. The trash cans had been removed and beaten, it seemed, left on the back landing, and there was a greater than usual prevalence of scuff marks from the parade of agents and police but otherwise Germaine could have been popping around for a Wednesday dinner, spaghetti night.

In the kitchen, however, it was not a normal dinner night. It looked as if someone had attempted to use the kitchen table as a lean-to, camping out amidst the placemats and a smattering of smashed ceramic. An agent knelt on the floor, taking pictures up close of the debris. There was a giant gouge in the middle of the table, like someone had taken a knife to it and the fridge was skewed in its cupboard, a rip in the linoleum beneath it. Laura was going to be furious. If she was still alive, that is.

"The bathroom’s the epicenter."

Gregory led Germaine into the bathroom. There was a high water mark on the wall, beneath which everything was scorched, bleached out, colorless.

"Will I leave you for a bit?"

"Sure, that’d be good."

Germaine sat down on the edge of the tub, which had great gashes torn out of the acrylic in four distinct spots. Germaine put his finger against one of the scars and felt the little curly cues like hair at its edges.

And then he closed his eyes and sat very, very still. The noise of the other agents scouring the house and measuring the blast marks on the walls, examining the carpet in the living room and measuring the resting place of the TV and TV stand and bookshelves which had been upset, all that noise faded away, until he was left on his own in the bathroom, a slight breeze coming from the window, which was open to the outside because the glass and screen had been torn from the frame. If he’d looked outside he would have seen the scrawny and bent screen in the neighbor’s hedges, resting against their house like it had popped out for a cigarette break.

In fact, that’s where he looked first, just to warm up. He looked outside the window as if he were intending to cross the street, or alleyway, in this case. To someone poking their head in the door they’d see a large black man sitting with his eyes closed on the edge of a tub, but Germaine was crawling over the astral version of the crime scene like a mental spider.

He saw the crooked screen down in the bushes, the glass fragments in and amongst the rocks below, as this side of the house wasn’t paved, it just held the drainage rocks in the gutter. He got no sense, at all, of Sadie or Laura having been there, so he moved on, came back in the window, and stepped through the apartment. Nothing in the bedrooms, the living room, the front room off the living room. Nothing in the street out front. This version of the crime scene was empty of all life. Germaine got no sense for the girls at all. He saw one little yellow ticket in the grass on the front lawn, just at the retaining wall, but nothing else.

Officer Gregory popped his head into the bathroom, "I didn’t want to ask ’are you okay in here’, but... are you okay in here? The other agents aren’t getting much, no fingerprints at all, as if they were all burned off by whatever left that mark. You having any luck?"

Germaine answered as if swimming up slowly out of a deep dive. It was similar, and the bends from his viewing could be just as bad as a diver’s. "Nothing. I’m getting nothing at all. For the girls." He focused his gaze on Gregory. Impassive. Laser beam. "I’m about to try Will."

"Ah, sorry. I’ll leave you to it." And Gregory popped back out of the room, and Germaine closed his eyes again and let the other noise fade away.