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Loren Barron was facedown in the living room, a bloodstain soaking into the rug beneath his head, a spray of blood droplets on a wall and on the television that hung on the wall, crimson smears on an anchorwoman’s face.
His head was misshapen from the passage of a large-caliber bullet from back to front, exiting at one of his eyes. They found his girlfriend near the back door, which she’d apparently tried to escape through, a bigger puddle around her, on the nonabsorbent terrazzo floor, and another spray of blood across a white washer and dryer. The rooms stank of death: fecal matter, urine, the astringent odor of gunpowder.
Baxter said, “I gotta go outside or I’m gonna puke.”
“Go,” Letty said. “If you gotta throw up, try to do it somewhere the feds won’t find it and test it for DNA. Down the street into some weeds would be good.”
Baxter went. Letty, fighting nausea herself, did a quick run through the house. No laptops. A tower computer, with three screens, sat on a desk in a home office; two hard drives had been ripped out. She opened the back door, hoping to get some fresh air in the house. Back in the living room, she found Baxter looking in at the side door. “You throw up?”
“No, I think I’m good, but the smell is bad. Laptops?”
“They’re gone. Probably what the guy had in that sack. There’s a desktop, but the hard drives are gone.”
Baxter stuck his head inside and looked at Barron, on the floor, and then stepped inside, crossed the room, and looked at the woman by the back door. “Those assholes didn’t ask any questions, they knew what they were here for,” Baxter said. “They just shot them.”
“I think so,” Letty said.
“I’ve never seen a dead body outside a funeral home, my aunt Janice, died of breast cancer,” Baxter said. “These guys kinda look like... dead. Like movie dead.”
“Nice if we could get those laptops,” Letty said.
Baxter: “No serious hacker is going to leave problematic content unencrypted on a laptop. They may have gotten the laptops, but they probably won’t get the content. I hate to say it, because of... well, whatyoumight want to do... but there’s a stash place somewhere in this house. The good stuff that no crook will find. Not in ten minutes, anyway.”
“We need to find it,” Letty said.
“I was afraid you’d say that. Okay. Look for something out of place,” Baxter said. “Could be anything. I’ve lived in crappy houses and hidden a lot of stuff, so I know the possibilities...”
“Tell me some.”
He told her to check edges and corners, anything that looked like a thick board that might actually be a thin drawer. He told her to look at the power outlets, to see if they all matched. If one didn’t, it could be a small safe.
Spice and seed jars needed to be checked—“You can stick an empty toilet paper roll down inside them, so from the outside, yousee beans in a jar, and nothing else, but there’s a hollow space inside that’ll take money or flash drives.”
Books could be hollowed out; a stack of books could be glued together, with a single space hollowed out in all of them. Drawers might have false bottoms; if a tennis ball is carefully cut, it could be squeezed to open it, but when the pressure was taken off, it would go back to looking like a regular tennis ball...
“Those are pretty small spaces,” Letty said.
“The most valuable things that people have are jewelry, which usually fits in small spaces, and information. You can stick an entire library on a single flash drive,” Baxter said.
They found a box of plastic gloves under the sink in the kitchen, pulled them on. They started with the woman’s purse, which turned up no flash drives, but did provide a driver’s license with a photo and her name and age. They took a cell phone photo of it, and then replaced it.
They searched the bedroom and bathroom, checking every pocket in every coat and jacket, assuring that every shoe was empty, that every bottle and can contained what it was supposed to contain, even if that was nothing.
All of the electric outlets were identical, which suggested that none of them concealed a hiding spot.
“The outlet safes look good, but they usually don’t match whatever your other outlets look like,” Baxter said. “They’re usually white and most outlets are beige. Don’t know why that is.”
There were no false bottoms in the drawers they examined, or secret drawers under the kitchen counters, or beneath the windows. Barron’s shaving cream cans didn’t unscrew to reveal a secret space.
An hour after they began the search, they found Barron’s cachein a hallway, behind a ten-by-sixteen-inch photo of a young Barron and an older woman standing in front of the Eiffel Tower. The photo was in a thick wooden frame, with a glued brown paper backing on the reverse side. Nothing seemed unusual until Letty tried to take it off the wall and noticed that it was far too heavy.
Baxter pushed up on the glass that covered the photo and the whole front slid up, including the photo, revealing a line of narrow shelves, almost like a spice cabinet, holding ranks of flash drives, four CDs in sleeves, and three stacks of currency, two of dollars and one of Euros.
“There we go,” Baxter said. He took the cash and stuck it in his jacket pocket. “Let’s pack it up and get the fuck outa here before the killers come back.”
They did that; once in the car, they scanned the photos of the killers and the SUV into the iPad, and Letty called Delores Nowak.
“We were watching that Barron guy when two shooters showed up,” she said. “They went inside and murdered Barron and his girlfriend.”
