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He left Steve and shuffled up the redbrick sidewalk to the house, climbed three stone steps to the front porch, crossed it to the impressive two-panel front door. The door was covered with plastic sheeting, meaning the cops thought the killer might have touched it. A young cop inside the door said, in her best officious tone, “Stay inside the tape.”
Lucas stepped into the house, found himself in an entrance foyer with twelve-foot ceilings, a wood-strip floor of some light-colored wood, and an intricate, circular red-and-blue Persian carpet under a modern cut-crystal chandelier.
Three small, framed watercolors of English country scenes hung on pale yellow plaster walls, above a darker-wood wainscoting. A three-foot-wide, blue-taped walkway led across the carpet deeper into the house.
He followed the walkway to the living room, where a polished ebony grand piano sat in one corner—a basketball lay beneath the keyboard. A couch and six easy chairs, in two groups, were wrapped around coffee tables on another Persian carpet, this one at least twelve by eighteen feet, and threaded with gold.
Three bodies, one male adult and two male children, lay on the carpet, the adult seeming to grasp at a piano leg.
The room smelled of bloody flesh, not unlike the odor of a custom butcher shop, and beneath that, the incongruous scent of buttered popcorn and something else. A martini? A crime scene tech was using a video camera and an LED light panel to record the scene. A half-dozen people were standing inside the tape, looking at the bodies, or trying not to.
An FBI agent who Lucas didn’t know, with an ID on a lanyard around his neck, glanced at him, nodded, then looked back at the bodies and the techs working around them. The St. Paul’s deputy chief for major crimes raised an eyebrow to Lucas, and a BCA investigator named Gary Durey stepped behind the chief and said, “Didn’t know you were working this.”
“I’m not. I got yanked off the couch to look at it,” Lucas said.Lucas had been a BCA agent before he joined the Marshals Service and had known Durey for years. “You got anything other than the obvious?”
“Not much. I haven’t talked to the wife yet; St. Paul has,” Durey said. “She’s not here. A friend took her in, with the baby.”
“There’s a baby?”
“Yeah. She was here—the baby was—during the shootings. The wife apparently found her screaming her head off when she came in the house.”
“So the wife found the bodies?”
“Yes. Called 9-1-1. I heard the recording and I would swear on my sainted mother’s grave, if she were dead, that there was nothing fake or calculated about it. She was freaked,” Durey said.
The deputy chief said to Lucas, “Hey, guy. My wife saw you and Weather coming out of the bagel place on Grand. Said you still looked banged up.”
“I’ve been told this will be good for me, a job,” Lucas said.
“That sorta sounds like horseshit,” the deputy chief said. “This ain’t gonna be good for no one.”
“We’ll see. So what...” Lucas nodded at the bodies.
The deputy chief called, “Jimmy? C’mere a minute...”
A St. Paul detective had been talking with a forensics investigator. He broke away and stepped carefully out of the scene and onto the blue taped walkway, said, “Lucas. What’s up?”
“I’m... observing, don’t know exactly why,” Lucas said.
The chief tipped his head at Lucas and said to the investigator, “Tell him.”
Jimmy Russo, a short man with a bristly gray mustache and dark eyes, turned to look at the bodies, then back to Lucas. “The househas security cameras, and one of them looks at the front door. The cameras have microphones and speakers so if somebody’s on the front step, you can speak to them from inside without opening the door. That means we’ve got sound, we got pictures, and we got the times, right down to the minute.
“At 7:41, Sand and his two sons, Arthur and Blaine, came around from the side of the house. Blaine was the older boy, twelve, Arthur was ten. Blaine was carrying a basketball,” Russo said. He turned his head and nodded at the ball by the piano. “There was still enough light to shoot baskets and there’s a net in the side yard behind a hedge. That’s apparently what they were doing. It’s just starting to sprinkle rain, in the video, you can see raindrops hitting on the porch steps. They go inside the house, half-ass shut the door—we can’t hear the latch click on the video—and turn on some lights.
“One minute later, at 7:42, a man, close to six feet, maybe an inch more or less, looks like average build, not fat, walks up from somewhere, we don’t know where, wearing a rain suit with a hood. I believe it’s a maroon University of Minnesota hoodie like people wear to football games when it’s wet. It’s hard to see in the bad light on the porch, but it looks to me like it has a gold M on the sleeve. His hands were dead white, like he was wearing plastic gloves.
“Can’t see anything of his face. He was wearing a black Covid mask and glasses,” Russo continued. “He didn’t ring the doorbell but it looks like he tried the door handle and the door opened. Sand apparently hadn’t locked it when he and the boys went inside. The killer went in, closed the door, and in twelve seconds shot Sand four times, and the two kids, who tried to run away, toward the kitchen, twice each.
“Probably not a pro, because he wasn’t a great shot, even upclose. He shot Sand twice in the back, hitting him low both times. He shot the older kid in the neck and knocked him down, maybe killed him, we have to wait to see on that; the younger one he shot in the hip. He shot Sand twice more and then he stepped over to them and shot both kids in the head, once each, from six or eight inches—like he just let the muzzle hang down past his knee and shot them.”
“How do you know the sequence?” Lucas asked.
“We don’t, for sure, but we can hear the shots on the recording and that’s what it sounds like,” Russo said. “Bang-bang, that’s Sand, two quick shots together, knocking him down. Then bang, bang, a little pause between shots, that’s the kids; then bang-bang, that’s Sand, higher up his back, through the heart, and bang, bang, the kids in their heads. The last four shots were more spaced, more... considered.”
“Okay.”
“He used a nine-millimeter automatic and left the +P shells on the floor where they landed. Commercial, not reloads. Not suppressed. Six minutes later, he walked back out the door, turning off all the house lights as he went. He was carrying one of those plastic shopping bags when he left, the kind you buy at Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s, we think he got it from the kitchen. He turned left at the end of the sidewalk and strolled off into the rain.
