D.D. looked at him. “I’m good at my job.” It was important to her that he know that.

“I’ve noticed.”

“Don’t need a man to fix me. Don’t need a man to save me.”

“I’ve noticed.”

She grimaced. “I hate my fucking pager.”

He smiled. “I love working at the Academy.”

“Not gonna give it up for all this glamour?” She spread her hands over their piles of notes and reports.

“No. Visiting the field is good. Don’t need to live here. ’Course, it helps me to be more understanding of a fellow investigator’s crazy schedule.”

“Nothing regular about this job,” D.D. agreed.

“Plans get made and unmade. Dinners could be prepared that sadly grow cold.”

“Very sadly,” she assured him.

“I’m good at my job,” he said.

“I’ve noticed.”

“Don’t need a woman to wait on me. Don’t need a woman to stroke my ego.”

“I’ve noticed.” She paused, regarding him more seriously. “So what do you want?”

“Let’s start with dinner.”

“Really?” She didn’t mean to sound disappointed.

“But I’m open to all possibilities,” he added hastily.

“Because I saw this ad-” D.D. realized what she was about to say, and broke off, mortified.

Alex grinned. “‘Cool chills, warm thrills’?”

She leaned closer. “I’m dying to know,” she admitted.

He leaned closer. “I’m dying to be of service.”

They both sighed. Heavily. Then leaned back, and returned to work.

“So,” D.D. said after a minute, clearing her throat, forcing herself to sound brisk. “Where are we at? We got a drug dealer, a welfare mom, a truant teen, a brainy preteen, and two unknowns. High-risk lifestyle. Isolated mother and kids. What are the odds that Hermes smoked too much dope, tried a new product, and went postal on his own family?”

“Don’t like the knife,” Alex remarked. “If he starts with the knife, he should end with the knife.”

“Maybe stabbing Audi was the impulse part. They got into a fight in the kitchen, he took it too far. Ishy saw him, started to run, and Hermes realized he’d better do damage control real quick. Hermes gets out his handgun and goes to town.”

“Then, once he realizes what he’s done…”

“Decides to finish it all. Suffocates his own baby, then lies down on the sofa and blows out his brains.”

“You’re wrong.”

D.D. and Alex looked up sharply. Neil had appeared in the doorway, his pale face so lit up his freckles glowed. “I got news, straight from the ME,” he burst out. “Hermes wasn’t shot. I mean, well, okay, he was shot. But it doesn’t matter, because at the time he was shot, he was already dead. Whole sofa scene-totally staged.”

There were moments D.D. didn’t like her job. The stress of working too many hours without a break. The tedium of poring over investigative reports. Her damn pager going off at precisely the wrong moment…

This moment, however, was not one of those moments. She, Alex, and Neil had taken over the conference room so they could spread out, and Neil was currently pacing up and down the length of the table, talking a mile a minute.

“Hermes Laraquette was hit with a Taser in the chest. Two jolts would be the ME’s guess, to judge by the twin set of burns. Most men would’ve gone down, but recovered. Laraquette’s lifestyle wasn’t exactly heart-healthy, however, so he never got up again.”

“Taser killed him?” D.D. reiterated.

“Taser caused a massive coronary event, which dropped him deader than a stone.”

D.D. was standing at the whiteboard, dry-erase marker in hand. With Neil’s affirmation of cause of death, she jotted down a fresh note. “Hang on. If a Taser was used in the attack, where’s the confetti?”

Tasers, which were illegal in Massachusetts, were supposed to discharge coded confetti with each stunning jolt. The code on the confetti could then be used to trace which Taser had been used in an attack-compensating for the fact that there was no bullet left behind for the police to trace. The confetti was a huge, fluttery mess, nearly impossible to clean up, especially given conditions at the Laraquette household.

“Don’t know,” Neil said. “But the ME is convinced it was a Taser. Has no doubts about the marks.”

D.D. frowned, decided to come back to the confetti. “Okay. So that gives us four instruments for attack: Taser, handgun, knife, pillow. What else did the ME have?”

“Definitely stabbing as COD for the woman. Single fatal blow. No hesitation marks,” Neil reported, still pacing.

“Like the Harringtons,” D.D. said.

“Same size blade,” Neil reported. “Meaning both households contained knife sets, and in both attacks perpetrator selected the same size blade.”

“The largest blade,” Alex said, his tone cautious. “Which, if you think about it, is the most logical choice for murder.”

“True, true,” Neil mused, stopping his pacing long enough to stick his hands in his front pockets and jiggle the loose change.

“Can the ME check Patrick Harrington’s body?” D.D. asked. “See if he was tasered, too?”

“Already made the request.”

“Well?”

“Give him a couple of days. Between the two scenes, plus the rest of the city’s normal mayhem, bodies are stacking up.”

“August,” D.D. muttered. “Always a busy time of year. So what about the kids? The son was shot.”

“Yep. Same with the four-year-old and eleven-year-old girls,” Neil reported. “Infant’s gonna be tougher. Harder to rule on asphyxiation. More like nothing else seems to be physically wrong with the child, ergo it was probably suffocation. ME’s sent the pillow out to be tested for DNA. Might be able to trace saliva on the pillow back to the infant, then it’s a bit more conclusive.”

“How long?” D.D. was already bracing herself.

“Three to six months,” Neil said.

“Fuck.”

“Not right now, I’m already too excited.”

D.D. rolled her eyes at Neil. Sure, the lanky redhead talked a good game, but it wouldn’t help her any. Alex, on the other hand, should look out.

“So what does this tell us?” she mused, riding the same adrenaline wave as Neil. She studied her whiteboard, then got busy with the marker: “One, this takes Hermes out of the perpetrator column and moves him squarely into the victim category. After all, the man couldn’t very well taser himself to death, then shoot himself to death.”

“Ambush,” Alex said.

She looked at him, nodded. “That’s what I’m thinking.”

“Stun Hermes, incapacitating him, then go after the rest of his family,” Alex continued.

“Why does Hermes have to be first?” Neil asked. “Couldn’t it be someone had attacked the family, then Hermes walked in on it?”

“If Hermes walks in, why taser him?” Alex pointed out. “Someone walks in on a shooting, the perpetrator fires off an extra round. The perpetrator doesn’t set down the gun and dig through his pockets for a new weapon.”

“True, true.”

“I think Hermes went first,” D.D. agreed. “Perpetrator incapacitates the most obvious threat-the father-by stunning him multiple times.”

“Not exactly foolproof,” Alex commented. “Especially a hard-core drug addict. I’ve seen guys stunned half a dozen times and they’re still screaming bloody murder.”

D.D. chewed her lower lip. Considered it. “Given that Tasers are illegal in Mass., maybe our perpetrator has a truly illegal, illegal Taser. Meaning, as long as he was acquiring a black market Taser, he got one with super-sized voltage. For the military, commercial grade, etc. Maybe custom cartridges, which would explain why no confetti was left behind. For a buck fifty, you can buy just about anything on the black market. Why not a super-volt Taser, guaranteed to silently incapacitate your problem, while leaving no evidence behind?”

The more D.D. thought about it, the more she liked it. “Higher voltage might also explain Hermes’s massive coronary event,” she continued. “He wasn’t just hit by a Taser, he was hit by a Taser.” She glanced at Neil. “Any way the ME can study the burn patterns on Hermes’s chest to estimate size of the hit?”