Crime Machine Read Online Free PDF Page B

in the squad car.”
    Delorme stepped up to the front window of the house, holding her flashlight to the glass.
    “Take a deep breath before you look,” Gifford said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
    Delorme stepped back from the window, and turned away.
    Cardinal went next, also holding his flashlight to the glass. The bodies were toward the back of the house, little more than silhouettes at this distance. “Jesus,” he said, and stepped back.
    He started toward the back of the house, Delorme following.
    “We probably should have left the car back at the road,” Gifford said. “But far as we knew, it could’ve been anything from a prank call to a hostage situation. I tried not to run over those, though.” She pointed to the tire tracks between the house and the squad car. “Those were already here.”
    “Two vehicles,” Cardinal said. “Clear tracks, too.”
    “Should I come with you inside?”
    “We need you to stay here and make sure no one steps on that porch,” Cardinal said.
    —
    Sandy and Doug were thirteen and fourteen years old. Best friends. A lot of people might have expected them to be traumatized by what they’d seen, but Cardinal knew they’d be bright-eyed with excitement. He and Delorme took separate statements from them, the only difficulty being trying to slow them down. They had been walking along the south side of the peninsula, not on the ice but on the shore. They weren’t up to any mischief, just out for a hike around the shore. But curiosity got the better of them and they decided to take a peek in the windows of this house on the tip of the peninsula.
    As soon as the boys had looked in the back window and “like finished puking our guts out,” they had called the police. Constables Gifford and Rankin had arrived, checked out the window and made them wait in the car.
    Cardinal pointed his flashlight at the tracks leading from the lake to the house, the tracks leading back. “Were any of those tracks here before you went up to the house?”
    The boys looked at each other and shook their heads.
    “The back door lock has been jimmied and there’s a broken window,” Cardinal said. “Would you know anything about that?”
    Again they shook their heads.
    After a few more questions Cardinal gave them his card. “Did you tell anybody about this yet?”
    “Nope,” the younger boy said.
    “Good. Don’t tell anyone until tomorrow—we don’t want the bad guys to hear anything until it hits the news. You did the right thing calling it in. Wait in the car and we’ll have someone drive you home.”
    The boys looked disappointed. “We’d kind of like to stay and watch the CSI guys, if that’s okay,” the older one said.
    “Sorry. Can’t allow any unnecessary personnel on the scene.”
    “First
on the scene,” the younger one said. “We’re material witnesses!”
    “Right you are, Inspector—if there’s a trial. But for now, you have to vamoose.”
    As he and Delorme turned toward the back of the house, Cardinal said, “Let’s get someone to tape off the back perimeter. We don’t want any more
CSI
fans poking around.”
    —
    Ident arrived, and all of them—the two ident guys, Cardinal and Delorme—struggled into paper suits with rubber feet that would keep their influence on the scene to a minimum. Bunny suits, they called them.
    “We’re lucky in one thing already,” Cardinal said. “We’ve got good footprints that haven’t been snowed on. Before we go in, we’re going to get photos and videos of all the tracks at the front door, the sides of the house and at the back. When we look back on this, we want to be a hundred percent sure what was here and what wasn’t.”
    Paul Arsenault, the senior ident man, was switching on his video camera as he spoke, and his partner Bob Collingwood had the two young witnesses come out of the squad car and make fresh footprints, which he photographed under bright light. The boys co-operated in a state of solemn