Too Close to Home by Linwood Barclay

the door, that one or more persons had knocked on it and he was shot very shortly after opening the door. And then over here,” he said, guiding us around the blood and over toward the stairs, “was where Donna Langley’s body was discovered.” There seemed as much blood there as by the front door. “She must have come downstairs when she heard the commotion, and that’s where it happened.”
    “Dear God,” I said, and took another look at my son, who was stone-faced. Hesitantly, I said, “And Adam?”
    “Down the end of the hall here, at the bottom of a half flight of stairs, by the back door.”
    Before we could proceed any further into the house, Barry wanted us to slip on some booties in a bid not to contaminate the crime scene any further. He pulled three pairs of them from his pocket, and we all took a moment to get them on. This, of course, necessitated taking our hands out of our pockets, and Derek and I leaned against each other, taking turns, to slip them over our shoes. They were crinkly, a bit like paper, but much stronger.
    Once that was done, Barry motioned for us to follow him along the hallway, which we both walked down as though we were tightrope walkers, hands back in our pockets, careful not to let our shoulders brush the walls. I noticed light-colored powder on many surfaces within the house. On doorknobs, stair railings, the corners of walls.
    Barry, who’d been watching me, said, “Fingerprinting.”
    “Of course,” I said.
    To Derek he said, “We’ll be wanting to get a set of your prints.”
    “Huh?” said Derek.
    “Not to worry,” Barry said. “We already know you’ve been over. But if the killer, or killers, left any prints behind, we have to be able to weed out the ones that don’t matter.”
    “Right,” said Derek.
    We’d reached the end of the hall, where the steps came up from the back door. We looked down onto a third puddle of dried blood. I felt myself getting woozy.
    “Derek,” Barry said, “have you noticed anything? Something that seems out of place? Something missing? Something that’s there that wasn’t there before?”
    I’d been inside this house several times over the years, and to my eye everything looked in order, aside from the obvious signs. The place had not been ransacked. Cushions hadn’t been tossed. It didn’t look, for example, as though someone had been searching for drugs after murdering the occupants.
    Unless, of course, they knew exactly where to look for whatever it was they’d come to get.
    “I just . . . I don’t notice anything,” Derek said.
    “Let’s do a slow walk-through,” Barry said, directing us to turn around and head back down the hallway. “We’ll start in the kitchen.”
    It was a relief to go in there. So long as you didn’t actually breathe, there wasn’t anything to tip you to what had transpired on the other side of the wall. Donna, who’d had more than her share of quirks, was also something of a neat freak, and the kitchen showed it. Nothing out of place, no dishes in the sink, everything in perfect order in the fridge, which Barry opened by pulling on the side of the door itself, and not the handle, which had also been dusted for fingerprints.
    “Mrs. Langley was here, packing stuff for the trip,” Derek said. “She was feeling kind of woozy.”
    “Right,” Barry said. “That’s what Langley’s secretary said was the reason they’d come back. The cooler with the food in it, some other groceries, they were all still in the SUV, they hadn’t had a chance to bring it back in yet before they were killed. So nothing here, nothing looks out of the ordinary?”
    “No.”
    “Okay, let’s head upstairs.”
    Stepping over Donna Langley’s blood at the bottom of the stairs was like trying to straddle a puddle at the edge of a curb after a rainstorm. Thankfully, once we were up the carpeted stairs, there were no more blood pools.
    “Again,” Barry said, “try not to touch anything.” We’d kept our