Murder in Misery (Spook Squad) Read Free Page B

then he died before they even got him to the hospital.” Leeroy tapped quiet rhythms out on legs. “Tough.”
    “Yeah,” Keegan shrugged . “It’s just hard seeing a kid so messed and hoping that he is going to make it through but he doesn’t.”
    “ The only thing you can do now is find that child’s murderer. You have all of us with you on that front. We have your back even if we’re working other cases. No one is going to leave that family’s murder unsolved.” Leeroy leaned back in his chair offering the only comfort the Djinn knew how to for her. He pushed passed the moment and focused on what they needed to be working on and what they needed to find out.
    “What did you get from the scene?” Leeroy pulled his feet down from the top of his desk and rested his elbows there instead. “What did you hear? What did you see? You had to pick up on something while you were there.”
    Slouching into the chair behind her own desk she let out a sigh. She took in the bluish tinge of Leeroy’s skin and how he appeared ready for a fight. She wasn’t the only one on edge with having to work a family’s murder and work with homicide.
    Focusing back on task, Keegan shook her head clear of cobwebs before answering Leeroy. “There was so much panic and pain. Most of what I caught was an overwhelming, jumbled mess. Scenes that violent make it hard to decipher the echoes.”
    “What did you hear?” Leeroy prompted again. One of the things being a necromancer allowed Keegan was the ability to hear and sometimes catch glimpses of the course of a death, if the death left a strong enough imprint on the scene.
    Leeroy had a yellow notepad sitting on his desk and pen poised to write. “What was one of the last things you heard? There was more than just feeling and hearing their emotions. There is something there that you can work off of. There always is.”
    “Glass,” Keegan looked up at the ceiling trying to remember everything, “Breaking and crunching glass. It almost sounded like someone had been walking over it in a pair of heavy boots.
    “So it wasn’t someone who entered the h ouse as a shifter. They broke in as a human.” Keegan thought out loud.
    “Did you see the broken glass?” Leeroy questioned her. “Anywhere in the house or were you hearing old things?”
    “ It was the eastern most window located in the downstairs entertainment area,” Keegan supplied as she walked the crime scene again in her mind. “There was a mess of glass trickling towards the stairway and then everything became chaotic. There were gouges on the stairway carpet. Kind of like what you would see after a cat goes at the carpet on stairs but only a lot bigger.”
    “So they shifted. ” Leeroy went back to his note taking. “They entered as a human and then they shifted. So what does that suggest to you?”
    “ Either they knew they were in trouble or they knew the only way to gain the upper hand was to shift before Alice did.” Keegan offered.
    “So we know there was a reason behind this. The entrance and the path of the killer would suggest that they knew what or who they were going for.” Leeroy scratched at his forehead. “And no one is thinking robbery gone wrong? Hollis and Cassidy are just going with straight up murder?”
    “T he crime scene doesn’t indicate that robbery was a motive. Nothing seemed out of place, valuables wise. Everything was tucked away tight and neat until you got to where the shifter changed form.” Keegan hummed under her breath in thought. “Not to mention that both Alice and Cody were found in the nursery. They were fighting together to protect their son, Connor.”
    Keegan rubbed the heels of her hands against her eyes. “It just, why bother with killing Connor? He is barely out of his crib. What harm could he have done?”
    Leeroy rolled his pen across the desk from one hand to another. “ Maybe they were after Connor? But I’m not seeing what they thought was so special about him.