Bitter Blood by Jerry Bledsoe

inside. Nobles’s first thought—that the daughter who was supposed to be in the house might have gone berserk, killed her mother, and still be holed up inside—had been joined by other possibilities. Perhaps the daughter, too, was dead, the victim of murder or suicide. Maybe she had killed her mother and fled. Or perhaps she had been kidnapped by the killer. Maybe she had been taken hostage and her mother’s killer was at this moment waiting for a policeman to stick his head inside the house so he could blow it off, too.
    The storm door was unlocked, and Swinney pulled it open gingerly, to be greeted not by gunblast but by the barking of two small skittish dogs weakened by hunger. The smell of dog feces and urine assaulted his nose. The door opened into the kitchen, and as the two officers stepped into the air-conditioned coolness, crouching, seeking cover from a counter jutting out to their left that enclosed the electric stove, they saw two drops of dried blood on the floor beside the counter, just inside the door, near a telephone on the wall.
    From the kitchen, the officers could see into the family room at the back of the house and the dining room at the front. Swinney checked the dining room and adjoining living room, stepping over a folding dog gate as he went. He noticed that expensive Oriental carpets on the floors and a silver tea service in the dining room were undisturbed. Nobles stepped over another dog gate into the family room, where he saw nothing out of the ordinary. A cheap, plastic-webbed chaise longue sat in the middle of the floor near the sliding door, as if somebody recently had brought it inside from sunning on the patio. Nobles peeked into the hallway at the foyer, where he again was joined by Swinney.
    Neither officer spoke as they clung to the walls, creeping down the hallway, pushing open doors to peer into a bathroom and seldom-used bedroom. The door to the linen closet in the hallway stood open, revealing a tiny red light aglow on a control box, indicating that the burglar alarm was off.
    As Swinney poked his head around Janie’s open bedroom door on the front side of the house at the end of the hallway, he saw the contents of her purse scattered on her bed and a jewelry box dumped upside down. Boxes filled with items moved from Janie’s apartment occupied one side of the room. An open suitcase lay on the floor. Swinney started to call to Nobles, who’d just stepped into Delores’s bedroom at the back of the house, but Nobles called first.
    “Tom, she’s in here. I found her.”
    Janie lay facedown on a small rug in a sun room with jalousie windows that reached nearly to the floor on two sides. The room adjoined Delores’s bedroom at the end of the house. The sun rarely penetrated the room because Delores kept the beige draperies drawn most of the time. Visitors who pulled into the parking area at the side of the house often saw her peering through those draperies to see who was outside. The room was called the French room because of the double doors that opened into it from Delores’s bedroom, the only access. The French doors always stood open, and bead curtains had been hung there. The French room was filled with wicker furniture and a few plants. On one wall hung a bamboo scroll bearing the reassuring rules for serenity of the Desiderata, some of them incongruous considering the present setting.
    On another wall, a wide-eyed owl stared down from a calendar onto a scene of horror.
    Janie was barefoot. Her slim, sun-browned legs protruded from black nylon jogging shorts. The black-and-white-striped jersey that she wore had been torn by a bullet that struck her in the back near the right shoulder blade. Her hair was in white plastic curlers, one of which had been driven into her brain by a second bullet, which caught her at the base of her skull and exited from the left side of her neck, leaving a gaping hole. Her left eye stared blankly. Definitely no suicide.
    Nobles and Swinney