Blood Silence by Roger Stelljes

early hour, and she was sure this would not be the last media vehicle to arrive. She walked along the front sidewalk to the front steps to find one of her officers waiting. “What do we have?”
    “You better see for yourself, Chief,” the officer replied grimly and waved for Nelson to follow.
    The patrol officer led Nelson into the house, turned left down a hallway, and then stopped. “Chief, I’m just warning you, it’s a pretty horrific scene.”
    “Okay,” Nelson replied and then stepped into the bedroom. “Oh … my.”
    The officer’s warning was on the mark.
    The room reeked of the heavy smell of death.
    There were two bodies: a man with black, albeit graying, hair was lying on top of a woman, a brunette. The bodies were riddled with bullet holes. There was heavy blood splatter to the right side of the bed, with the sheets, blankets, pillows, lampshades, and window curtains soaked in it, along with splatter high up the wall and over the bed. It had been a frenzy of shooting. The bodies gruesomely lay in an expansive pool of blood.
    “Okay, has anyone called the Hennepin County sheriff?” Chief Nelson asked. Her small department did not have the resources or expertise to investigate this one on their own. In such cases, they called in investigators from the county.
    The patrol officer nodded. “The call has been made. Detectives are on the way.”
    “Okay, good.” Nelson then looked at the bodies. “Who are they?” she asked as she approached the right side of the bed, being careful to stay clear of the blood pool.
    “I found this wallet in some trousers out in the living room,” the patrol officer replied, handing a wallet to Nelson. “The man’s name is J. Frederick Sterling. Lives in Minneapolis, according to his license. He’s an attorney, it appears. His Minnesota law license is in one of the slots in the wallet. We checked, and Sterling is the owner of the premises.”
    “And the woman?” Nelson asked.
    • • •
     
    St. Paul.
    President Thomson was taking the day off, but the political operation was not. Sally was still back at the Hilton in Minneapolis with the Judge and the rest of the staff, working, while President Thomson retreated to his home in Afton, an affluent bedroom community fifteen miles east of St. Paul.
    Mac had no interest in hanging around the hotel all day, especially when he and Sally were staying in the Twin Cities for the weekend. He contacted a car service, took a comfortable ride in a new Town Car, and arrived home twenty minutes later.
    They might have been living in Washington, but Mac and Sally kept their St. Paul house. It was Sally’s house to begin with. Mac moved in six months after they started dating. It was nice enough when he moved in, but then he went to work on updating and modernizing it. When he got millions for his ownership interest in the Grand Brew coffee chain, one of the first things he did was pay off the remaining mortgage as a birthday gift to Sally. They owned the house free and clear in a desirable neighborhood of mature homes that were not just retaining but increasing their value. With all of his work, it now had four bedrooms, including a spacious-enough master, a remodeled modern kitchen, a newly finished man-cave basement, and a large paver patio with a Jacuzzi tub and bonfire pit. When they came back to Minnesota, he would be completely content living in the house. Would Sally? Well, that might be another story. She’d made noises about wanting to be on water. Well, there were thousands of lakes two hours north of the Cities, and he wouldn’t mind a cabin on one of those someday.
    The streets of the Macalester-Groveland neighborhood were quiet late on a Friday morning, a light November wind blowing loose orange, red, and brown leaves across the sun-drenched driveway as he strolled up to the house’s small side portico. He pressed his way inside, turned off the alarm, and turned up the thermostat. His cousins, Shawn and Paddy,