The Patrick Bowers Files - 05 - The Queen by Steven James Page B

the same size as Donnie’s boots in the mud room. Natasha should be here any minute to process the crime scene. I’d have her check it out.
    I descended the stairs, stepping past Ardis’s body as reverently as I could. “We’ll want to check the neighbor’s clock,” I told Ellory. “See if it has the correct time. If we really are talking about 1:48 p.m.”
    â€œI’ll have an officer do it.” He stared past me toward the landing. “You think he forgot something maybe?”
    â€œWho?”
    â€œThe shooter. That he might have been on his way out, realized he forgot something upstairs, went back to the landing to get it, and then fired the last shot through the living room window when he got there.”
    â€œI really couldn’t say.”
    Jake, who was still on the landing, answered, “That would make sense.”
    While Jake came down the stairs to join us, I questioned Ellory about some of the issues that the rather disappointing and incomplete police report had left unanswered.
    â€œWere the lights in the house on or off when you arrived?”
    â€œThey were on. All of them, except the study.”
    â€œWere the exterior doors locked or unlocked?”
    â€œThe doors were unlocked, but that’s not so unusual.” He said the next few words with uncertainty, as if he’d stopped believing them: “There’s not much crime around here.”
    â€œAppliances. Which were on?”
    â€œYou mean like the oven?”
    â€œYes, and the computer, television, the washer, dryer, a cooking timer—anything.” All of these things tell us what was happening, where people were, what they were doing, or when they were doing it.
    He thought. “Not the washer or dryer. Or the TV. We checked the computer for a suicide note; didn’t find one though.”
    â€œThe computer is in the study?”
    â€œYes.”
    I retrieved my laptop from the mud room. “Do you by any chance know the last webpage that was opened?”
    He was looking increasingly disappointed in himself the more we spoke. “I didn’t look.”
    â€œIt’s okay. Thanks.”
    In the small office nook attached to the living room I clicked to the internet history while Ellory asked Jake, “You’re a profiler. What’s your take on this?”
    The web history was password protected. The Bureau has ways past that, however. I surfed to the Federal Digital Database and entered my ID number.
    â€œRage,” Jake said. “Donnie’s—or whoever committed these crimes—their behavior exhibits uncontrollable rage. We find this type of thing with people who snap. Something pushes them over the edge—job loss, marital problems, the death of a child.”
    I downloaded the program I needed, and a few seconds later, using a 32-byte MD5 hash, I’d cracked the password and I was in.
    Jake continued, “Almost always in cases like this, we find what we call a trigger event or a precipitating stressor. Do we know if there was any sudden trauma in his life recently?”
    â€œNo,” Ellory answered. “If there was I don't know what it would be.”
    The web history had been deleted, but the hard drive hadn’t been wiped. It wasn’t difficult to click into the terminal window, enter a few lines of code that Angela Knight, my friend in the Bureau’s Cybercrime Division, had taught me, and pull up the files.
    Someone had been surfing through the naval archives of Ohio Class fleet ballistic missile submarine, or SSBN, deployment records from the 1980s. I could hardly believe the information was made available to the public, but then again, the data was three decades old. A few mouse clicks told me that the Cold War archives weren’t considered matters of national security any longer, and a Freedom of Information Act request had apparently been filed by a group known as Eco-Tech four months