The Love Killings by Robert Ellis

to be. Wishing for a Marlboro, he pushed a piece of nicotine gum against his cheek and tried to process what he was seeing.
    Rogers didn’t live here, that much was clear. No one in law enforcement lived here. He was looking at an estate—a building so massive that it dwarfed the Strattons’ mansion on County Line Road. Matt took in the open gate and guessed that the six-foot-high wrought iron fence circled the entire property. As he scanned the grounds in the darkness, the length of the fence from the corner to the property’s end on Fairfield Road, the depth and proportion of the house, it felt like a lot of land—maybe ten acres, maybe even more. And the neighborhood was quiet. He hadn’t seen or heard a single car on either road since he arrived.
    He turned back to the mansion. His eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and he could make out four three-story-high columns supporting the roof over a formal entrance.
    Everything about the place looked like trouble. Everything about what he was seeing felt wrong.
    He wondered who had sent him the text message. Who wanted him to be here? Who knew enough about what went down today to put Rogers’s name on it?
    He slipped the flashlight into his back pocket, drew his .45, and chambered a round. Then he started up the drive, slowly and carefully, hoping the moon would stay behind the clouds for another five minutes or so. There was a second building here, a two-story carriage house with five of its six garage doors open. In spite of the darkness, Matt could see a handful of vintage cars inside, along with a Land Rover, a Jaguar, and a Lexus SUV parked in the drive. He turned back to the mansion. It may have been below freezing tonight, the wind may have been howling, but none of that was on Matt’s mind right now. All he could feel as he reached the entrance and started up the granite steps was his heart beating heavy and hard in the center of his chest.
    One of the two glass doors was cracked open. Matt slid into an entryway that had to be three times the size of the FBI’s apartment on Pine Street. The ceiling was two stories up, the extra-wide staircase rising to a pair of French doors set above the entrance and finally making the turn with ten more steps up to the second floor.
    Matt didn’t move. Clearing his mind, he quieted his breathing and spent several minutes listening to the house. Moonlight suddenly flashed through the entryway, and Matt glanced at the French doors above his head. Then he lowered his eyes and composed himself with his gun still raised.
    He knew in his gut that he was listening to the sound of the dead. He’d heard it before, and it was always the same. A silence that seemed too silent. A stillness that appeared frozen and absolute. The house was beyond quiet. Not a clock ticking. Not a refrigerator stirring. Not even the fan from the building’s heating system. Just that eerie sound of the dead cascading through time.
    Matt pulled the flashlight out of his pocket, switched it on, and pressed it against the barrel of his gun. Working his way from front to back, he cleared the living room, a den, another sitting room, a library with a false wall that had been left open, an office, a room that looked just like an English pub, a game room, a powder room and two full baths, a gym with a steam room and sauna attached, a dining room, a washroom, and finally the kitchen and pantry. The entire back of the house appeared to be lined with windows that ran all the way up to the ceiling. Matt walked over to the door and peeked outside at an Olympic-sized swimming pool. Through a row of trees at the rear of the property line, he could see lights from another home or building. Still, they were a long way off. If Matt could trust his instincts, and he thought that he could, the doctor would have had no concerns about the sound of gunshots or his victims shrieking at the top of their lungs.
    He tried to shake off the image, the sounds of innocent women and