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Pushing the thought from his mind, he called up the stairs.

“HELLO?” Nick bellowed the word. His voice echoed strangely in the open space. “JORDAN! WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU?”

“Jesus, Midnight,” Morley said, wincing. “Are you mental? Or just deaf?”

Realizing Morley was right, that he was being stupid, that somehow his mind had taken the silence on the comms thing too far, Nick pinged his friend via his headset.

“Damon? You still here?”

There was a brief pause.

“Yeah. I’m here.”

Nick frowned.

“And?” he prompted. “Where are you? Why is it so fucking quiet? Where is everyone? Are Rob and Rick with you?”

Another pause.

“Tech team left,” he said. “The bio team took the bodies. It’s just me here now.”

“Bodies.” Nick felt his heart sink. “We were too late.”

“Fuck,” Morley muttered.

“Yeah.” Jordan’s voice remained strangely empty.

To Nick, he sounded distracted, possibly disturbed. He might even be in shock.

“Rob and Rick left with them,” Jordan added.

“No.” Morley broke in, obviously listening on the same channel. “They didn’t leave. Their car’s still here. Parked out front.”

“Oh.” Jordan didn’t seem overly disturbed by the news. “Oh, I thought they said they were heading back. Well, maybe just one of them went with the techs. Or maybe they’re both walking the grounds. It was them who found the bodies. They were pretty fucked up about it. The baby especially. He killed the baby last, they said.”

Nick grimaced, fighting back the images in his mind.

“When?” Morley asked. “When did they find them?”

“They were calling it in probably as I pulled my car out of the Long Island precinct parking lot,” Jordan said grimly. “I just missed it, apparently.”

That time, Jordan sounded almost like himself.

Maybe because he also sounded faintly annoyed.

“The squints passed me on my way out here, burning by with full sirens blazing,” he added. “No one bothered to fucking call me. I wasn’t even sure the ambulances were for the Tanaka house until I pulled up to the driveway and saw all the flashing lights.”

Nick and Morley exchanged looks.

“And they’re gone?” Nick asked. “The squints? All of them? The full tech and bio team? Already? They couldn’t have been here more than an hour.”

“They weren’t,” Jordan agreed, again sounding annoyed. “I don’t know if that’s just how they do things out here, but their priority seemed to be to get the bodies back to their labs as soon as possible. They were all about the autopsy, not the physical scene here. They seemed to think all of that was the job of the homicide cops. They told me we were supposed to be the ones to walk the scene, look for any other kinds of physical evidence. They expected us to bring all of that to them… presumably in their lab.”

“Are they sending anyone from NYPD?” Morley asked. “Squints.”

Jordan exhaled, sounding tired now.

“I don’t know. Acharya called, but he did most of the talking. He didn’t mention anything about sending more techs out here, but it makes sense they’d sendsomeone,right?”