Page 8 of A Deeper Darkness

“Yes, Mommy. But, Mommy—”

“No. None of that. It’s just your imagination, all stirred up. Get back in bed and go to sleep.”

“But, Mommy, I saw—”

“Jen, honey. Stop. It’s late.”

Jennifer knew that tone. It was the one that made her close her mouth and climb into bed. There would be no more comfort from her mother tonight.

“Good girl. Do you want me to leave the closet light on?”

“Yes, please. Night, Mommy.”

She let her mother kiss her briefly on the cheek and watched her leave the room, flicking on the closet light as she left. Jennifer rolled over, wondering. The flash was like a shooting star, there one moment, gone the next, quick as a blink. What had made a shooting star in the room across the street? Who had made it? Maybe it was from the tip of a wand, like in Harry Potter. She wished she could have that kind of power.

A star.

Her voice was soft, a gentle singsong. She’d gotten herself to sleep this way many times before.

“Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight. I wish I may, I wish I might, have the wish I wish tonight.”

Chapter Six

Georgetown

Detective Darren Fletcher

Darren Fletcher hated when the schedule rotation put him on the overnight shift. He was supposed to get off at 6:00 a.m., but it never failed—nights there was a murder, and that was more often than he liked, he always got the call around 4:00 a.m. Which meant that after spending ten hours on he’d have to pull another five or six. Yes, it was overtime, but he was a creature of habit. Losing sleep made him cranky.

And he was cranky right now. It was 4:13 in the morning. He was nursing a rapidly cooling cup of coffee from the Dunkin’ Donuts down the street, and staring into the empty eyes of a dead man.

A man who had three eyes, if you wanted to be specific, because he’d been shot cleanly through the forehead, with an accompanying shot to the chest.

Kill shots.

Fletcher had no idea which was the fatal injury, though he was willing to guess it was the head, because there was a tidy pool of blood under the man’s chest and neck, which told him the body had been dropped with the chest shot, the bullet to the head delivered as the coup de grâce. The man had crumpled into a nice heap, his right leg bent under him as if he were trying to turn and flee.

There were no obvious contact burns on the man’s skin or clothing.

So he’d been surprised, whether by an intruder or a conversation gone terribly wrong…. Fletcher would have to figure that out.

The dead man’s driver’s license identified him as Harold Croswell of Falls Church, Virginia. He was thirty-nine, five feet ten, a fit one-eighty, brown on brown. Organ donor, though it was too late for that. Maybe his eyes, those brown, murky eyes, could be given for corneal transplant.

Fletcher winced and looked away. He’d signed his own donor card, but the idea of someone taking his eyes freaked him out.

The soft voice of his partner, Lonnie Hart, interrupted his thoughts and he turned, grateful for the distraction.

“Not a smash and grab. I can’t see anything disturbed outside this room. Do you think this is his place, and he just hasn’t gotten the license updated?”

“I don’t know. Maybe,” Fletcher said.

“It’s kind of weird downstairs. Fridge is empty and the temp’s turned down. There’s no mail. The whole house is spotless. No dust, vacuum cleaner tracks in the carpets, fresh TP rolls in the head. Looks like someone’s out of town for an extended period. And it’s clean. Bet you dollar to doughnuts we won’t find any prints.”

“No shell casings, either. This guy’s smooth—shoots a guy and cleans up after himself. A pro.”

“Don’t know how he’d have time for all that. M.E. said liver temp shows the body’s only been here for a couple of hours.”

“Fresh meat. Who called it in?”