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Down the hallway, two officers stood guard in front of an open door. Huge sections of the wall were blown open to the studs.

Edwards stepped up. “All four in here?”

One of the officers nodded. “Yes, sir.”

Edwards stopped in the doorway and looked inside. “Good Christ.”

Holmes stepped in behind him. The metallic smell was stronger here, and there were other smells too. Seared flesh and the stink from voided intestines.

He turned. “Margaret, you don’t need to see this.”

She stepped up beside him. “Since when have I ever backed away from a dead body?”

Edwards moved around the perimeter of the inside wall until he was standing with his back to the shattered window. Holmes followed his route, with Marple and Poe in his tracks, until they were staring down at the corpses.

Three of the four men on the floor looked barely human now. Faces ripped off. Limbs twisted and broken. Gaping holes in their torsos, with gleaming tangles of tissue spilling out into wide pools of thickening blood. On the far side of the room, the fourth man looked almost pristine, except for the single purple dot between his eyes and the smear of brain matter dripping down the wallpaper behind him.

Weapons were scattered among the lifeless bodies. Two AR-15s, three automatic pistols, and one 20-gauge pump-action shotgun.

“Looks like they were ready for company,” said Edwards. “We’ll look for IDs when the M.E. gets here.”

An officer appeared in the doorway. “We checked both floors, basement too. No explosives, no bomb-making materials.”

“That doesn’t prove anything,” said Poe. “Oliver Paul could be making the bombs and supplying them on-site. He could have just been using these guys to plant them, or for muscle along the way.”

“We’ll check their clothes and skin for residue,” said Edwards.

Holmes moved back around the edge of the room. He stepped out into the hallway and started walking down to the far end. His sense of smell had mostly adapted to the sickening miasma in the bedroom. Now it was being tweaked by something else.

“Holmes! Hey! No wandering!” It was Edwards, calling from the bedroom doorway.

Holmes stopped at another door. He gestured to one of the cops standing in the hall. “Open this.”

The cop looked over at Edwards.

Edwards hesitated, then nodded. “Do it.”

The cop nudged Holmes. “Step aside, please.” He opened the door a crack and pointed his rifle in. Then he backed off and threw the door open.

Holmes stepped inside. It was a large linen closet, totally empty, with shelves resting on moveable brackets. He looked up. Set into the ceiling was a hatch with an inset handle. Easy to miss in the excitement. Holmes took a deep breath in through his nose.

Edwards was standing beside him now. Poe and Marple too.

“There’s an attic up there,” said Holmes. “Or at least some space under the rafters.” He closed his eyes. His olfactory lobes were now filling with fresh stimulation. Sulfuric acid, toluene, ether, lye, and a dozen other scents—a virtual periodic table.

“These guys weren’t making bombs,” said Holmes. “They were cooking meth.”

CHAPTER 50

TWENTY MINUTES LATER, Margaret Marple was riding in a government SUV with Auguste Poe and Brendan Holmes. They were on their way back to the Navy Yard and a waiting helicopter, courtesy of the FBI.

Holmes had been right, of course, annoyingly so. He definitely had annoyed Edwards.

As soon as the CSI team arrived on the scene, they’d removed the closet shelves and put up a ladder. In the attic, set amid the pink insulation and roof supports, were folding tables covered with lab gear, bins of chemicals, small ovens, and ventilation equipment. A compact but efficient urban lab.

As much as Marple admired her partners’ research on Shining Path, she doubted that any connection between the dead men and Oliver Paul would ever be found. She wasn’t sure that Burton Edwards was all that fired up about investigating the link anyway. It wasn’t his lead.

“He couldn’t get rid of us soon enough,” said Poe.