NIGHTFALL: THE BROKEN SON-IN-LAW'S LAST WAR

Chapter 4: Nobody Gets That Lucky

When the first police car skidded into the driveway, I was still sitting on the hallway floor with my back against the wall.

Behind me, the unlocked cellar door creaked open, and the family came up the stone steps one by one, blinking, shaking, clutching each other. Tyler saw me first.

"There he is! He had a gun! I heard him, he was giving orders like a..."

"Tyler, shut up," Natalie said.

He stared at her, stunned. In twenty-eight years, I don't think his big sister had ever once told him to shut up.

Then the lights came back on, one of the officers had found the cut cable and patched it, and the whole house filled with police.

They found the bodies one by one. A man under the dining table. A man by the windows. A man behind the kitchen counter in a pile of copper pots. Two at the bottom of the main staircase. One on the back terrace in the rain. I heard the young officers swearing quietly to each other as they counted.

An hour later, long after midnight, a big man in a rumpled grey coat walked into the hallway and stopped in front of me.

He had a shaved head, broad shoulders, and a tired, kind face, the kind of face people tell their secrets to without meaning to. He crouched down so his eyes were level with mine.

"Detective Sam Okafor, Bayridge Police," he said. "You're Adam Kessler. The son-in-law."

"Yes, sir."

"Want to tell me what happened here tonight, Mr. Kessler?"

I could still smell gun smoke on my own hands. I let my eyes drift past him and focused on nothing, the way I'd seen frightened men do a hundred times.

"The lights went out," I said slowly. "There was shooting. I got everyone to the cellar, then I hid."

"Where?"

"Here. In the hallway. In the dark."

"For how long?"

"I don't know." I rubbed my face with a hand that shook just enough. "I was in the army, Detective. I have problems with loud noises. I just sat here and waited for it to stop."

Okafor looked at me for a long time without blinking.

"Six men are dead in this house," he said quietly. "Six professionals. Military boots, body armor, radios, rifles with the serial numbers filed off. Two more drove away in a van, and one of them, according to your neighbor, was bleeding. And you're telling me you sat right here, in this hallway, the whole time?"

"Yes, sir."

"Did they shoot each other, then?"

"Maybe. I don't know. It was dark."

Behind him, Tyler couldn't keep quiet.

"He's lying! Detective, he had a rifle! I heard him talking in the dark like some kind of soldier!"

Okafor turned his head slowly. "Is that right, Mr. Kessler?"

"I picked a gun up off the floor," I said. "One of them dropped it. I was scared. I held it so nobody could use it on us."

"Do you know how to use a rifle?"

"I was a cook in the army, sir. They made us learn the basics."

Okafor's eyebrows lifted, just slightly. He looked down at my hands, then at my shoes, which were soaked with rain and garden mud.

"Your shoes are wet," he said.

"I went outside to throw up."

He smiled, but it didn't reach his eyes. Then he stood, his knees cracking, and turned to the others.

"Did anyone actually see what happened?"

There was a long silence.

"It was pitch dark," Harold said finally, gripping his walking stick. "I couldn't see my own hand."

"I was in the cellar the whole time," Vivian said, pulling her pearls tight against her throat. "We all were. My son is upset, Detective. He's confused."

"I'm not confused!" Tyler said.

"Tyler." Vivian's voice was pure ice. "Not another word."

Vivian Prescott hated scandal more than she hated me. If her family's name was going to be in the papers, she wanted it to be as victims, not as people with secrets.

Okafor turned to Natalie last. "Dr. Prescott? You're a doctor, I'm told. A calm head. Did you see anything?"

Natalie's hands were still shaking. Her blue dress was soaked at the shoulders from the rain outside the cellar window, and a thin streak of mud ran down one arm. She looked at me for one second, and I couldn't read her face at all.

"I stayed in the cellar," she said. "I didn't see anything."

It was the first lie I had ever heard her tell, and she told it for me.

Okafor looked at the mud on her arm, and then at the mud on my shoes. He didn't say anything about either.

"The security cameras," he said instead. "Who checks them?"

"I do," I said. "Sometimes."

"Well, somebody cut the camera line an hour before dinner. We've got nothing. No video, no footage, no faces." He shook his head. "Whoever planned this knew exactly what they were doing."

He started to turn away, then stopped.

"Funny thing, though. The man under your dining table died from a carving knife, the kind you'd use on a Sunday roast. And the man on the terrace had his elbow bent the wrong way before somebody shot him." He tilted his head. "Strange way for professionals to fight each other."

"Maybe one of them got angry," I said.

"Maybe." He pulled a card out of his coat pocket and held it out to me.

"In case you remember something, Mr. Kessler."

I took it. "I don't think I will."

"You'd be surprised what people remember." He leaned closer and lowered his voice so only I could hear. "I've been a cop for twenty years. I've seen lucky people. I've seen people who hid under beds while their whole street burned. But six professionals don't kill each other by accident in the dark while the house cook sits on the floor and waits." He straightened up. "Nobody gets that lucky."

"Then I guess I'm the first," I said.

He almost laughed. Then he walked back toward the dining room, where men in white suits were taking photos of the blood on Vivian's carpet.

The family drifted to the living room, wrapped in blankets the officers had brought. Jason left with a police escort, saying something about his lawyers. Natalie stood at the window with her arms crossed, staring out at the rain.

I stopped beside her. "Natalie..."

"Not here," she said, without turning her head. "Not tonight, with all of them listening. Tomorrow, you and I are going to talk, and you're going to tell me everything."

She still wouldn't look at me.

Tyler sat alone on the stairs, his face lit blue by his phone screen.

He was smiling now, for the first time all night.

I walked past him on my way to the kitchen, and I glanced down at the screen in his hand. I saw myself on it, frozen in the moment I'd hit the dining room floor, plates smashing around me, my mouth open in a silent shout.

Under the video was a caption he'd typed with his thumbs.

Psycho army cook melts down at family dinner LOL.

A blue bar crawled across the bottom of the screen.

Uploading... 94%.

"Tyler," I said quietly. "Don't."

He looked up at me with a smirk, and his thumb tapped the screen.

Upload complete.