off Indian Bend Road, where house prices ran from eight hundred thou to a million and change. Designed for privacy, the main drag of Palomino Circle linked ten cul-de-sacs, where most of the custom-built homes, only three per cul-de-sac, backed up to the Greenway Golf Course. After a few wrong turns in this circle-within-a-circle development, I finally found 16733 East Yellow Horse Drive, where a uniformed police officer waited to escort me through the house. His name tag identified him as L. Bocelli. When I asked him if he was related to Detective Louis Bocelli, my former partner at Scottsdale PD, he smiled.
“My uncle. I was named for him.”
“Then tell Louie I said hi.”
A makeshift memorial had been set up in front of the Camerons’ house. Smiling photographs of the victims, flowers—both real and fake—candles, stuffed animals, a toy rocket, and sympathy cards and notes sprawled against a hand-painted sign that said, in shaky blue letters, REMEMBER THE CAMERONS. I spent a moment reading the notes—one of them, unsigned, written in a delicate woman’s handwriting—said I will always love you . That singular “you” made me wonder which of the Camerons the note’s writer grieved for. Maybe Dr. Cameron had a lover. If so, we should find her. Rejected lovers sometimes revenged themselves in brutal ways.
“Ready to go in?” Officer Bocelli asked.
“Ready as I’ll ever be.”
The architecture of the Cameron house wasn’t remarkable, just your basic Mediterranean sprawl. But its location explained why the bodies hadn’t been discovered until six p.m., when Mrs. Cameron’s book club had shown up to discuss Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom . Like its neighbors, the house was located at the end of a cul-de-sac, and backed up on the opposite side of the same golf course as Tiffany Browning-Meyers’ home. At midday on a sweltering mid-July Monday, that golf course would have been pretty much deserted. Not that the house’s isolated situation mattered, since photographs of the Camerons’ bodies showed duct tape over their ankles, legs, and mouths.
“You might want to look in the garage first,” Louie’s nephew said, pulling me away from that image.
“The garage? Why?”
“To start off slow. The house, well, I was in there once, and it’s intense. Besides, what happened in the garage is interesting, too.”
There’s not much I haven’t seen, but the fact that Bocelli wanted me to begin the tour in a four-car garage intrigued me. As soon as we rolled up the door, I understood why.
The killer, whoever he/she was, hadn’t even spared the family’s cars.
The windows of a 1957 Corvette convertible were smashed, its Polo White and Inca Silver body defaced with red spray enamel. Even the red Venetian leather upholstery was slashed. But it was the damage done to the 1955 Ford Thunderbird convertible that made me want to weep. The gorgeous turquoise thing was keyed in a crosshatch pattern, then spray-painted with red stripes. What looked like acid had eaten away at the whitewall tires and turquoise-and-white upholstery. Shredded bits of the soft top lay scattered on the garage floor. Similar damage had been inflicted on a silver Escalade.
“Impound yard has the mother’s Lexus LS, the one the kids escaped in. Turned out not to be hard to spot, a brand new silver Lexus LS sedan partially sprayed red, paint all bubbled up in the acid attack. Still had the dealer’s tags.”
“Acid’s rough on cars,” I said, still mourning over the Thunderbird.
He looked down at the garage’s cement floor. “Yeah, but that’s nothing compared to what happened to the family.”
I studied the young cop’s face. He was in his early twenties. “You saw?”
“I caught the welfare check. One of the book ladies called it in when Mrs. Cameron didn’t come to the door. They noticed that it was ajar, so after repeatedly ringing the doorbell and rousing no one, they walked in. And saw what they saw. They’re
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