THE VICTIM was on the corner. As two detectives approached the scene, a young sergeant came up and raised the yellow tape.

“What’ve we got?” asked the lead detective.

“Shotgun. Double-aught buckshot. Penetrated all vital areas, according to the inspector,” said the sergeant.

“Time of death?”

“People next door heard the shots, and … collapsing. About four this morning. Didn’t see anyone though.”

“Then burnt?”

The sergeant nodded gravely. A tang of smoke still hung in the air.

“That may not have been intended,” remarked the other detective.

The detectives asked to be shown through to the scene.

The victim lay before them, a ruin. A partially blackened skeleton. A hole, filled with broken parts.

The lead detective stepped back, arms akimbo, blinking.

“Someone,” she said, “must’ve really hated this house.”

The briefing began.

The lead detective tapped a photograph on the whiteboard depicting a two-story Tudor bungalow, its white stucco covered with vertical and diagonal brown beams. “Our victim, 364 Hetherington, known as ‘Woodthorn.’ Unoccupied at time of death. Been on the market for four years, since the last owners died.”

Before that, the house had been owned by an old couple, now in a retirement village a thousand miles south.

“They’re in their nineties now. Check their alibis anyway. I want a list of anyone who ever owned this place, rented it, subletted it, or spent a night on the sofa. We need to figure out who had a grudge against this house.”

The second detective took up the thread: “So far, no hits on the shotgun. Now, the inspector from the department of buildings says that the perp must have known where to shoot,” he said. “This was not a spontaneous fit of rage, friends. You can’t kill a house with a shotgun unless you know something about its structure, the load-bearing walls, where it’s weak, and all that. This killer did their research.”

The house had a lot of enemies.

There had been an extraordinarily high turnover for a dwelling of that type, situated on a relatively quiet street.

Emotions ran high among the former tenants. A few had adored it, but most harbored residual ill feelings toward the victim.

Many had lost money on the house, which continued to decrease in value, often in concert with the downturns in the market and the fortunes of the neighborhood, but even in the recent uptick, Woodthorn was being listed at slightly less than the going rate.

Some—renters mostly—had to be dragged into the station by force. One woman seemed to believe that the house would “know” if she “testified” against it. (In the course of her interview, she made similar accusations against her current apartment, and a statue in the town square, however.)

A long-faced man blamed the house for his girlfriend “abandoning” him fifteen years prior. “She hated it, said it was dark and scary. Maybe she was right. But I loved the old place … before that.” He'd been alone ever since.

One gentleman in his sixties behaved with such a studied indifference, claiming repeatedly not to have feelings “either way” about the house’s murder, that the detectives’ suspicions were aroused. After hours of questioning it eventually came out that the man had lost Woodthorn in a bet thirty years ago to a hated rival (that individual was no longer living, had flipped the house immediately, in any case).

Neighbors were interviewed.

Many described the victim as “somewhat dilapidated,” “overgrown,” “past its prime,” but averred that it had “good bones.”

One woman, in her late fifties, had grown up on the block. “When I was a kid, I’d pass by and look up at the upstairs window. I’d always imagine a bitter old woman had imprisoned a young man there since childhood, never letting him out, filling his ears with darkness.”

No evidence was found to support this, however, and the statement was deemed the flight of fancy of an overactive young imagination.

Most had alibis to different degrees of verifiability, but so far few were viable suspects.

The detectives entered Interview Room One. There sat James Fanshaw, a middle-aged man with a wary look, stroking his shoulder.

Having established that Fanshaw worked occasionally at the local hardware store, the lead detective appeared to read from a page in her case folder.

“Where did you work before that, Mr. Fanshaw?”

“I … was in … real estate.”

“And why did you leave that respected profession?”

“Things weren’t … going well. Time for a change.”

Things had gone very poorly indeed for Mr. Fanshaw: he’d been in a slump for a while, lagging behind all the other agents in his office, when he was given the listing for 364 Hetherington. Woodthorn. A series of near misses, with buyers backing out and things going wrong with the house itself, had evidently driven Fanshaw to a violent outburst.

“Says here that you took down the garden shed with a shovel and your bare hands. Oh, except for a few shots to the window and the door from your .45,” said the detective.

Fanshaw had gone white. He kept quiet.

He’d done time, getting out after fourteen months, but had never recovered—lost his own house, was forced to scrape a living here and there.

“Look, I have the transcript of your trial right here,” said the lead detective. “Quite a litany of complaints about that house, Mr. Fanshaw. And I quote, ‘I’d be about to get an offer, then the house would suddenly settle violently. Or the pipes would randomly start up. Always too hot in there, or too cold. Certain rooms, they looked nice, but you couldn’t get comfortable. The shadows …’ here it trails off.”

“What was it about the shadows, Fanshaw?” asked the other detective.

“Ma’am?” The sergeant had flung the door open.

“What?”

“There’s been another murder.”

It was the same M.O. Forensics and the building inspector agreed that the killer had probably started with the staircase, which would not have caused the collapse, then the water heater, then hit all the structural weak spots, the same way he’d done with Woodthorn. This time the owners had been home but were chased out by a “tall wiry man with a big rifle.” Ballistics confirmed that the same shotgun had been used in both murders.

Fanshaw had to be cut loose: his alibi for that morning’s attack checked out, (nor did he match the witness’s description of the shooter).

As soon as the printer had spit out a photo—taken from a real estate agency’s website—of the victim, a certain similarity between the houses was remarked upon. The same white stucco, the same brown Tudor Revival exterior beams.

“Looks like we’ve got a serial killer.”

“With a type.”

“We need a map of all the houses like this in the area. I want officers stationed at as many of them as we can.”

“We got a hit on the shotgun.”

The weapon had been used in the murder, unsolved, of a station wagon, three months previously. Registered to one William Trusk, Sr., who maintained that the gun had been stolen a week or so before the crime.

“Let’s see this victim.”

This murder had taken place ninety miles from the city. The department sent over the crime scene photographs.

It was a 1979 Chrysler LeBaron Town & Country Station Wagon.

Wood paneled. Like Tudor-style architecture.

“Childhood trauma,” pronounced the profiler. “He’s getting back at the totems of his tragic past.”

There had been a suspect in the murder, Mark Luther Dale, but nothing could ever be proved against him—he matched a witness’s description, but had no connection with the victim, and the weapon was never found.

“Yep,” said an officer, looking up from his computer. “He’s moved up here, ma’am.”

A little digging told the tale to those listening, likely confirming the profiler’s theory: Dale’s mother had died in his childhood home, of a fall when the staircase railing had come off. The father was long gone (“probably drove off in a wood-paneled station wagon,” opined the sergeant) and the boy was put into the system.

Mark Luther Dale was gone when they broke into his shabby apartment. The place was strewn with ammo and takeout containers and little else.

“Take a look at this,” said the second detective, from the bedroom.

One white wall was covered top to bottom with thick brown slashes of paint, horizontal, vertical and diagonal.

“Beams.”

Occasionally the intersections were obscured or smudged by red spray-painted conflagrations.

The call came in. Shots fired in a heavily Tudor neighborhood. Officers had been sitting on a likely target five blocks away, and were rushing to the scene. The detectives arrived two minutes later.

The door to the house had been blown apart in the blast.

The family was huddled behind a squad car.

“Mark Luther Dale! Come out NOW!”

A thunderous report with an accompanying flash, lighting up the first-floor windows, was the only reply. Wood splintered and fell.

Armored officers formed two lines on either side of the smoking ruin of the front door.

The lead detective was raising two fingers, about to bring them down to signal GO—when a fusillade erupted inside. Debris flew and smoke billowed. Still the shots kept coming. He wasn't firing toward them, however, but against the interior of the house.

Finally, the volley stopped and for an instant all that could be heard was the lamentations of the family from across the street.

Then there was a deep rumbling, a great tearing of wood. The officers stepped back, barely breathing.

Nothing could be seen through smoke. Then there was an agonized human scream accompanied by a long crashing, like the fall of a giant redwood.

Then silence.

The house was still standing.

Only the staircase had collapsed, murdering Mark Luther Dale.