“Put the belt down,” one cop yelled. It was not hard to tell that the cop meant what he said.

Jeff was startled by this.

“Back up toward us, with your back facing us, and hand the officer your weapon, sir.”

The tension was high and tight. Jessica stood, not knowing what to do or how to react. She was troubled by such a show of might. The HPD wanted to make an impression, make it clear who was in charge. But Jessica wasn’t getting it.

What was happening? Were they there to arrest Jessica and Jeff? What was going on? Jessica had no idea.

Or did she?

The McCords’ dog barked erratically, crazily. Jumped around. Ran up to the fence in the back of the house. He wasn’t on a leash.

“Chain up the dog, ma’am,” one cop said with concern.

Jessica tied up the pooch. “And that helped, too,” she recalled, “because the dog was flipping out over all the people with guns and the voices and everything.”

“Mr. and Mrs. McCord,” said an officer, “we have a warrant to search your home.”

Jeff and Jessica looked at each other. Jessica could not tell how many cops were present for the search, but, by her humble estimation a year later, she said, “It seemed like a ton. I remember when I looked up as we walked out . . . and, you know, all of these people standing there with guns pointed at us.”

The HPD was concerned that Jeff McCord would draw on them; they knew he not only carried a weapon, but he had additional weapons inside his house. When you’re dealing with guns and police and warrants, you don’t take chances. Those days of brotherly blue were behind them. Jeff and Jessica were suspects in a double murder. They were considered armed and dangerous. If they had murdered two people already, what would stop them from going down in a hail of gunfire?

Sergeant Tom McDanal ran the show. He handed Jeff and Jessica the paperwork, saying, “You need to get those children out of here. They should not be here.”

Jessica took out her cell phone. “I’m calling my father.”

After a few moments, she hung up the phone.

“I’ll have to give them a ride over to my mother’s house,” Jessica said.

Wrong answer.

“You cannot leave, ma’am,” McDanal made clear.

So Jessica called Albert Bailey back and told him to pick up the kids at Myrtlewood.

Someone suggested Jessica, Jeff and the kids wait in the front yard. An officer would keep them company. Anyway, the HPD had work to do.

One of the children asked her mother what was happening. Why were the police going inside their home?

Jessica didn’t answer. She stared straight ahead as a line of officers filed into the one place she had refused to allow them access.

Detective Laura Brignac stood out front with Jessica and the kids. “Do you mind if I talk to your children?” Brignac asked.

“No!” Jessica snapped. “No way . . . I don’t want you talking to them.”

Brignac pulled Jessica to the side, away from the children and Jeff. “Look, I’m not going to tell them anything about what’s going on with their father. . . . I just need to establish a timeline.” The seasoned detective paused. Then: “I’m going to interview the children, Mrs. McCord. Either right here and now. At your parents’ house. Or at the police station.”

The choice was Jessica’s.

After a moment Jessica looked at the detective. Thought about it. “Well, my dad is going to take them and you can talk to them over there.”

Albert Bailey showed up. Jessica and Jeff went into their Myrtlewood Drive home so they could watch the search. Brignac said she’d follow Albert and the kids and interview them at Jessica’s mother’s house.

Driving over, Brignac considered a few things: Kids, she knew, can be the most truthful of any witness. They lay out facts without thinking about them. Without even knowing it. This was going to be interesting.

As Brignac sat down with the kids out of Albert and Dian Bailey’s earshot, she quickly built a rapport, chitchatting with them first about kid stuff. It was clear almost immediately to Brignac that Sam (pseudonym), who was almost twelve years old, and McKenna (pseudonym), closing in on ten years, could potentially break the case—without even realizing it.

“Y’all notice anything different about your house when you went back there yesterday?” Brignac asked both children. She knew the kids had been out of the home for almost an entire day, but they went back that afternoon. They had gone from day care on late Friday afternoon to their grandmother’s house and hadn’t left there until that Sunday morning. Brignac was already suspicious of Jessica’s story of how Alan had never shown up at the house. The detective interviewed the day care provider earlier that same day and the woman confirmed that she, in fact, had dropped the kids off at Dian Bailey’s, somewhere near 4:00 P.M. on Friday, not Jessica or Jeff.

So Brignac knew Jessica and Jeff had lied already.

The day care story was in total conflict with Jeff and Jessica’s version of the same situation. Barring that, by Brignac’s determination, this one discrepancy indicated to her that Jessica was not expecting Alan to show up at her house to begin with.

One of the children spoke up after Brignac asked if anything was different inside the house. “Yes,” the child said, “the carpet was gone . . . in the den . . . there was a new floor . . . and the sofa was gone. . . .”

The other child chimed in, “Yeah, yeah, and . . . my momma had been talking about getting rid of that sofa, anyway. The den had been rearranged, too.”

Brignac was floored by this revelation. She continued the interview, knowing exactly what she needed to do when she was finished.

D. C. Scively was one of the HPD’s working technicians, there at the McCord home to “supervise the other technicians.” Scively was also responsible for maintaining the integrity of the evidence collected. You know, making sure it arrived inside an evidence bag without a problem. Then onto the lab and wherever else, as it should. That whole chain-of-custody thing.

Throughout his time at the McCord house, Scively documented both on paper and with photographs the mess the HPD had run into as they approached the inside of the McCord house.

The place was simply disgusting. Housekeeping was definitely not a domestic skill Jessica could be crowned queen of; it seemed wherever you looked there was a stack of this, a pile of that: clutters of videos, DVDs, magazines, and even pure old-fashioned garbage. But more important to the search team, they confirmed that someone had been working in the home.

After the children left for Jessica’s mother’s, Jessica and Jeff walked into the house and began “observing different areas . . . ,” Jessica later explained in court, “while it was being searched.”

To Jessica, it seemed as though the cops were there to mainly ransack her home and invade her personal space.

“Oh, they moved things,” she said agitatedly, “emptied drawers, made a big mess even worse.”

HPD detective Peyton Zanzour was one of the investigators leading the team during the search. With nearly twenty-five years on the job, Detective Zanzour had surely seen and directed his share of search warrants. On this day Zanzour worked in the capacity of an investigator for the Crimes Against Persons Division (CAPERS).

Here, a group of cops was searching a fellow police officer’s house. It happened. Didn’t mean the guy was guilty. In fact, Jeff McCord likely knew better. Since that interview with Bureau agent Kimberly Williams at the Pelham PD, Jeff hadn’t said much of anything, one way or another.

But then maybe Jeff was covering up for his guilty wife?

Several things stood out immediately to Detective Zanzour. For one, the fact that the house was “in total disarray.” Cops couldn’t walk through the place without stepping on something. One area was loaded with empty floor tile boxes. The carpet in the living room had recently been ripped up. With such a mess, it was almost impossible, without moving things around or dismantling parts of the house, to conduct the type of search the HPD needed to do. There was a lot of ground to cover, like the inside of walls, the basement, boxes, underneath carpets, and the garage.