part0021

UNLIKE GUILLORY, Evan didn’t have a Curtis Banks, the confidential informant, petty thief and burglar she’d used to watch Robert Garfield’s house for her. He had to do it all for himself. Nor did he have the luxury of spending twenty-four hours to make sure the house was empty. Rather than sit in the relative comfort of his car watching the house and risk the unwanted attention of a nosy neighbor, he’d crept into the overgrown back yard, hid in the dense bushes at the bottom.

For two hours he watched and waited in the cold and dark. A chill worked its way into his bones to match the cold dread that gripped his stomach and squeezed his heart. For two hours he stared at the house that was as lifeless as a mausoleum and tried to still his mind.

Because in the neglected, overgrown jungle of Robert Garfield’s yard he couldn’t shift from his mind the memories of the last time he’d waited in preparation for breaking into a deserted house—and he didn’t mean Todd Strange’s apartment. It was ironic that Kate Guillory had been at his side on that occasion to lend emotional and physical support.

Because the house they’d broken into had been one where his dead wife Sarah had spent time growing up. One in which she’d suffered the most traumatic experience of her young life. A trauma that had contributed to her taking her own life in a state psychiatric institution more than twenty years later.

Or so they’d told him.

Because at times like this his mind would give him no peace. Now here he was, alone, on a mission to try to find for her some of the peace she’d helped try to find for him.

If he didn’t make a move now, his doubts would weaken his resolve to the point where he’d give up altogether. He encountered the first surprise at the back door. It was unlocked. And while it was an unlooked-for bonus, it also made his stomach turn over.

Had somebody been here before him?

Because it couldn’t be that Garfield left his house unlocked. It sent a wave of revulsion crashing through him to think of the sort of things that a man like Garfield might keep in his house. The sort of things he was going to have to dig through himself in his search for information. That sweaty, gorge-rising wave of nausea told him that Garfield would never leave his house unlocked. Not unless he was stupid. They knew for a fact that he was far from that. It was the smug confidence in his own cleverness that had gotten under Guillory’s skin to the point where she’d attacked him in the first place.

Somebody else had left the door unlocked.

And that person or persons might still be inside.

He eased the door open. Stepped lightly into the kitchen, breathing on hold. Silence. Complete stillness. Not even a startled cockroach scuttling for the safety of a dark corner. He couldn’t explain the aura of hollow emptiness that immediately enveloped him. Not just in the kitchen. In the whole house. As if he could see through the walls and the ceiling. His shoulders relaxed, his breathing easier. He’d put money on the fact that he was the only living thing in the house.

There was something else as well as the sense of abandonment. Not strong or overpowering, but it was there. A sharpness in the air. Like the smell of spilled milk gone sour. Except it wasn’t that. He recognized the smell. It awakened memories that he couldn’t put his finger on, of sweaty nights spent tossing sleeplessly in tangled sheets.

It was coming from the hallway. Leaving the kitchen, he crept silently into the increasingly pungent atmosphere. He closed the kitchen door behind him to block out the kitchen window, flicked on his flashlight.

An up-ended bucket sat at the bottom of the stairs. Around it, a congealing pool of vomit, the source of the acrid smell. More of it streaked the wall leading up the stairs to the landing. As if the bucket had been thrown down the stairs, its foul-smelling contents spattering everything.

Amongst the bile and partly-digested food particles that lay at the bottom of the stairs, he saw something that was out of place. Something bright. He ignored it. Concentrated instead on the task ahead—getting across to the other side of the sea of vomit in front of him.

Because whatever might have happened here, it had happened upstairs. He wouldn’t be able to search for information until he knew what it was. He already had a bad feeling about it.

That was when he caught the smell of soap. Just a hint, then it was gone. So fast that it might have been nothing more than a remembered smell, his nose working with his subconscious mind to put thoughts into his head he refused to acknowledge.

He gripped the banister tightly with his left hand. Bent his knees, tensed, then leapt across the pool of vomit, thigh muscles exploding into adrenalin-fueled action. He landed on the second step with a heavy thump, wobbling precariously. Shot out his right hand to steady himself against the wall. Then froze, head cocked, alert for any reaction to the unavoidable noise he’d made.

No sound came from above, just a deeper silence.

He got up on his toes to avoid the spills on the stair treads, pressed his fingers against the wall for balance. Ever mindful to avoid the streaks slashed across the wall, he made his way upstairs. As he climbed, the acrid smell receded, only to be replaced by one far worse, one that told him what he was about to find. As if, in the darkest places of his mind and heart, he hadn’t already known.

Of rotting flesh and putrefaction over a backdrop of rotten eggs and feces. He pulled out a handkerchief, clamped it tightly over his mouth and nose.

He paused at the top of the stairs, tried to slow his heart and his breathing. On the other side of the landing the door to the master bedroom was closed. He ignored it. Put off approaching it, even thinking about it, concentrated on looking for Garfield in the places he knew he wasn’t.

He wasn’t on the landing. So much for the theory that he’d dropped the bucket as he collapsed at the top of the stairs. He wasn’t in the bathroom. Not slumped clutching the toilet pan like a prized possession to be carried with him to the next world. Or even stabbed to death in the shower stall in a frenzy of murderous rage. He wasn’t in the second or third bedrooms either, both of them empty and unused, their doors wide open.

He was all out of places Garfield wasn’t.

He stood for a long time in front of the closed door to the master bedroom. His nose told him that his irrational hopes that he wasn’t only seconds away from finding Garfield dead behind this door were in vain. Not because he gave a damn whether Garfield lived or died. But because his mind would give him no rest from the thoughts that tormented him, from what he so desperately wanted not to be so.

The smell of soap. And something shiny where nothing shiny belonged.

Gently, he pushed the door open with his finger.

Then rocked violently back on his heels. An odor straight from the pits of hell rushed out to embrace him like a long-lost friend, to smother him with its foul embrace, the chemical compounds and particles released by Garfield’s decomposing body eagerly searching out a new home in his hair, his eyes, his pores. Who’d have thought that an inch of wooden door could keep such a monstrous thing at bay.

Robert Garfield’s unseeing eyes stared back at him as he lay in his bed, propped up on pillows as if waiting for a friend or a kindly neighbor to bring him a hot drink and his medication. Except he’d had a very different sort of visitor. Even from the doorway, the dark stain on the pillow around his head was clear to see. Still Evan’s mind clung to its desperate hopes of natural causes. It was vomit. He’d choked on it. In his sleep or as he lay too weak to move.

Those hopes died a peaceful, easy death as he crossed the room, saw that it wasn’t so, that the dark stain was blood and not bile.

Garfield’s death had been neither peaceful, nor easy. His throat had been slit, an open wound from ear to ear like a second obscenely grinning mouth. His eyes were like those of a dead bird, reflecting the world but with no life within, just the remembered horror of his passing. A crudely-written placard sat on his chest.

He stared at the words, a thousand thoughts fighting in his brain. Was it the work of some vigilante group or individual? Or was it somebody who wanted it to look that way? His own people perhaps, worried he’d become too great a risk.

Or somebody else altogether, somebody with an axe to grind.

All thoughts of searching the house for the names of the men higher up the food chain, the men who might well have sanctioned what lay before him, went out the window. The house was a crime scene now. He’d contaminated it unwittingly, didn’t want to compound his guilt.

He backtracked carefully out of the bedroom and across the landing, made his way down the stairs. It was obvious now what had happened. The bucket of sick had been Garfield’s last-ditch attempt to fight off an intruder intent on killing him, buy himself a few moments’ time.

As he descended, carefully avoiding the splashes and stains, his mind went into overdrive. All his senses conspired against him, each contributing its own small piece of a picture that made him wish that he’d never set foot in this house, never heard of Robert Garfield.

The sight and smell of Kate Guillory in the breakfast diner. Her skin, usually pale, looking like it had been scrubbed raw with a stiff brush. Hair smelling of soap, still wet.

The unexplained cut on her cheek.

Snapping at him. Irritable. Stressed. So out of character.

Her lack of appetite, an inability to face a plate of greasy food. He’d just seen and smelled something that had stolen his own appetite. And he was a mere spectator.

On the bottom stair he tensed momentarily, then leapt to the far side of the mess at the bottom, stumbled and fell headlong into the wall as he landed.

He picked himself up, shook his head clear.

He had to call it in immediately.

On leaden legs he took a step towards the kitchen, then another.

That was the trouble. He did want to know, couldn’t help himself. Who the hell did he think he was fooling? He turned around. Stared without seeing at the pool on the floor. He’d rather drop to his knees and lap up the filthy mess like a half-starved dog than do what he had to do.

Around him the room blurred and faded to black as he squatted down. The blood roared in his ears as he reached out his hand for the thing that would bring his world crashing down.

Carefully so as not to get his fingers wet, he took hold of what he’d noticed earlier and forced himself to ignore. A small, glittering object so very out of place in the bile surrounding it.