The stink pressed against me like a sheet of chain mail. The reason for it lay in the foyer that led to the living room. A large man was splayed out facedown on the floor. A halo of dried black blood circled his head. A black hole, smaller than a penny, stared out from behind his left ear. Black stippling from gunpowder dotted the bare skin around the hole. He’d been shot at close range. Like the killer had been waiting behind the front door and shot the man when he entered the house. The dried blood around his head came from what must have been a gaping exit wound out the man’s face. I didn’t have to or want to see it. The man wore a black leather Raptor jacket.
I’d only seen him twice before, and I now could only see him from behind, but I felt fairly certain that the dead man was Eric Schmidt, the Raptor who’d met in secret twice with Trey Fellows. Once at the bar in Pacific Beach, and the second time with the lawyer Alan Rankin two nights ago.
Who had killed him? Trey? Could he have possibly done it? No. Sometimes people surprise you, but Trey Fellows wasn’t a killer. Besides, I was pretty certain that he’d spent the last forty-eight hours holed up in his sister’s apartment.
Then who? A fellow Raptor at Steven Lunsdorf’s behest? My pal, Wayne Delk? Maybe somebody at LJPD leaked that Trey Fellows had signed a sworn affidavit stating Lunsdorf had confessed to the Eddington murders, and Lunsdorf found out about it. Schmidt and Rankin must have been working against Lunsdorf and someone ratted them out. A power play at the top? Whatever the reason, Lunsdorf found out, and Delk had the Candlelight address in his car. Thus, the dead body. If Lunsdorf could pin the murder on Fellows and discredit him as a witness in the Eddington case, he’d get a twofer.
Just by staying here for a day, Trey’s DNA and fingerprints were in the house. Now, by walking inside, there was probably a tiny trace of my own DNA too. A few dead skin cells, a hair, a drop of sweat. I was now a part of the crime scene. When they discovered the body, the police crime-scene techs would test for fingerprints everywhere. Trey had a conviction for drug possession, so his prints would be in the FBI’s IAFIS. When the prints were run against IAFIS, some would have Trey’s name on them.
IAFIS had my prints too. Because of my arrest for my wife’s murder, even though I was never tried, much less convicted. But they didn’t have my DNA in IAFIS, and I was going to make sure they didn’t find my fingerprints here.
But I still had to find out if Trey was lying somewhere else in the house. Injured or dead. I went into the kitchen, grabbed a dish towel off the handle of the stove, and went back to the front door. I opened it a crack and peeked outside. No cop cars. Yet. I wiped down the outside doorknobs, closed the door and locked it, then wiped down the inside doorknobs. I carried the towel with me in case I had to open any doors and checked the living room, two bathrooms, and three bedrooms downstairs. No Trey. First good news of the day.
Upstairs was just one room, the master bedroom. No Trey on the floor or in the bathroom. Something on the bedside table on the far side of the unmade bed caught my eye.
A gun.
A Ruger .357 Magnum SP101. I walked over to the table and picked up the gun to check the serial number on the barrel. But I knew the number even before I read it.
My gun. I checked the cylinder. Four bullets. One empty shell. The one that had held the bullet that went through Eric Schmidt’s head.
My phone vibrated in my pocket. I pulled it out but didn’t recognize the number on the screen. Then I did. Sierra.
“I’m on my way,” I said.
“A police car just drove by.” A desperate whisper. “It turned up Candlelight!”