The smell hit me first. The sting of bleach, acrid in the air.
But inside wasn’t some bloody scene like at Ross Tignon’s. The place looked clean. Too clean for a crime scene.
I walked into a small, tiled entry, and the others filed in behind me.
To our right was a living room. Spartan and carpeted with a tan, worn-down low pile. A sagging kelly-green couch sat against the wall. In front of it was a coffee table sprayed with black lacquer and a twenty-eight-inch TV on a rolling cart made of wood laminate. Furniture you could find in an alley.
Ahead of us was a ten-by-twelve kitchen. The wooden cabinets were painted white, but you could see red oak through the brush streaks. A yellow refrigerator—so likely from the 1970s—stood along the north wall.
To my left, a hallway opened up, and I followed the smell of bleach toward a bathroom.
The tub was filled two-thirds of the way. But there wasn’t an empty bottle of Clorox in sight. Or even a sign that a messy cleanup job had been performed.
I moved into an empty spare room. Then to the master. Nothing in either, except made beds.
Soon I had circled back to the kitchen and covered the entire place. It was an efficient fourteen hundred square feet. Two bedrooms. One bath. Zero bodies.
“You spent an hour in here last night,” I told Frank. “I could keep looking for a body—or do you just want a drumroll?”
“I do love a good drumroll, Gardner.”
It was usually better for everyone if Frank was happy, so I used my two hands to batter out a beat on the counter.
Frank took two steps across the kitchen. “Fisher’s brother Kenny came by yesterday to visit,” he said. “But he didn’t see his brother. He figured Barry had gone out, so Kenny decided to grab a beer and wait.”
Frank opened the refrigerator. Inside was a single box of baking soda and two dozen clear bags. Through the plastic, I could see red fluid.
I picked up one of the bags with my gloved hand. Felt something tubular squishing around, shrouded in ten or twelve ounces of blood.
The tub had been a temporary workplace. A filling station. The bleach, the cleanup effort after.
Back at the diner, Frank had told Cassie to see what Fisher looked like for herself.
I looked more closely at the clear sack. Floating free in the bag’s red liquid was a white label, two inches long, printed with the kind of machine you’d buy in an office supply store.
ESOPHAGUS, it read.
What the hell was this?