8. Kyle
CHAPTER 8
KYLE
T he scene could’ve waited until tomorrow. My liaisons at the department always emphasized that while everyone wanted scenes to be cleaned and released quickly, it was fine for me to wait until… you know… daylight.
But as with Rick Leighton’s death scene, the powers that be had wanted to transfer it to someone else to minimize overtime and appease the bean counters. And as long as I was here, I might as well get to work.
So, there I was, decked out in a Tyvek suit at ten at night, scrubbing at stains I tried not to identify if I could help it. Sometimes I needed to so I’d know which chemical to use (or, more to the point, not use), but for the most part, I tried to consider them like unnamed extras in a film. “Dark red stain in the corner.” “Weird brown smear on the linoleum.” “Chunky multicolored substance on the stairs.” In my line of work, it was best to just… not overthink things.
And the other reason I was out here at this late hour instead of waiting until normal business hours was, quite frankly, because this was mid-July. Death scenes always smelled a bit ripe, and tackling them during the cooler hours meant the miasma was a bit less aggressive. Some of the cops in town complained that whenever people died at home and were found later, they somehow always did it when their A/C was broken or their thermostat was set to eighty-seven or something. They, being investigators, couldn’t tamper with anything, so they had to just sweat and swelter.
I, on the other hand, had the luxury of turning off the furnace, cranking up the A/C, and even bringing in my own industrial fans. Plus, like, coming in after the sun went down instead of fourth-circle-of-hell-thirty in the afternoon. All those things only did so much to combat the smells, especially since death scenes had usually been sitting for a while by the time I got to them, but they were better than nothing.
Tonight, I would take everything I could get. The homeowner had apparently been dead for at least a few weeks before someone had noticed Amazon packages piling up on the porch. I didn’t know what the cause of death was. If I had to guess, the medical examiner didn’t either—it got a lot harder to tell as time went on. If the body was someplace hot, that was even harder.
This death hadn’t involved foul play, though, so the scene had been released, and now I was here…
And I couldn’t fucking concentrate.
Like, yeah, I did try to not think about certain things while I worked, but while this may have seemed like a mindless job to some people, there were things I did need to think about. I had to focus so I didn’t cause a fire, damage the house further, ruin belongings, or become the reason another death scene cleaner was called in. Mixing bleach and ammonia was considered a bad idea, for example, unless you actually wanted to make mustard gas (spoiler: I did not want to make mustard gas).
But that was exactly the kind of careless shit that could happen if someone’s mind went wandering at the wrong time. You would think the smell would give it away—just take a whiff of what was in the bucket to figure out what I’d already poured into it—but in a scene that smelled to high heaven of hot decomp, rotting trash, and literal shit, I wasn’t really keen on taking a deep sniff of anything .
Finally, I took all the chlorine-based cleaners out to the truck and stuck with ammonia for the time being. If something needed bleach, it could wait until later. And it probably would need it, given that the deceased had done their deceasing in the bathroom.
With the bleach safely out of reach of the distracted crime scene cleaner, I resumed scrubbing at the viscous substance that had slithered down the side of the toilet before congealing.
And just like it had done the whole time I’d been here… my mind wandered.
It went to three predictable places: the calling-that-a-suicide-is-bullshit decedent, that guy’s friend who hadn’t returned our calls, and my unexpected partner in crime-solving.
Leon was stressing me out. I needed him to call us or answer our calls. I didn’t like the idea of spoofing a number and tricking him into answering—it sounded very illegal and shady and underhanded—but I also didn’t like not being able to reach him. He could know something about Rick’s death. He could be in danger himself, either because of what he knew about his friend’s death or… or any number of things.
I pulled my phone out of the pocket of my Tyvek suit. It was encased in a freezer bag so I didn’t get any gore or unidentified substance #2 on it, but I could at least see the screen.
No missed calls. No texts. Damn it.
Well, there were some texts, but they hadn’t come from Leon or anyone else. They hadn’t even come from my brother to browbeat me into joining him on the retirement gift for Dad.
They were from Everett.
I just realized you didn’t tell me your other fish’s names.
Steve needs his own Instagram. He’d get a million followers for sure.
Would the fish like one of these?
That last one included an Amazon link. I was curious, but I couldn’t check it right now. Probably a toy of some kind. Maybe a plant?
That Golden Retriever vibe of his was surprisingly endearing. I could get seriously annoyed with people who were super eager, doing the human equivalent of bouncing and wagging their tail in hopes I’d throw the metaphorical toy. With Everett, it wasn’t annoying. Caught me off-guard sometimes, especially since most people weren’t bound and determined to befriend a piranha (especially Steve), but it wasn’t annoying.
Maybe I’d just been around too many dickhole cops. I didn’t even mind that they snarked that I should wear a French maid costume; what bothered me was their dark humor. I knew they needed it to cope with a lot of the things they saw and did, but it could cross lines that made me uncomfortable. There was a sergeant who could always be trusted to say something so crass at a crime scene that if Steve could speak, he’d say, “Dude, that’s mean. What the fuck. ”
Everett sometimes said… I couldn’t even call the things he said inappropriate. Just maybe awkwardly timed? He could sometimes make question marks float above my head, but nothing he said ever seemed to come from a place of malice. If anything, he was…
Well, he was kind of like the Golden Retriever who eagerly chased sticks, then innocently brought back a venomous snake. If he did or said the wrong thing, it was with the best of intentions.
Or maybe I just haven’t known him long enough to see his Steve side. Because everyone has a Steve side.
…a Steve side? God, I’ve been inhaling too many ammonia fumes.
I sighed into my respirator and kept chipping away at the semi-hardened sludge.
I liked Everett. He was charming in ways I didn’t know I could be charmed, and he was sweet and earnest. He was smart. He saw things differently than other people, especially cops, and he’d trusted his instincts about Rick’s death. Other people would’ve just assumed the cops knew what they were doing and moved on. Instead, he’d grabbed on like a dog on a bone, and he was determined to see this through.
I appreciated that a lot.
But it also worried me a lot.
Because Everett wasn’t a cop. And he didn’t have those time-hardened instincts and trauma-driven cynicism. I wasn’t a cop either, but I’d spent my whole life around them. Enough to have a better feel for how they thought, how they operated… and how quickly shit could get dangerous even when it didn’t seem like it would.
How quickly the stick could turn into the venomous snake.
I sat back on my heels to stretch a crick out of my back, and I tilted my head from side to side. A knot coiled in the pit of my stomach. Yeah, I wanted to figure out what happened to Rick Leighton. But what if Everett got hurt in the process? What if someone had murdered Rick, and he came after us to stop us from finding out?
It wasn’t that I thought Everett was helpless or stupid. Not in the least. But there were certain types of survival instincts honed from being around really bad people. There was a reason I carried a gun when I came to death scenes. There was a reason I was paranoid about locking doors and locking my truck.
Everett came to death scenes, too, but only when there was no immediate threat and there were still cops around. There was still an element of danger, sure, but he wasn’t thrown to the wolves and left on his own to?—
A tire squealed outside.
Even over the fans I had blasting in the hallway, the sound carried.
Then came the ka-chunk of metal scraping concrete.
A car door closed.
I stood slowly, staring wide-eyed at the bathroom door and listening over the fans as my heart slammed against my ribs. Who the fuck…
Someone pounded on the door, and my stomach flipped. Oh, shit. A relative, maybe? A neighbor? A cop?
I carefully stepped over my cleaning equipment and around the fan, then tiptoed down the hall. There was a living room window overlooking the front porch, so I got as close as I could and peeked around the corner.
What the—are you fucking kidding me?
I groaned, pulled off my respirator, and stalked to the door. I swung it open, ready to demand to know what he was doing here, when Everett blurted out, “I got in touch with Leon!”
I froze, mouth agape. “You… He… Wait, what? And how did you figure out I was here?”
“My brother picked up the body.” He half-shrugged. “I came to the address and saw your truck outside.”
“I…” Well, fuck. I did say he was smart. “Okay, but—wait, you said you got in touch with Leon?”
“Yeah!” He held up his phone like a prize. “I was curious about that spoofing thing. If it would actually work? And it did!”
“I thought we were doing this tomorrow.”
His expression turned a little sheepish. “I wasn’t going to be able to sleep unless I knew if it would actually work.”
Somehow, that checked out.
“Anyway,” he went on, “he wants to meet with us. Tonight.”
“Tonight? But it’s?—”
“Almost eleven, I know. Once he found out we were looking into what happened to Rick and that we’re not cops, he didn’t want to wait. He sounded pretty scared, to be honest.”
I once again worried that I shouldn’t be dragging Everett into this. Not that I was Rambo or anything, but I didn’t want him to get hurt.
And I also wasn’t going to talk him out of anything, not even if I promised to let him pet-sit my piranhas until the end of time, so… the best thing to do was just make peace with him coming along and try not to let him get hurt.
“Uh. Okay. I…” I gestured over my shoulder. “Let me shut everything down. I can finish it in the morning.”
I was admittedly a little disappointed that our rendezvous with Leon didn’t happen at Waffles?
“Do we at least have time to swing into a drive-thru?” I asked as I drove us across town. We’d left his car at my place and taken mine. Everett was a sweet guy, but I wasn’t getting into a vehicle he was driving. My neck hurt just thinking about it.
“We’ve got time.” He wrinkled his nose. “You’re hungry? After, uh…”
“Oh, God, yeah. I’m always starving after I’ve been at a scene.”
He said nothing. When I turned to him, he was staring at me in horror, and I thought he’d turned a little green.
I rolled my eyes and chuckled. “It’s a lot of physical work. Trust me—you work up an appetite.”
“Blech.”
“What? You’re around bodies and stuff all the time!”
“Yeah, but I don’t hit up the drive-thru with a body in the hearse!” He paused. “Well, except that one time, but that scene wasn’t, you know, messy.”
“Okay, yeah, I wouldn’t do that either.” I glanced at him as I got into the turn lane. “But do you get hungry if you’ve been cleaning your house for a few hours?”
“Of course.”
“Same deal.”
“Right, but I’m not cleaning up… pieces of people.”
“That’s good.” I reached over and patted his arm. “It’s very encouraging to know you don’t have pieces of people in your house.”
Everett snorted.
“Or, wait…” I pulled into the lane for the drive-thru. “Do you live at the funeral home?”
“Yeah, we have a living space on top. The building was actually a restaurant first, and my parents added the?—”
“Hold up.” I very nearly hit the curb, which he would’ve never let me live down. “The funeral home used to be a restaurant? ”
“Well, yeah.” He shrugged innocently. “It already had a walk-in refrigerator, so…”
“Oh God,” I groaned.
“I’m kidding!” He snickered. “No, no. My dad ran a restaurant, but it didn’t do very well, so he renovated the place and went into the funeral business.”
“Huh.” I rolled down the window as I pulled up to the speaker. “I feel like there’s a story there.”
“I’ll tell you one of these days.”
“I’ll hold you to that.” I placed my order for a burger and a soda, paid, and collected my food.
“You sure you don’t want me to drive while you eat?”
“No, no, it’s fine.” I didn’t want to be mean and point out that his driving terrified me. Steadying the wheel with my knee, I unwrapped my burger partway. “I eat and drive all the time.”
“Eh, fair enough.” As I drove, he asked, “So, did you look at that link I sent? I didn’t want to be presumptuous and buy something for your fish, but it looked really cool.”
“I didn’t get a chance to. What was it?”
“Another castle kind of like the one you have now, but it’s a little bigger. So your guys might actually fit in it, you know?”
I pursed my lips. “Hmm. Maybe? I’ll have to take a look. Maybe if I take out the one they already have.”
“Ooh, no, I don’t want to take away something they like. It’s just a thought, but if they?—”
“I switch out their toys and plants sometimes,” I said. “I like to take them out and clean them, so I put other ones in and just kind of rotate them.”
“Huh. I never thought about doing that with fish toys.”
My face heated, and I shrugged. “I’m a little neurotic about it. They actually like dirtier water, so I try not to go overboard. But they’re really, really messy eaters, so I have to stay on top of things. And people say piranhas can live with plecos—those algae eater catfish things?—but someone on a forum told me his piranhas ate them. So… I don’t take the risk.” I paused. “Sorry, I’m rambling about my fish.”
“Don’t apologize. I’m fascinated by them.” He flashed me a grin. “I’m still determined to make friends with Steve.”
I couldn’t help laughing. “Well, maybe next time you come over, I’ll let you use the net to clean the water after they finish eating.”
“You have to do that? You don’t just like, clean their tank?”
“Oh, I do. But I also have to basically let them eat, then scoop out whatever they don’t eat so it doesn’t get gross.” I glanced at him and grinned as I turned down Leon’s street. “If you can do that without getting nipped, then I’d say you’ve made friends with Steve.”
God, that dorky, charming, incredibly cute smile was going to be the actual death of me.
“Clean out the food without getting bitten?” He put out his fist for me to bump. “Challenge accepted.”