Chapter 19
19
Elliot Crane
Happy Halloween!
Seth Mays
What the fuck is wrong with your state?
A lot.
To what are you referring, specifically?
The level of alcohol consumption.
How do any of you still have livers?
It IS Halloween.
So?
The whole point if you’re even approaching 21 is to spend it shitfaced.
How else are you going to stay warm in your thong?
I didn’t respond to that last message, but I took his point.
The number of people I’d seen in far, far less clothing than the nearly freezing temperatures warranted was shockingly high. People in what I assume were supposed to be cave-person outfits, people in bikinis and Speedos with tuxedo patterns, ‘sexy’ insert-noun-here costumes… And I do mean ‘noun’ in the most encompassing of terms—I’d never seen either a ‘sexy tomato’ or a ‘sexy pencil’ costume before. I guess that warranted bonus points for creativity.
Or it would have if I hadn’t been trying to drive through them on my way to various crime scenes. It was almost ten-thirty p.m., and I was headed to the third and in an absolutely foul mood. Roger and Lacy were at their own scenes, and I’d been stuck—as the guy at the bottom of the ladder—driving my own car because Lacy had the van and Roger had the truck, and I had to drive something .
I’d texted Elliot back because I needed to just vent at someone , and I’d already been told by Hart to, and I quote, Fuck off, this isn’t any more fun for me than it is for you .
I’d texted Hart between scenes one and two, both of which had involved alcohol-related DUIs. The second, at least, hadn’t involved a human fatality, although I’d now had the ‘fun’ new experience of cleaning deer guts off my shoes. And yes, before you ask, I had had on the little booties, but gravel bites right through them, and that particular road was in terrible shape, with as much loose gravel as asphalt.
The driver and passenger had both been taken to the hospital, although the responding fire department team had seemed positive about their chances. They’d hit the deer, hit another car, then careened off the road, flipped the car, and ended up smashed into a tree. The driver of the second car had managed to keep herself right-side-up in the ditch, and although one wheel was absolutely shot, she was okay.
The first one had left two people on their way to the morgue, one of them in a bear costume and the other dressed as a penis, complete with a little rounded pink hat. There is nothing quite as depressing as a dead man in the driver’s seat of a car dressed as a penis and reeking of cheap whiskey and beer.
But I wasn’t going to say it was the worst scene of the night yet, because I’d just been called in to a domestic dispute scene… and they generally only called me to those kinds of scenes when they turned deadly. I was hoping this was going to be the exception to that rule—that a domestic call resulted in revealing a drug cache or a meth lab or something. I’d take a meth lab about now.
I’d texted Elliot back—which was probably a bad idea, given that I hadn’t spoken to him at all since our argument about the digitalis—while stuck in traffic waiting for the meandering herds of drunken revelers to get out of the way. It had been a spur-of-the-moment reply, sent because I needed to say something to someone , even if I kind of wasn’t talking to him, and I didn’t have the energy to deal with Noah.
Because Noah would, again, try to convince me to move back to Richmond. Back home , he would say. But Richmond wasn’t home anymore. I wasn’t sure Shawano was home, either—not yet. But I was working on it. I was learning a lot in my fire investigation courses, I’d started actual firefighter training, which, while terrifying, meant that I was converting some of my body’s softness to muscle in a way I’d never been able to do before. There was still softness there—a layer of fat over the hardness of muscle—but I was stronger, faster, more confident.
I felt like I was finally getting used to my body and finding peace in my own head.
Usually.
I was not terribly happy at the moment—the DUIs, drunken partiers, and the case I was driving towards all left me dissatisfied and unsettled. Irritable. Impatient.
I’d wanted to text Elliot back, so I had.
And his response had been the same sort of thing he would have sent me months ago.
As though we’d never argued. Never been on a disaster of a date. Like I’d never moved to Wisconsin and confessed my feelings for him.
Which I guess was exactly what he’d wanted.
It didn’t… hurt, exactly. But it didn’t feel good, either. More sour than bitter, uncomfortable than painful, although I had the feeling that it would start to sting if I kept probing the wound.
Traffic started moving—I had finally gotten past the crowds of drunken hooligans and turned toward one of the lower-income pretend-suburban neighborhoods that had gone up in the 1950s and probably hadn’t been renovated since. The houses were mostly bland shades of pale yellow, off-white, grey, and other almost-non-colors. The yards were little stamps of grass that had seen better days—scrubby brown patches, bits of crabgrass, small gardens that were dying after several days of hard frost.
I wasn’t used to that in October. It didn’t drop below freezing in Richmond until January, usually. Maybe a day or two in December if it was an early winter. The idea that we’d be seeing our breath and watching plants die around Halloween would have meant apocalyptic conditions.
Around me, the houses were growing in size—not mansions by any means, but the slightly-higher-income middle-class sorts of houses that might have been seen as aspirational. More 1960s than 50s. More variation in color. Bushes and winterized flower beds. The occasional cement or ceramic deer.
The house I was going to was glaringly obvious—there were three cop cars, lights blazing, pulled into the driveway and the yard. There was tape stretched across the driveway, wrapped around the mailbox on one side and the end of a decorative split-rail fence on the other. The tape flashed weirdly green-brown and blood red in the alternating color lights from the tops of the police cruisers.
I pulled up to the curb, and a frowning uniform ran over. I rolled down the window and leaned across the passenger seat to hand him my Sheriff’s Department ID. “Sorry about the car,” I said, trying to be pleasant. “The official vehicles were already out when I got called.”
The frown smoothed away as he looked at my ID, then handed it back to me. “Give me a second to get the tape,” he told me, then ran over to push it up so I could drive under it and park in the driveway behind one of the cruisers. The tape snagged briefly on my antenna, but then snapped back, wobbling in the mostly-still, cold air.
I parked, then climbed out, wincing as usual as I slid out. I opened the back door, pulling out the gear I needed, starting with the bunny suit. I held it up and looked over at the uniform. “Am I going to need this?” I asked him.
He nodded, his expression grim.
With a sigh, I pulled it on, following it with a mask and gloves before grabbing the giant overstuffed duffel with the equipment I needed to do most of my job—fingerprinting, evidence collection, blood and fluid sampling, and so on. I made sure my ID was clipped to the outside of the suit and made my way up to the door.
It was open, another serious-faced uniform standing halfway out of it, his dark eyes scanning the ID of everyone who approached. He was the only Black officer I’d seen in the Shawano PD. I nodded a hello, and he gave me a nod back, pressing his back against the door frame so that I and my giant bag could get past him.
I stopped about two steps inside.
There was a lot of blood, smeared in streaks down the worn linoleum of the hallway floor, soaked into the fibers of the rag rug that had been shoved up against a wall.
“Mays.” The voice belonged to McKinley, surprising me. I looked up from the blood-streaked floor to find him leaning through the first side door leading off the hallway.
“Detective McKinley,” I replied.
“It’s easier to come through here,” he told me.
I carefully picked my way toward him, avoiding the wide smear of blood just to the left of the door. It looked to me like someone had been stabbed there, fallen, and then crawled or been dragged down the hallway. I studied the smears on the floor. Crawled seemed more likely to me.
I’d come back to that later. I picked my way across the smears to enter the room where McKinley was waiting. He moved out of the way to let me in, and I saw Smith crouched down beside a small crumpled form on the floor.
Oh, fuck . I hated cases with kids. I kept that to myself. Nobody liked cases with kids, and swearing at crime scenes—if you weren’t Hart, anyway—was generally considered unprofessional. You didn’t have to say that kid-cases hit you harder, because they hit everybody harder. Especially people with kids, which I didn’t have. I wasn’t sure about either Smith or McKinley.
Both detectives wore masks, but the tension evident on their foreheads told me they weren’t any happier about this than I was.
“Detective?” A uniform stuck his head in. Both McKinley and Smith looked over at him. “Detective McKinley,” he clarified.
“Yes?” McKinley asked.
“Gas station attendant called in from the north side. Man matching the husband’s description, right vehicle type. Shirt and pants had dark stains that could have been blood.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing. Bought gas, didn’t go inside. Attendant placed the call while he was still there, but he’d left by the time a patrol car got there. We have people checking the nearest highways in both directions.”
McKinley nodded. “Thanks.”
The uniform bobbed his head, then went back to whatever he’d been doing.
I crouched down next to Smith. “You want me to start here?” I asked him.
“Yes,” he replied, his voice low and serious. “You should be able to clear this room faster than the kitchen.”
Great . I didn’t want to think about what that meant. I’d find out sooner than I wanted to, either way. I nodded to Smith, then got to work.
The kitchen had been worse. A second child, this one maybe a year or two older than the little boy in the side room, and an adult woman, presumably the children’s mother, if resemblance could be trusted. She’d been the cause of the bloody streaks down the hall, if the state of her pants were any indication. If anybody had asked me, I’d have said that she’d been stabbed out in the hall at the first smear, perhaps because she’d heard the younger boy scream and come running.
The killer had left her there, on the floor, and either anticipation or the screams of her older daughter had gotten her to her knees and made her crawl, dying, down the hallway and into the kitchen. I could only hope that the girl hadn’t suffered as badly as her mother.
I had gotten about two-thirds of the way through cataloging the kitchen when Douglas Borde, acting ME, finally showed up. I heard him before I saw him—or, rather, I heard Smith’s angry voice.
“There was another death tonight,” Borde half-whined. Which was true, although I hadn’t seen him at either of the car accident scenes.
“Of course there was another death,” Smith snarled. “There were several. And our CSI investigator has managed to be at three in the time it has taken you to attend this one. And he actually does his job thoroughly.”
“So then you get a medical degree and do this job, if you don’t like the way I do it,” Borde scoffed.
“Believe me, I’m tempted,” Smith snapped. “I’d probably be able to do it faster than it would take you to get through tonight’s cases.”
“That’s enough,” McKinley rumbled. “Both of you.”
I didn’t hear whatever it was Borde said in reply, as it was pitched lower. I wanted him to be shamed, chagrined, but I would not have put money on it. If he were capable of that sort of emotional response, he’d actually be punctual and efficient about doing his job.
I steeled myself as I heard angry shoes making their way down the hall—without booties. I hadn’t done the hallway yet, and I felt a surge of annoyance at the fact that Borde was fucking up my crime scene.
“Borde!” This time the angry voice was McKinley’s.
“What?” the makeshift ME snarled back.
“You’re contaminating the hallway,” McKinley growled.
“Why haven’t the CSIs cleared it yet?” Borde demanded, and I had to take a couple deep breaths.
“Because this is his third body tonight and he’s been focused on the scenes around the bodies so that you can do your job,” McKinley retorted. “So have the decency not to make his job any harder than you already have, yeah?”
I suppose at least I didn’t get called to a fourth scene. And they did find the husband and arrest him, but that was when Smith disappeared, so I didn’t get any more news on that front.
It was very early in the morning when I finally got home—about an hour until dawn.
The first thing I thought of was that I wanted to talk to someone—no, not someone . Elliot.
Except that clearly wasn’t going to happen. I could probably text him, but if he wasn’t asleep, he should have been. I also should have been. And talking to him wasn’t going to help me do that because it would just rake up feelings that I shouldn’t have.
And on top of all that, tomorrow was Monday.
Fuck me .