Chapter 2 Nathaniel’s Past
There are many ways to kill a human. Most of them I learned before I even finished middle school.
I never imagined my mother would die by one of the worst.
The police report said “mixed blunt-force trauma” and “extensive blood loss.” Two neat little phrases that look routine on paper and feel like a demolition charge going off in your chest when you read them about someone you love.
The report left out the bruises on her wrists from being dragged.
The defensive wounds on her palms. The fingernails snapped off and embedded in the killer’s skin.
It left out the fractures, too, though those told me something the report never could: the angles said she kept getting back up.
Over and over, she kept getting back up.
I wouldn’t have expected anything less. She ran from abusive parents, put herself through nursing school, got pregnant by a man who disappeared, and raised me alone.
Tired every single day, she still sat with me and taught me everything she knew from her years on the ward and from the doctors she worked alongside.
Medicine, patience, how bodies fail and how they fight.
She was fierce down to her bones.
So now I’m standing at the door of the apartment across the hall from where she died, eye pressed to the peephole, watching the people who are supposed to find her killer.
Two officers are arguing about which direction to photograph the hallway from.
The younger one holds the camera upside down for several seconds before his partner notices.
Their gloves stopped being useful ten minutes ago.
They’ve been touching their belts, their phones, their own faces.
A third one kneels near the wall where my mother’s blood dried into a dark smear, hours before anyone thought to show up.
He presses his thumb straight into it. Leans in close. Blocks the light.
“Looks old,” he mutters, and writes something down.
If this were a surgical team, they’d lose their licenses. I’d file the report myself.
“Quite a ruckus out there, isn’t it?” the woman says from behind me.
She lives here. This is her apartment. “To think something so cruel was happening right next door.”
I don’t answer.
Through the peephole, a detective tries to piece the scene together. My hands itch to open the door and walk him through it, but I force myself to stay still.
“How about I brew you some tea, young man?” she asks. “It must be tiring, standing at the door like this.”
I close my eyes. Just for a moment.
I made my purpose here very clear to her.
But she let me in before the police arrived for round two of yesterday’s disaster, told them I was a nephew visiting during a difficult time.
Her difficult time. Because there was a murder on her floor, and apparently proximity is enough to claim a piece of it.
I owe her. More relevantly, she could walk into that hallway right now and tell the officers exactly what I’ve been doing. So I play nice.
I open my eyes, glance at her over my shoulder and give her the smile. The one I built during residency, when passing a rotation came down to how comfortable you made patients feel. The instructors loved it. Warm, reassuring, just the right amount of soft.
Completely fake. Always works.
“Tea would be lovely,” I say. “Thank you.”
She softens. I clocked it within the first two minutes of meeting her.
The loneliness sits on this woman like dust on old furniture.
Her daughter’s photos cover the cabinet in the living room.
The daughter herself hasn’t been here in a while.
This woman’s days are long television series and the particular alertness of someone waiting to be remembered.
She disappears into the kitchen. Something floral steeps on the counter.
I turn back to the peephole.
The detective has clocked in the only clean drag mark. The one that showed the killer pulled my mother backward by her ankles.
Within the next two hours, they’ll be done here.
I already know the conclusion they’ll reach because I reached it first. The apartment has a registered owner who hasn’t responded to anything in fourteen months.
No active lease, no current tenant on record.
The building management has a number for him that goes to voicemail in a language nobody here speaks.
They’ll call it a dead end and write it up as such.
So that’s where I’ll start.
Three buildings in a five-block radius use the same industrial floor wax I smelled on the fibers embedded in my mother’s palm.
A specific blend, commercial grade, not sold retail.
I looked it up. One janitorial contractor services all three buildings, and their employee roster is accessible if you know which municipal database to pull from.
Twelve men on the night crew. Seven had alibis I could verify through shift logs and security footage from neighboring buildings.
Four of the remaining five didn’t match the shoe impression left near the stairwell, or the estimated height based on the blood transfer pattern on the wall.
The police missed the transfer pattern entirely.
I didn’t.
That leaves one.
Leonard.
Forty-two years old. Lives alone. Works nights. Documented history of losing his temper, particularly when drinking. Three weeks ago he drank himself into acute alcohol poisoning and had to be brought in by ambulance.
His blood work from that night still sits in the hospital system. I checked it this morning. Elevated liver enzymes, high bilirubin, a metabolic panel so compromised it reads like a countdown. His body has been trying to kill him for years, but he just keeps ignoring it.
That night, while nurses were trying to stabilize him, he lashed out and threw a tray. Grabbed an IV stand and swung it at anyone who came close. Security had to pin him down before he was admitted for detox observation.
The nurse he grabbed by the wrist hard enough to leave a bruise was my mother.
I found the incident report buried in the hospital’s internal system.
She must have hit a nerve in his intoxicated little universe.
Maybe she told him to sit still, or lower his voice, or stop cursing at the staff.
Maybe she held his head to the side so he wouldn’t choke on his own vomit while he fought her like a feral dog.
She handled him professionally, the way she handled everyone. That’s who she was.
For a man like Leonard, being handled by someone smaller, smarter, and sober is an offense to his entire existence. At least, that’s my hypothesis.
I knock on his apartment door at 9:12 p.m.
It takes him a while to answer. When he does, the chain is still on, and one bloodshot eye squints at me through the gap.
“What,” he says.
“Good evening. I’m from the building’s health compliance office.” I use the same soft, professional tone I keep for the outside world. “We’ve had reports of a sewage leak affecting units on this floor. I need to check your water pressure and take a quick sample. Two minutes.”
I don’t bother making up a better lie. If he doesn’t let me in politely, I’ll let myself in another way.
Leonard stares at me for a long moment. Then the chain slides off and the door swings open.
The apartment is exactly what I expected.
Food containers stacked on food containers, laundry that hasn’t been touched in weeks, empty bottles lining the counter.
The television is on but muted, casting a pale flicker across the room.
There’s a blanket bunched up on the couch where he’s clearly been lying for hours.
“Make it quick,” he mutters, dropping back onto the couch.
“Of course,” I say.
I set my bag on his table and open it. My heart skips a beat in my chest, but it does so only once before settling down.
Two vials. One syringe.
He watches me with dull suspicion. “What’s that for?”
“The pipes,” I reply.
He seems to accept that.
I stand there while my stomach does something slow and terrible.
He’s already settled back in, bottle against his chest, eyes at half-mast.
The pipes.
I look down at the syringe in my hand. Then at him. Then at the syringe again.
My mother could read a room in seconds. She could de-escalate a violent patient with her voice alone, keep a crashing body alive with one hand while charting with the other, think three steps ahead during a code blue while interns froze around her.
She could spot a drug interaction from across a medication chart.
She could talk a psych patient off a window ledge at 3 a.m. and still finish her shift without complaint.
She was sharp and she was kind and she was so much more than this world ever deserved.
And this is what took her out.
This. A man who cannot tell the difference between a syringe and a pipe wrench.
All the understanding I tried to find for him, and this is where it ends. What did I really expect? A profound reason why he would murder a woman who probably saved his life?
Ridiculous.
And perhaps that’s why, at the same moment I draw the ketamine into the syringe and push it into his shoulder, a sense of wrongness begins to shake my hand.
Will killing him really be enough?
He flinches. Looks at me with a flash of something almost lucid, mouth opening to protest, but the drug is faster than his thoughts and whatever he was about to say dissolves into a slow blink. His head tips back against the couch.
I switch syringes and inject the second compound.
The paralysis is fast. His chest rises once, shallow, then barely at all. His eyes stay open but there is nothing behind them anymore. Whatever fight he had in him left before the drug even finished its work.
I watch him for a while. Longer than I need to. There is no medical reason for it. I just want to see the exact moment it ends.
Then I move to the table and start packing. One by one, each vial goes into the black evidence bag I brought for this. The syringes, the wipes, the caps. Only when the table is bare do I pull off my gloves, turning them inside out in one smooth motion and dropping them in with everything else.
I zip the bag shut, tuck it deep into my kit, and scan the apartment one last time. No footprints on the linoleum. I avoided the carpet entirely. I touched nothing except the things I brought and the man I came for.
This was… easier than I anticipated. I did not even have to use physical force.
Police probably won’t find him until he starts to decompose.
And even if some ambitious detective decided to treat this scene with more care than they gave my mother’s, there’s nothing here that leads back to me.
A coroner will open his chest and find cardiac failure in a body whose organs were already giving out under years of abuse.
Natural causes. File closed, forgotten by lunch.
I sling my bag over my shoulder and listen at the door. When the hallway is quiet, I step out and lock up behind me.
Two blocks away, a row of dumpsters lines the back of an all-night laundromat.
I kneel beside the largest one, pull the sealed bag from my kit, place it inside a heavy-duty garbage sack, tie it twice, and set it at the bottom.
Compacted with the rest of the waste by morning.
The hospital bins would have been simpler, but they log everything, and I don’t need that kind of trail anywhere near my workplace.
I wipe down the dumpster’s edge with a fresh alcohol pad, fold it into my pocket, and walk back to the main road.