Chapter 40
CHAPTER FORTY
Rue
My suspicions start to ping as I approach the house with the first dead guy of the day.
Maybe it’s my years as a death investigator. Maybe it’s intuition that only a seasoned killer carries with her. Or maybe it’s the rookie cop puking his guts out on the front lawn.
“You okay, Officer Dominguez?” I ask as I pass him on the way to the front door.
“Hey, Miz Bellamy.” He lifts his head and scrubs his uniform-sleeved arm across his mouth, his complexion a greenish beige. “It’s b-bad in there.”
My gaze tracks to Bart, who’s mid-eye roll as he waits for me in white disposable overalls.
“The kid’s not wrong,” he says when I reach him, handing me my own Tyvek suit to pull on over my street gear.
“Great.” Behind us, the rookie gives another mighty retch and heaves up everything he, his father, and his grandfather ever ate. “Whatever’s inside can’t be any worse than Dominguez redecorating the rhododendrons.”
Bart snorts. “That’s a boxwood. Do you know anything about plants?”
“I had an extremely rocky childhood,” I say cheerfully as we step inside and follow the buzz of activity to the kitchen.
Bart gives a low whistle as we stand shoulder to shoulder in front of the frail old man impaled on the silverware in his open dishwasher.
“Need to puke?” he asks.
“Nope,” I say. “You?”
“Nope.” He pulls out a pair of gloves. “Let’s do it.”
My suspicions continue to grow as I fire off a series of photos documenting a death that gives every indication of a household accident but is a little too Final Destination for me to brush off entirely.
Bart, meanwhile, dictates his observations into a digital recorder similar to the one Hugo found and—
And I’m not thinking about Hugo and what we did last night. I’m thinking about Hugo and why he might’ve gone after a retired junior high violin teacher named Augustine Horne.
When I crouch to get a better look at his injuries, Bart says drily, “Mind the blood.”
I laugh because it’s everywhere. Horne looks like a Dairy Queen dipped cone, coated in a thin layer of chocolate from the nose down, dropped in a dishwasher, and left to melt.
And of course, there’s the smell. No protective overalls in the world will spare the clothes underneath from the almost meaty smell of old blood or the piss- and shit-stench from the body. That’s what I get for wearing dry-clean-only today.
“Elderly male found prone across an open dishwasher door. Scene consistent with a possible trip and fall,” Bart says into his recorder. “Multiple injuries to the face and neck with possible airway involvement. Wounds appear to be from utensils in the silverware basket. Specifically…”
We both lean in to study the objects that pierced Horne’s papery flesh.
“Items from the knife block,” I say, standing to confirm the handles embedded in Horne’s head match the ones in the wooden block on the counter. “And he must’ve kept them sharp.”
I squat back down and fire off a few pictures before carefully moving the hair at the nape of Horne’s neck, where blood’s turned the once-silvery strands dark and crispy. “Did you clock the—”
“Knife poking out next to his C-2 vertebra? Sure did.”
That’s the least cinematic of Horne’s wounds; the most dramatic by far is the gash that damn near split his face in half, creating a grisly death mask.
If this is Hugo’s work, which I’m almost entirely certain of by now, I’m extremely impressed.
I also understand why poor Trevor Dominguez was tossing his cookies; the crusty glaze on the blade piercing Horne’s eye is especially nasty.
“At least he left me one good one to pull from,” I mutter as I snap a pic.
“What’s that?” Bart glances up from where he’s crouched to study the leathery, split lips.
Oops. “He was a violinist, right?”
I point to the two-prong carving fork that entered Horne’s face under his chin to emerge just above his left mandible.
“No more private lessons for him.” Bart stands with a crackling of his knees. “Ready to have him moved?”
I nod, but it’s only when the removal team starts to lift him and I fire off a few photos from this new angle that I spot the problem.
“Bart,” I say urgently.
He ambles forward to stabilize the knives protruding from Horne’s neck and jaw, but the one in his eye is precarious, and I’ve got my hands full of camera.
“A little help?” I call to the room.
Dominguez comes running, his eager-beaverness restored. Then he sees his assignment and blanches.
“No,” he says.
“Yeah.” I nod with my chin at my equipment bag placed on the floor outside the blood radius. “Glove up.”
His eyes dart to the knives in the corpse’s face, and he swallows convulsively.
“Now, kid,” Bart barks. We share an exasperated look as the fit, buzz-cut twentysomething scrambles to follow our directions.
To his credit, Dominguez keeps it together and holds the eye knife stable as the crew lifts Horne straight up, letting me slide in to get the shots I was missing.
Then they carefully set him face-up on a clean sheet on the floor.
Because Horne’s body is in rigor, it stays in the position it was in at the time of death—folded over the dishwasher door, bent at the waist, one knee lifted and the other stretched behind him—and now that he’s on his back, it looks like he’s trying to ascend to heaven on an invisible ladder while his face acts as the world’s grossest pincushion.
“Hey,” I say to Dominguez, who’s breathing hard through his nose. “What do those white lines on Mr. Horne’s face mean?”
“Umm…” He’s turning green again, but he gamely leans over the body to look closely at the pale grid lines intersecting on the purplish-red skin of the man’s left cheek.
“It’s where he was touching a surface and the blood couldn’t pool.
” He glances over his shoulder. “The, uh, top of the silverware basket, probably.” Then his eyes snap back to the dark curls of Horne’s lips, and he whispers, “They look like Fruit Roll-Ups.”
“Stay with us,” Bart orders. “What do the grid lines mean?”
“Right.” Dominguez blinks, then nods slowly. “He wasn’t moved postmortem. So it was an accident?”
“Maybe,” Bart says, while I say, “Likely.”
The kid frowns as he looks from Horne’s face to the knife block to the dishwasher again, his choppy breaths starting to level out. “Who puts their knives point-up like that?”
Dammit. I was hoping no one would notice that, just like I’m hoping nobody will think to ask why Horne put his good knives in the dishwasher in the first place.
Bart just shrugs. “Who knows why anybody does anything?” He pats his pockets and pulls out his crinkled pack of cigarettes. “Who knows why I keep smoking these cancer sticks? And who knows why this guy was allowed to keep teaching after half a dozen sexual abuse allegations against him?”
Now it’s Dominguez and me sharing a look.
“Really?” I start to ask, but Bart’s already headed for the door with his lighter in hand.
“I’ll ask around,” Dominguez tells me. Having recovered from his messy corpse trauma, he wanders off to extract gossip from his fellow cops. And that’s when I find the plant cutting in Augustine Horne’s pajama cuff.
Our falling-out was so swift and brutal that I never got to ask him about it. But this is him. It’s Gomez and it’s Hugo, and this little sprig is for me.
I covertly squeeze my thighs together at the memory of that soft, almost reverent “fuck” as he came and the slap of his hand on the wall.
For one ironic moment, I wished I had cameras in his half of the duplex so I could watch those big hands working his dick, could see his beautiful face twist in pleasure as he came.
I’m still furious with him. Of course I am. But apparently, it’s not that hard to get off on someone while being pissed at them at the same time.
I glance around the room, confirming that nobody’s paying any attention to the all-work, no-play investigator messing around with the grossest body in recent memory. It lets me turn and casually drop the cutting into my equipment bag to keep it from becoming evidence.
I wasn’t sure what I’d do if I came across another of his scenes, particularly one that had questionable evidence for me to flag.
At least now I have my answer: I won’t turn him in.
Even if we never speak again, I’ll keep covering up his kills, and I’ll tell myself it’s nothing more than the threat of mutually assured destruction.
That decided, I continue examining the body for any trace evidence I need to eliminate before the return of my partner, but the earthly remains of Augustine Horne are otherwise clean. I’m wrapping up when the smell of cigarette smoke reaches me a full five seconds before Bart does.
“Look at him,” he grumbles, nodding his chin toward Dominguez, huddled with a few other officers. “Confirming what I already told him.”
I stand and use my pinkie to pull the edge of my glove back so I can give Bart’s shoulder a friendly pat with my wrist. “He’ll learn soon enough. You’re the source of all wisdom.”
“Damn straight,” he grumbles. “And aren’t you supposed to be meeting your movers in an hour?”
“What?” I glance in shock at the phone he holds in front of my face.
Yep, I lost track of time, and what I thought would be an easy “pop home over lunch to let the movers in” errand is now going to be a massive pain in the ass after catching this extravagant kill.
“I’ll… I’ll go call Hugo. He can let them in. ”
This earns me another brow lift from my partner, but I ignore him as I pull off my gloves, snag my phone from my bag, and slip into the main-floor powder room, leaving the door partially cracked to cut down on the general crime-scene noise.
Now, how in the world am I supposed to make this ask?
In the end, I chicken out and send a text.
I’m stuck at work. Can you let the movers in at eleven?
God, that’s brusque.
I’m investigating what I’ll write up as an accidental dishwasher death in the home, so I can’t get there in time.