Close to the Bone (8 page)

His body had a few bruises to the arms and two to the ribs, one rather harsh one on the left clavicle, thought to have occurred as he stumbled around in pain or possibly looking for a phone, according to the scribbled notes of the responding officer. There were no signs of foul play; the door was unlocked but closed, victim’s wallet still in his pocket. Cash and two guns were found in the bedroom, undisturbed. Neighbors had not seen or heard anything unusual that evening, though neighbors tended to keep their observations to themselves in that corner of town. Discretion being the better part of valor, and all that.

George had died on a Saturday night, so there had been no need to clear the building since there was only a skeleton staff present on Sunday anyway. The night-shift deskmen hadn’t been particularly close to him since they worked at different times and so would have been expected to suck it up. Dr Harris had been assigned that weekend, probably complaining the entire time that a former employee should have known enough to die during business hours.

Theresa pulled out the source of her brain twinge, the crime scene photos. George had not been much of a housekeeper, and his home had many obstructions which could cause a fall – stacks of newspapers, empty boxes, an abandoned mop, spilled liquids and scattered shoes. It didn’t
quite
qualify for an episode of
Hoarders
, however, and the clutter had some sort of order to it. The newspapers were stacked, and the boxes set parallel to the wall. George had probably considered the place rather tidy.

Except for the corner of the living room used as a home office, and the bedroom.

A cheap computer desk held a dusty monitor, yet more stacks of paper, three staplers and a coffee can brimming with pens and pencils. A clean end of the desk had a small mountain of sheets and notes on the floor underneath it, almost as if one stack had fallen over or had been gone through. Theresa could see a two-drawer file cabinet, similar to Dr Reese’s, except that instead of glossy walnut, George had a cheap metal one with scratches and some deep dents. It had been emptied, its contents in one large heap next to it.

She studied the photos, then turned each over one by one. She wondered why they had even been printed – most scene photos weren’t in this digital age, when doctors and other people with access could view them on their computers, zooming in and out at will. (Theresa had access only to cases with samples assigned to Trace Evidence; simply browsing through death scenes out of morbid curiosity was not allowed … The medical examiner’s office really
did
try to preserve the privacy and the dignity of the deceased.)

Certain aspects of the scene sorted themselves out as she studied it. The living room coffee table had stacks of playing cards and magazines next to an array of remotes for the home entertainment system. Cardboard boxes had been stacked behind the sofa in a nearly perfect rectangle of bricks – apparently, George spent way too much time on the home shopping channels. But the file cabinet and the desk drawer had everything removed from them and put in a condensed but not neat pile.

The kitchen: the back half of the counter had cereal boxes, a blender, a toaster, a knife block, and so on and so forth packed into a continuous block from one wall to the next. The kitchen table had been similarly loaded up to three-quarters of its capacity, with the remaining quarter left as pristine as the front half of the counter.

The bathroom: medicine cabinet contents undisturbed (all over-the-counter, basic first-aid kind of stuff – no syringes, no industrial-sized jugs of sleeping pills, no worn bottles of expired Xanax such as addicts carry around to lend themselves legitimacy if searched). Enough toilet paper to stock a good-sized men’s room lining the walls, but everything in its assigned though cluttered space.

The bedroom: bed made, albeit with more than a few wrinkles in the old-fashioned bedspread. No less than three dressers with their tops packed with the now-familiar boxes, cartons, and a stack of folded polo-type shirts. But on the lowest dresser this layer had been topped with smaller items: an open ring box, a loose tie, a bundle of letters held with a rubber band and what looked like a tiny bowling trophy. A decorative bottle of cologne, which she hoped had been empty since it lay on its side on top of the polo shirts. A bunch of watches.

The next shot showed a more aerial view of this collection. Beneath the stuff, the top drawer jutted out about three inches and appeared to be empty except for some loose pieces of paper.

Theresa’s mind made that immediate, instinctive leap: someone had emptied the first drawer out piece by piece, placing the items on top of the stuff that was on top of the dresser.

The other drawers were closed – not perfectly flush, but closed. Not a burglar, then; at least, not a professional one. Burglars didn’t take the time to close drawers.

Maybe George had been cleaning out this drawer when overcome by his fatal heart attack? Or maybe George had a fatal heart attack because someone had attacked him, just as someone had attacked Dr Reese. Or someone attacked George because George walked in just as the attacker had been methodically searching through the retired bodysnatcher’s stuff.

Or maybe Theresa was now engaged in the all-too-human pursuit of seeing patterns that weren’t really there simply because she felt convinced there must be a pattern in the first place.

The closet had a similar aura to it. The doors were open, clothes hanging, light on. But the top shelf had two blankets, a stack of jeans, and a stack of sweatshirts, leaving large spaces between these items – odd, considering that every inch of available space stayed filled throughout the rest of the house. Boxes and containers left on top of the shoes on the closet floor. She peered at the colored pixels, trying to sort their contents into specific items: smaller boxes, more envelopes in rubber bands, a baseball, a few books, a worn teddy bear—

‘What are you doing in here?’ Don asked at her elbow, scaring a few years off her life … annoying that they always came off at the wrong end and thus wouldn’t make her any younger. She tended to think bitterly and a bit nonsensically about age whenever Don entered the room. Particularly when he was accompanied by Elena, who didn’t look old enough to drive and was cute enough to make Miley Cyrus look like Leona Helmsley.

‘Reviewing a file. How are you doing, Elena?’

‘What an awful day,’ she said, blonde hair glimmering to her shoulders, hot pink fingernails fluttering. Elena had a lot of awful days, her nerves consistently rubbed raw by the strain of living with two doctor parents who imagined their little girl doing her residency at Johns Hopkins or some such place; Elena herself had just enough intelligence and common sense to know that would never be an option for a girl who couldn’t even pass high school biology. So she strode through life as a constant contradiction, an eternal disappointment and yet the envy of all who set eyes upon her. One couldn’t
not
like the kid – for all her dewy beauty she looked as awkward as a shy seventh-grader standing in a clique-ridden school cafeteria. Theresa patted the table across from herself and suggested Elena sit down for a moment.

Don sat beside Theresa, gingerly. She thought he felt wary at her being sweet and mothering for no apparent reason to anyone other than, well, him, but it turned out he had something else on his mind.

Instead of looking past her at the spread-out file, he turned toward her, removed her right hand from the table and held it in both of his. ‘I have to tell you something.’

She knew at once it would be bad. Solemn wasn’t a common expression for either of them.

‘Dr Reese died.’

‘Oh,’ she said, and nothing more, though her stomach plunged at least a foot deeper into her body, and she revisited the question of exactly how to feel about the death of a co-worker to whom one had not been especially close. In the next instant she moved on to less selfish concerns. ‘His poor wife. And his daughter, with a new baby—’

Don simply held her hand, and when she could stand the silence no longer, Elena mercifully interrupted, asking: ‘Did Justin really kill them?’

‘I don’t know. I can’t believe he did, either.’

‘Justin was always so nice to me,’ the girl said, eyes as wide as the lake and twice as blue.

Theresa didn’t point out that
all
men were nice to her and would continue to be until she hit forty or so. Then all that niceness and attention and helpfulness would drop off exponentially, and she would miss it, no matter how much she had always told herself that her looks weren’t important to her. ‘I heard that he tended to hang out here and talk to you a lot.’

Elena nodded earnestly. ‘He used to, when he was on days for training. Of course, since he went to nights I hardly see him. Just in passing. But he bought me lunch once or twice – twice – because I had gone over to the medical school food court and he happened to be there too and bought me lunch even though I told him he didn’t have to.’

‘Uh-huh,’ Theresa encouraged. ‘What was he like?’

She nibbled one fingernail, chipping off some of the hot pink. ‘Nice! Even when he would kind of flirt with me – I know everyone thought he wanted to ask me out, and he did once, but I kind of said no because …’

Because what? He was black? He had a gap between his front teeth? He snorted when he laughed? ‘Because?’

‘He was so much older than me.’

Justin couldn’t have been more than thirty-five. But then Elena couldn’t yet legally drink, so yes, that
was
a significant age difference.

‘And I don’t like to date people I work with,’ the girl added.

‘That is very sensible,’ Theresa assured her. Without irony, even given the direction of her own thoughts at times.

‘But Justin was even nice about
that
. I know people think he was all like, “Hey, baby,” but he wasn’t. We mostly talked about work. He really cared about his job.’

‘That was my impression, too,’ Theresa said. Don just listened. A formidable mother and adoring but chatty sisters had turned him into a very good listener.

‘He told me that he needed to keep this job, that he had screwed up a few things in the past and didn’t want to do that again. It sounded like drugs, but I didn’t ask. He said he had goals now, and that once he found the right path to them then nothing could be allowed to stop him from reaching justice. That’s how he got past the blood – when he first came here it really made him sick, but he told himself that blood is a trail leading back to the person so that they could never really get lost. In this life or the next, they could never be lost. I thought that was sweet.’ Her eyes filled with tears. ‘That’s why I can’t believe he’d kill Darryl.’

Theresa pressed her hand over the girl’s for a moment. She couldn’t believe it either. Yet the talk of blood trails seemed creepily prescient. ‘Did he mention any problems with Darryl? Did they get along?’

‘No, but then he didn’t even work with Darryl then. He was still on the day shift when we would talk a lot.’

‘Oh, right. Justin’s only been on nights for, what, six weeks?’

‘I guess.’

‘Any problems with anyone else?’

‘No. He seemed to really like it here. He wanted to know everything, who everyone was, how long they’d been working here, how the doctors divvy up the work, what kind of slides they make in histology, everything. Even the paperwork, the reports, the files, how we organize them, how we made the switch from paper to the new digital system. He really seemed interested in what I do.
That
was a first,’ she added with a surprisingly indelicate snort, and for an instant Theresa could glimpse a spark of snarky intelligence. Elena might never become a doctor, but she might yet become one hell of a something else.

‘Did he ever ask to look at some records? A case file, or a personnel file?’

‘No … um … well, sort of. He said once or twice that he’d like to – what’d he say? –
browse
through the records. Just to see how the other deskmen fill out their forms – even though they don’t have that many. The clothing form, the personal property form, the main ledger. The release form—’

‘He didn’t ask for a particular person’s file?’ Don asked.

‘No, no. Just wanted to look at some at random. But of course Janice would never go for that.’

‘Of course not,’ Theresa agreed.

Elena thought a minute, her frown causing a furrow in her perfect skin. ‘But if he didn’t kill Darryl, then what happened to him? Do you think the real killer kidnapped him?’

‘I suppose it’s possible. But for what? Ransom?’

‘Yes! They could make the county pay. That’s what they do in Mexico all the time – families don’t have any money, so they ask the victim’s employers to pay up.’

‘True, but—’

Elena’s eyes had begun to glisten again. ‘I hope he’s okay. Even if he
did
kill Darryl – I still hope he’s okay.’

‘So do I.’

Janice appeared in the doorway, managing to express great displeasure using only one eyebrow, though whether it might be directed at her, Elena, their momentary lack of constructive labor, the current crisis or simply the disruption in the day’s routine, Theresa couldn’t guess.

Janice said, ‘Elena, customers are lining up.’

The girl got up and left without another word. Janice gave Don and Theresa another sharp look – interlopers in her territory, which custom forced her to tolerate. Then she turned away, and Don asked Theresa what the hell she was doing, though not in so many words.

‘Looking at our ex-Property-clerk’s case file.’

He raised an eyebrow to express curiosity that she might choose this moment to revisit history when current events had overwhelmed them.

‘His house is packed to the gills, but it’s not messy. Not messy at all.’

Don leaned over the pictures. ‘I’m not following you, kiddo.’

‘Someone’s looking for something. He’s not interested in clothes, food, prescriptions or money. He’s looking for some
thing
.’ Theresa looked into her friend’s deep brown eyes, and for once they didn’t make her feel better. ‘And he’s going to keep killing us until he finds it.’