Hades (4 page)

4

Justin had been in similar situations often enough to know that for many people death turned the world upside down. The secure became insecure. The satisfied were suddenly morose, and the complacent were lonely. Murder took things to another, surreal level. Truths were often shown to be lies. Strength was revealed as weakness. The mundane could prove crucial. Things that seemed so impregnable suddenly crumbled at the merest touch.

His life had disintegrated when death had hit his family. His lovely little daughter had been murdered and, never being able to cope with the loss, his wife had committed suicide a year afterward. It was only now, so many years later, that he felt as if his life was being stitched back together. And Justin was very cognizant of how quickly that stitching could unravel.

Watching Abby walk up to the home she’d lived in for over four years, Justin understood that she was uncertain now about how to do something as simple as open her own front door. He took her arm as they approached the steps, and she didn’t flinch or shake him off. He saw her shoulders sag just slightly in relief, and her muscles relax, grateful for any support. When they got to the door, she stood frozen. She didn’t know if she should reach for her keys or knock or just go right in. He’d noticed that, although she hadn’t said a word, her eyes had narrowed at the gate to her driveway, in recognition of the fact that it was open and that it was unnecessary to use the various security precautions that normally kept people off the property. Invasion was not normal for her. She was used to controlling her surroundings, dominating her environment. But things were no longer normal. Even walking into her own house had become disorienting. She didn’t know who’d be inside. She didn’t know the protocol. She didn’t have any understanding of the world she’d just entered so unwillingly.

“It’ll be open,” he told her. And when she didn’t move, he took the door handle and pushed. When it swung open and she still didn’t move, he said, “I’ll be with you every second you want me to be with you. Okay?”

Abby nodded, and Justin acknowledged the briefest of grateful smiles, and then she stepped forward.
Death brings things to a grinding halt,
he thought.
But life starts moving around you again pretty damn quickly.

As they stood in the Harmon foyer, Justin saw that Gary Jenkins was waiting nervously in the living room. His leg was jiggling and his right hand was flapping against his thigh. With him was a man Justin didn’t recognize. He looked to be about forty, rail thin; his hair was cropped close, probably to hide the fact that he was losing it. The man’s face was angular, almost gaunt, but at the same time there was something soft that shone through. He had a runner’s body, and Justin, sizing him up quickly, couldn’t help but think that he was running away from some kind of weakness. He glanced over at Abby, saw that she most certainly did recognize the man. And wasn’t all that crazy about him.

Gary made his way quickly over to meet them. He turned to Abby, shifted his eyes so he could look everywhere but directly at her, and mumbled that he was sorry for what had happened. She nodded graciously. Justin touched her elbow lightly and guided her forward until they and Gary were back in the living room with the thin man.

“Forrest,” Abby said. She did not do a good job of disguising her distaste.

The gaunt man took one step toward her, holding out a hand and saying, “I’m so sorry,” but he had to stop because he was tearing up and could no longer speak.

Justin gave him a few moments to compose himself. The man tried to stop his sniffling but wasn’t having much luck. Shaking his head, embarrassed by his lack of control, he put out his hand to shake Justin’s, and Justin saw just how badly the hand was trembling. “Forrest Bannister,” he said. “I—I—”

“He found the body,” Gary said. “It’s upstairs.” He saw Abby’s expression and immediately said, “I’m sorry.
He’s
upstairs. Jesus, I’m really sorry. It’s just that—”

“Gary,” Justin said to the young cop.

“What?”

“Shut up.”

“Right. Sorry. Oh, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be saying I’m sorry. I’ll—I’ll just stop talking.”

Justin shook his head and let a small sigh escape from his lips. “Why don’t you sit down, Mr. Bannister,” he said. And to Abby: “Do you want some water?” She shook her head, but he followed up his question by saying, “I need to go upstairs to see Evan’s body. I’d like you to come with me and identify him.” When she managed a deep breath and a nod, he followed it up with, “Are you sure you don’t want water?”

She was looking wobblier by the second. She didn’t nod or shake her head at his second question. She just went to a cabinet beneath an ornate mirror at the far end of the living room. Abby opened the cabinet door to reveal a bar and she reached in to grab a bottle of vodka.

Justin thought about telling her she should stay sober, that she had important decisions to make, and then he decided what the hell difference did it make; she needed a drink and she should have it. He waited for her to pour a long one, then he motioned to Gary to step into the foyer with him. There he asked a few questions about the condition of the body, about any disturbance of the crime scene, about anything he should know that might await him upstairs. Gary gave him a solid, professional briefing, and Justin thanked him. He told Gary what he wanted him to do next—call one of two stations within an hour’s drive that could put together a crime scene unit, get another officer from the East End station over here as quickly as possible, get an ambulance to come take the body when the CSU was done. Then Justin stepped over to the archway, looked into the living room, and nodded at Abby. She walked toward him, continued past him, drink tightly clutched in her hand; and he let her lead him upstairs.

At the top of the landing, she stopped.

“He’s in the master bedroom,” Justin said. Before she could step forward, he took her hand. “It’s not going to be pleasant,” he said. “He was beaten to death.”

Confused, trying to comprehend: “Beaten how? Punched?”

“No,” Justin said softly. “It was with some kind of implement. A club, a bat, I don’t know. Gary said his face is . . . well . . . like I said, it’s not going to be pleasant.”

“I can do this.”

“Are you sure?”

“No. But stop asking me questions, ’cause I won’t even
think
I can do it for very much longer.”

“All right. Let’s go.”

He walked in ahead of her, his body momentarily shielding her husband’s corpse. He took in the sight of the mangled and bloody body of Evan Harmon. Justin had to close his eyes for a moment, but that didn’t cause the horrific image to go away. He knew the image would now be fixed in his memory forever; this was not the kind of picture one could remove merely with wishful thinking. Every bone in Evan Harmon’s body seemed to have been crushed. His face was particularly gruesome. Even his eye sockets were shattered, and his nose was flattened and formless. Under his light brown hair, part of his skull was visible where the skin covering his forehead should have been. His teeth were scattered on the floor near him, looking as if they’d tumbled from a collector’s jar. On his neck and forearms were round, deep burns. Justin heard Abby moan behind him, turned to see her eyes widen in shock and horror and the excruciating awareness of the pain her husband must have endured before his life ended.

“That’s Evan?” he asked, his voice low and hoarse.

“His face,” she said. “His face . . .” Her breathing was heavy now, coming in short, heavy bursts. “What are those burns? Why does he have all those burns?”

“Is it Evan, Abby?”

She nodded. Made a coughing noise and a thin stream of vomit escaped from her tight lips. She immediately wiped it away with her hand.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” she said. “His hands. Our wedding ring. Those shoes . . . he just bought those shoes yesterday. No, two days ago. Maybe yesterday . . . I don’t know . . .”

“It’s all right,” he said softly. “It doesn’t matter.”

She was breathing quickly now, unable to tear her eyes away from the devastating scene. “And his sweater,” she wailed. “Oh god, I gave him that sweater.”

The glass of vodka dropped from her hand, landing softly on the thick carpet. She looked down, watched the liquor spread into the fibers, but made no move to pick it up.

“It’s his favorite sweater.” Abby looked up at Justin in bewilderment. It was what murder did. She understood that her husband was dead. She understood that some sick fuck had been in her house and committed an unspeakable act of violence. She understood that life as she’d known it had now changed forever. She didn’t comprehend how a favorite sweater had somehow been defiled. Didn’t see how something so delicate and beautiful had become a part of the tragedy, had been changed into something ugly and unusable. Something repellent.

“His favorite sweater,” she said one more time.

“I know,” he told her. And then he said, “Let’s go back downstairs.”

After getting Abby settled onto the living room couch, and putting another glass of vodka in her hand, Justin went back to the bedroom, and spent twenty minutes there, alone. At one time, he had considered himself a truly good homicide cop. Not now. His skills had been dulled over the years. But certain memories remained, memories that told him he had to trust his instincts and his feel for the crime. So for the first few minutes he just stood there, forced himself to look at the violence that had been inflicted upon Evan Harmon, made himself take in the aura of the room, the sense of space, some kind of physical feel for what had occurred.

He knew that CSU would have to go over everything with a fine-tooth comb. But still, those were just facts. And selective facts. He wanted to remember everything. There had been too many times when something supposedly unimportant had been overlooked or ignored, but his memory had come into play and dredged up a solution. There was one case up in Providence. He had been a young cop, working on one of his first murders, and he wasn’t the lead detective. A twelve-year-old girl had been battered and beaten to death. Her hands had been cut off and placed next to the corpse. The parents were suspects, but their grief seemed real and there was nothing to tie them to the murder or to any sort of motive. But Justin remembered, at an early interview, that he’d noticed something odd: he’d been in several rooms—the kitchen, a bathroom, the living room, a front porch—and every single room had an ashtray with a nail clipper in it. CSU had paid no attention to that, neither had Justin—it just seemed like a quirk. But at a second interview, the mother of the girl had begun to bite her fingernails and her husband had suddenly and violently swatted her hand away from her mouth. The woman had shrunk back in fear when his hand had moved. Justin realized the nail clippers were no longer on view, so he went to the lab, had them blow up one of the photos that had been collected of the dead girl’s hands, and he saw that the girl had bitten her fingernails down until her cuticles had bled. He went back to the house, arrested the parents, and at the station he separated the man and woman, eventually got the woman to talk about the fury that erupted from her husband whenever she or their daughter bit their nails. She saw her husband repeatedly hit the little girl when she bit her nails in his presence, knew that this last time she’d put her hands in her mouth he’d hit her hard enough to knock her unconscious. That’s when her husband had banished her from the room. Later, he’d told her that the girl had run away. But she knew that was a lie. She knew he’d killed her . . .

Justin could still picture those nail clippers, sitting in their ashtrays. Unassuming, unimportant items that held the key to a deep-rooted sickness and to death.

Looking around Evan Harmon’s bedroom, he didn’t see anything that struck him as an oddity. The splatters of blood on the walls, the carpet, and the bed had to be seen as normal, considering the brutality of the murder that had taken place. Everything in the room was extremely ordered. The bed was made, the bathroom spick-and-span, the clothes in the closets undisturbed. It looked as if the room had been tidied and made pristine by a maid prior to the murder. There was no sense that the room had been lived in that night. No shirt tossed on a floor, no book laid aside, no speck of toothpaste spit onto the side of the bronze bathroom sink. It looked like a hotel room.

He reached into the dead man’s right pants pocket and pulled out a wad of cash. Justin flipped through it, over two thousand dollars in hundreds. So much for robbery. He shifted Evan’s body, pulled a wallet from the back pocket. Driver’s license, two different American Express cards, one MasterCard, all platinum. An ID card for Harmon’s money management company, Ascension—it looked like one of those treated IDs that allowed you to open lobby doors and pass through turnstiles so you could get into the right elevator bank of a large building.

Justin spent two minutes just crouching over the body, staring at it. The strange, multiple burn wounds on the arms and legs and torso. The bloody sweater. The bloodstained pants. The highly polished black loafers, worn without socks. Two minutes was long enough for what he needed. He had the mental picture in his head. From here on in, the CSU guys could come in and gather their facts. And he was happy to let them do so.

Justin was a big believer in facts. But he knew that facts were only part of what composed any kind of final truth. He wasn’t sure he could define what the rest of the composition was. Only that, like those damn nail clippers, it was, on the surface, usually unimportant, overlooked. But underneath that surface, it was usually the key. And the key fit a door that led to places most people would never want to go.

Downstairs, in the living room, Abigail was sipping another vodka. A dull glaze was starting to cloud her eyes.

Forrest Bannister sat where Justin had left him, the color still drained from his face. He kept making the effort to sit up straight but didn’t seem to have the strength, so he’d move, without warning, from a rigid position, staring straight ahead, to slumped over, head in hands. Occasionally, he made a sound that was somewhere between a sad, lonely sigh and a strangled sob.