Letter to Belinda Read Online Free PDF Page A

not.”
    “Can’t you at least give me a few ideas about how to dispose of it?”
    “Miranda, I’m no expert on disposing of bodies! I’m a coal miner.”
    “But you are also a writer, and you’ve written murder stories before. Surely you have ideas on how to hide a body!”
    He didn’t want to tell her that he had recently been considering that very thing, concerning Jenny’s husband. But she didn’t know about the mess he was going through with Jenny, and didn’t have the time or patience to tell her about it right now. “If I have learned anything from writing murder mysteries, it’s that the murderer usually always makes a mistake, or overlooks a tiny detail that leads to him getting caught. Modern forensics techniques are so advanced that the odds are stacked heavily against you.”
    “But I’m no murderer. I just want to avoid embarrassment.”
    “But you would look like a murderer if you tried to hide the body. I’m telling you, just call 911 and report that you found your neighbor dead in his house. If there is no evidence of foul play, and plenty of evidence for natural death, how could they suspect you of anything?”
    “I’m going home to think about it awhile. I have to get out of this house.”
    “I can understand that. Okay then, I’m going to go through the house and wipe out all my fingerprints, from everything I can remember touching.”
    “Then I guess I’ll clean up my mess and go home too. I’ll get my car out of the garage and put his in its place. Oh my! Why does it seem like I leave nothing but destruction in my wake? Everything I touch turns to crap!”
    “This wasn’t your fault. It was just one of those things that happens. Blame it on the Judge for having an unhealthy diet that made him susceptible to a heart attack. That’s probably what caused this.”
    “The Viagra I gave him didn’t help either.”
    “Probably not. Let’s get busy if we’re going to get out of here before one o’clock.”
    “I’ll have to disarm the security system to leave the house.”
    “And you’ll have to leave it off, because there is no way to turn it back on once you get out of the house. But that’s okay. With him here, the investigators will think he had it off because he was at home.”
    “Should we go ahead and turn it off?”
    “We probably ought to. Where is it?”
    “How should I know?”
    “Let’s look around the front door.”
    They found a small sensor above the front door with a tiny red light on it. A wire led from the sensor down the corner to the coat closet. Inside the coat closet was a monitor box with a series of red and green lights. A key was in the ‘on’ position. Travis turned the key to ‘off’, and all the green lights went to red. A small LED screen read ‘SECURITY SYSTEM OFF’.
    “There, that ought to do it. Now, let’s clean this place up. Come with me out to the garage. I saw something out there we need.”
    He took her to the garage, past her car, to the utility closet where he had entered the house. The folding trap door was still down, just as he left it.
    “Here.” He got a pack of latex gloves off the shelf and gave a pair to her, and a pair for himself, and they put them on. He then passed her a dust cloth.
    “Wear these gloves until you get home, then destroy them. Use the cloth to wipe off anything you might have touched while you were here.”
    She went to do as she was told, and Travis figured the best place for him to start would be in the attic, where he had come in. He returned to the attic and duck-walked across the ceiling studs to the ventilation duct. He raised up out of the roof and wiped off the turbine, and the outside of the duct, then found the two screws. The two cross bars he had broken loose were almost out of reach, but he was able to get them and wipe them off too, and left them inside the attic. He then set the turbine down on the duct, aligned the screw holes, and put the screws back in the holes from the inside,