Lost City (An Eoin Miller Mystery Book 3) Read Online Free PDF Page B

they’ll bring in a murder team, forensics. Case’ll blow.”
    She bent down and pulled at the carpet in the gap between the room and the hallway, prying it loose and pulling it up a few inches. She made quick headway, and a minute later was pushing the carpet back away from the door and exposing bare wooden floorboards.
    “The carpet’s caught most of the blood. Advantage of the cheap material they use. If we get it up now there will be minimal mess on the floorboards, and there’s none on the bed. You’re not planning on reporting any crime, right?” She waited until I nodded. Then she also nodded. “Right, so, we get rid of the carpet and the two bodies. Get someone to lay a fresh carpet, maybe repaint, and the room will be fine unless a forensic team has reason to come in.”
    “I thought you couldn’t paint over blood.”
    “You been watching TV? I’ve heard that one too, but you can paint over anything if you use enough.”
    She kicked off her shoes and left them in the hallway with her overnight bag, nodding for me to follow her into the room. Once inside the room she shut the door, then walked over to the en suite bathroom, sidestepping a patch of blood. She stepped inside the bathroom and shut the door. A moment later I heard her coughing, and the toilet flushed. The shower came on, but it didn’t sound like anyone stepped beneath it. I stood and waited, feeling like I’d missed an instruction manual on how to respond in this situation.
    When Laura opened the door the shower was still running and she’d stripped down to her underwear, but she wasn’t wet.
    She looked at my confused expression, and sighed, rolling her eyes before waving at the shower. “The noise will help cover us.”
    “Trust me, noise isn’t really an issue in this place. Why take off your clothes?”
    “They’re expensive, and nice. You want to ruin yours?”
    “Fair point. And the toilet?”
    “Nerves.”

Laura was cold and methodical. I followed her lead.
    The corpses had already emptied their bowels onto the floor, and the blood flow had stopped. Whatever fluids remained inside them would have sunk to the lowest point and settled, meaning I wasn’t looking forward to turning the bodies over. Laura started on Jellyfish, who was already naked, and I did the heavier work of stripping down Tony. Using towels from the bathroom, we wiped them down so we could move them without getting covered in blood.
    I checked Tony’s wallet just as I had done earlier with Jellyfish’s, and found pictures of a woman and a young boy, a wife and child I didn’t know he had. I pocketed the wallet without showing it to Laura. I didn’t want her knowing about the family. It wouldn’t take much for her conscience to get in the way.
    We piled their clothes and belongings in the center of the room and worked our way around the edges, pulling the carpet loose. We then started pulling it into the center of the room, with me taking the weight of the furniture one corner at a time while Laura pulled the carpet beneath it. The bed took the longest, with us both needing to lift it with both hands while pulling at the carpet with our feet. Laura yelped when the cockroach ran out. Then her face flushed, and she laughed.
    “A cockroach, huh? Two dead bodies and a load of blood, fine, but you see a bug and you freak out?”
    She waved the moment away. “He just reminded me of you.”
    I used my keys to cut into the side of the carpet and used that beginning to tear a patch loose around the corpses. Then we rolled the rest of it, clothes and all, into a bundle in the center of the room.
    After all that, we took a break, sitting on the cold tiles in the bathroom and letting the steam from the shower roll around us. I closed my eyes and could feel my body telling me to stay right there, that everything would be fine if I just didn’t move. When I opened my eyes, Laura was smiling. She broke out into a nervous laugh.
    “What the fuck are we doing?”
    I