equaled by religious devotion.
It didn’t
end there, but at the time, I didn’t know it.
They’d
come from an old place across the sea, and it never occurred to me until later
that something else might have come with them.
If someone
wanted to recreate a crime scene from memory — from my memory — then they’d
done a good job of it with the Camerons at their own table. Like for like, it
could’ve been taken from any of the scene photographs or notes. Seeing it from
the threshold of the door, I fought the urge to scream or run.
“Bad,
isn’t it?” Sam asked when he saw my face and reluctance to move any further.
“Yeah,” I said, swallowed, and stepped forward.
“Can’t
figure Michael to be capable of this.”
He wasn’t.
He was a churchgoer, but not the kind who worked himself into a frenzy when the
dust darkens the sky — not like some around here, anyway.
The gun
was below his limp hand, the left rather than his right as happened with the
Polish family. Sarah was facedown in a pool of blood, and the children were
too. Michael had the same leering grin plastered to his face; the same black
pits for eyes.
Sam was
bearing it pretty well, though his face had gone a kind of pasty, waxy white.
Sweat, no doubt cold, beaded his forehead and cheeks.
“You found
his eyes?” I asked. If Sam thought the question indelicate, he gave no sign.
“No, figured he’d pulped them.” He swallowed and dabbed his face with the back
of his hand.
“No. When
the examiner gets here, you’ll see they’re gone like they were never there.”
“Jesus.”
I looked
around the room, my eyes lighting on the carpet and floor. “Place was locked up
when you came in?”
“Tight as
a button.”
Squatting,
I looked at the patterns of dust on the floor. Everyone drags it in with them,
can’t help it. There were prints enough for the family, smears and scuff marks
from where they traipsed in and out.
“Look
here,” I said. Sam came up behind me and leaned over my shoulder. “Not
Michael’s?”
The print
was new as evidenced by its shape and size. Could’ve been nothing; wasn’t like
I knew the shoe size of anyone around here, but there was an odd slant to the
toe and heel. Something was odd about the turn of the instep, and when I looked
around the table, I saw more.
“He walked
around as they sat,” I said, Sam following the line of my finger as I traced
the path.
There was
no dust in the last place, nothing to give away if anyone else might have been
in the apartment. I wasn’t sure if this was good or bad, but it gave Sam
something to go on.
He sucked
in a breath through his teeth. “Jim, I know it’s a lot to ask…”
“I’ll do
it. Fuck knows you’ll need help, and the way things are around here, I might be
all you have.” I pitied him his situation.
After they
carted the bodies away, I stuck around and decided to talk to the Polish
family’s neighbors. I didn’t think it would do any good, but it’s a habit and
they’re hard to break at the best of times.
Most of the
tenants didn’t know the family so well except to say hello. They were Polish in
a mixed block of Hungarians and Czechs, for the most part. I didn’t get the
sense of any bad blood between them, more apathy, which was worse in many ways.
Hate I can understand, it’s uncaring I can’t get my head around.
The
elevator was broken, if it ever worked in the first place, so I took the
stairs. The place smelled of sweat and boiled cabbage, and I thought if I
stayed any longer, I’d claw off my own skin to get the smell out.
On the
floor below the family’s apartment, a little girl in a stained dress with no
shoes on her dirty feet waved to me. I waved back, but she kept on doing it,
until I realized she wasn’t waving, but beckoning me. I bent down so I could
hear her; there was something conspiratorial about her.
“You’re a
policeman?”
Her
English was good, almost no accent. She’d most likely grown up
Heidi Hunter, Bad Boy Team