Walking into the Ocean Read Online Free PDF Page B

kitchen. The fight had flowed from front to back. Still near the vestibule, he knelt down on the plastic and leaned close to the corner where the plaster met the baseboard. He stood again and peered up at the junction of the wall and the ceiling. No dust had accumulated at the lower corner; no cobwebs at the top of the wall. He sighted along the surface halfway up and, aside from the blood spatter and several traumatic gouges, the wall was smooth.
    The wavy bar of blood down the corridor had been made by someone trailing their hand along the wall. The track faded out halfway down as the blood ran out; the gruesome painter had dipped his hand — the right hand, he could tell — in a pool of blood again and begun a new line, which ended at the kitchen door jamb.
    Peter left the hallway and explored the living room. The lighting remained subdued even though Willet had turned on the table lamps and a floor lamp behind the television. Peter at once noted differences in the blood patterning. There was plenty of it on the chesterfield and the stuffed chair, and even the ottoman, but it was thinly spread, and nowhere pooled. Anna hadn’t made her last stand here. It appeared that she, or perhaps the husband, had sat in the blood on the footstool.
Did she retreat there and wait, sobbing and fearful? Would it be too much to ask the forensics wizards to test the carpet for salty tears?
The damage in the living room, aside from the blood, was oddly selective. On either side of the gas fireplace, the brocade curtains were bunched on the floor below their broken tracks. Someone had used an axe or cleaver to drive a ruinous gouge into the top of the mahogany sideboard, but neither the victim nor the attacker had upended chairs or the chesterfield.
    â€œConstable,” he called, “is there anything in the police inventory about an axe or a hatchet?”
    Willet’s form filled the entrance to the hall. “Not in the drawing room, sir, there wasn’t. There’s a cleaver in the rack in the kitchen, I can show you, but there was surprisingly little in the way of tools or blunt objects, given that Lasker was a car mechanic. We were looking out for a murder weapon.”
    â€œHas anything been moved from its original position?”
    â€œNo, sir, I can guarantee that. You see, sir, I was the one took the call. It was on my beat.” Willet seemed bewildered; he remained wary of any challenge from Peter. “Kept it as it was, sir. Inspector Maris assigned me the key, as it were. No one has gone in and out without me.”
    â€œThank you, Constable Willet.” Indeed, the battlefield had been well preserved. Willet had not even rekiltered the furniture. But someone had moved the cleaver back to its slot in the kitchen, he was almost certain.
    Willet was trying to be helpful but it was time to get rid of him. Peter Cammon’s solitary habits were entrenched and, at the outset, always impressionistic. Here in the family home, emotions still hung in the air, and he hoped to latch on to their echoes. He didn’t need the constable sucking the oxygen out of the rooms. But he reminded himself to be diplomatic.
    â€œConstable, could you give me a half hour alone here? I want to get a feel for the movements of the wife.”
    Willet was offended, and he wasn’t stupid. Peter’s request was disdainful, if only because the Scotland Yard man wasn’t taking him into his confidence.
    â€œBut I want to show you the kitchen,” Willet said. “It’s significant.”
    â€œGood. Give me a few minutes on my own, then we’ll rendezvous in the kitchen.”
    Willet nodded and slouched outside, making sure to leave the front door unlatched.
    Peter stood there for an additional minute, letting Willet’s aura fade. The pace of his explorations was important. He wasn’t reaching for some psychic resonance, and it was nothing so hackneyed as waiting for the dead to speak to