Jimmy sees it, too.
Crammed into the underside of the lid is a neatly folded piece of lined paper stained in blood at the edge. Jimmy pries it gently from the lid and opens first one fold, then another, and lays the paper flat on the paper towel. I can see markings on it: numbers and letters in black pen, but I can’t make them out.
Jimmy picks the note up and turns it toward better light.
“Fourteen seventy-three Bracker Street,” he reads.
“That’s all it says?”
“That’s it.”
“Bracker Street? Why does that sound familiar?”
“I don’t know,” he replies. “I was thinking the same thing.”
Curious, I lift my glasses an inch and take a look at the blood on the fringe of the page. The instant I do, my stomach knots into a tight ball and my legs go wobbly.
“Oh, God!”
It’s a prayer, not a curse.
I remember now.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
July 1, 11:52 A.M.
The interior of the town house is orderly and spotless.
It’s everything I expected …
… except for the body.
The foyer—if it can be called that—empties into the living room to the right, and up the stairs to the left. Straight ahead a narrow table adorns the hall, upon which are three items lined up in a row: a cell phone, a set of keys, and a name badge.
Two dark-wood bookshelves stand sentinel in the living room, equally spaced on either side of the TV. As a book collector and connoisseur, I’m always intrigued by the titles one finds on the bookshelves of others. It’s almost a window into their personality, a peek behind the curtain and into the hidden clockwork of the mind.
I’ve always thought that every book tells two stories: one told by the author and one by the reader. The reason a person picks up a book in the first place is a story unto itself. One person picks up Mein Kampf because he’s an anti-Semite, another because he wants to learn the origin of monsters.
The books on these shelves display the mind of their owner not just by their titles but by their order and symmetry. The books are arranged by height and by color, beginning with lighter colors on the bottom, such as oranges, pinks, and yellows, and working up to navy blues and blacks on the top shelves. As I stare at the books, I wonder if their owner at one time arranged them alphabetically by author, at another time by subject.
Probably, but it doesn’t matter.
Visual symmetry won in the end.
My eyes drift to the body, to the paramedics, to the crimson-stained carpet that had recently been so clean. Dammit! We should have taken precautions … but who could have known?
In a neat line centered perfectly under the wall-mounted flat-screen in the living room is a row of DVDs, ordered alphabetically from left to right starting with ?on Flux and ending with Zardoz. Most of the movies in between are of similar genre, as are the books on the shelves.
Chas Lindstrom was a science fiction fan.
I say Chas was a science fiction fan because to say he is a sci-fi fan would be to imply that he’s still alive, and, sadly, he isn’t. His body lies in the breezeway between the living room and the dining room, cold to the touch and nearing rigor mortis, that clinical-sounding Latin term that simply means “stiffness of death.”
He’s been dead a few hours.
His hands are bound behind him with duct tape smeared wet and red, the same red that covers his face, his neck, his shirt. The outer edges have already started to dry, turning from bright red to carmine. Every inch of his face shows signs of a savage beating. His eyes are gone, of course, and his right index finger. They’re still in the box tucked under Jimmy’s arm.
I don’t know why he brought them.
Probably in such a hurry that he didn’t even think about it, just tucked and ran. And as we blazed through town to the shrill scream of a dozen sirens, there were many among us delusional enough to believe that Sad Face would cut out Chas’s eyes, cut off his finger, personally deliver them gift-wrapped to the hotel, yet leave Chas alive so that we, his adversaries, could feel the gushing relief of saving him. So that we could smile and pat each other on the back and hold his hand while the ambulance rushed him off to a life of blindness … but a life.
I knew better.
I always know.
On the carpet next to Chas, written in his own blood, is a sad face … with no eyes. The sick bastard thinks he’s funny.
“You did good, Chas,” I say to the emptiness. It’s a hollow sentiment, meaningless, too late. I don’t know why I say it.
“He came because of the list.” Jimmy’s shaken. The words are heavy in his mouth, spilling into the room like bitter water, every syllable overenunciated. He thinks we should have foreseen this, prevented it.
He’s right. We should have.
“There’s nothing we could have done,” I say, tasting the bitterness.
“Why his eyes, his finger?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s a message.” I shrug. “Maybe he just didn’t like the fact that Chas saw his list, so he cut out the offending parts. He’s a serial killer; he doesn’t need a reason.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Jimmy shoots back. “Serial killers are driven by reasons. Just because we find them unfathomable doesn’t mean they don’t exist.” He pauses, staring at the empty vessel that was once Chas Lindstrom. “Trust me, he had a reason.”
As we stand by Chas’s body, empty of words, Noble Wallace comes through the front door with a young assistant from the medical examiner’s office on his heels. Behind them is Sheriff Gant, looking beaten and weary.
“Helluva thing,” he says as he comes up between Jimmy and me. He shakes his head, his big shoulders slumped. In a quiet voice he says, “We’re getting our asses kicked here, you know that, right?”