The Laughterhouse A Thriller

CHAPTER FOUR

There are already minivan cabs pulling up outside Popular Consensus. They’re filling up with cops and slowly pulling away. The water in the gutters and road is reflecting the lights coming from all the bars and streetlights. There’s no sign of the moon, no sign of any stars, just endless clouds. At least it’s stopped raining, but what rain has already fallen splashes off the street as cars pass us, and it feels like it’s going to come back. Nobody seems to be able to walk in a straight line. I have no idea what’s happened, and unless it’s a call to stop a local brewery from flooding, none of these people should be allowed to be involved. If they were sober, they’d know that. I suspect they even know it drunk. Problem is the police force is understaffed, there are no other options, and whatever has happened is important enough for all of these off-duty detectives to pile themselves inside the arriving minivans.

“You gonna fill me in?” I ask, leading Schroder back to the parking garage.

“Christ, I really need to take a piss.”

“I’ll wait here.”

“It’s okay. I can hold on.”

“Where we heading?”

“I gotta make another call,” he says, and pulls out his cell phone. We take the elevator up to the top floor and he leans against the wall of it the entire trip, pulling his cell phone away from his ear and studying it every few seconds or so. “No signal,” he says.

We reach my car.

“Does this seat belt work?” he asks, tugging at it.

“I don’t know. I’ve never had any passengers.”

“You lose a bet?” he asks.

“What?”

“That why you driving this thing?”

“I’m happy if you want to walk.”

“Might be safer. And quicker.”

“And wetter. Just tell me where we’re heading.”

“The retirement community.”

“Which one?” I ask, taking the ramps down to the bottom floor.

“What do you mean which one? Oh, shit . . . hang on, let me think a second. It’s . . . ah, shit, hang on.” He’s halfway through composing a text to find out when he remembers. “Lakeview Homes. You know where it is?”

“Listen, Carl, I don’t think it’s a good idea you going there.”

“I’ve only had a couple of beers, Theo.”

“You were starting your fourth. And that’s four too many.”

“Jesus, I should have gone with the others.”

“And what? Lose your job along with the rest of them?”

“No chance of that. Who the hell would they replace us with?”

I get his point. I pull into traffic and one of the taxis loaded up with cops cuts me off, almost taking out the side of my car. I try to toot at him but my horn doesn’t work. There is a small amount of drizzle back in the air. I turn on the wipers. The one on Schroder’s side gets to its apex with short, jerking motions, shudders at the top, then dies up there. Schroder taps the inside of the windshield.

“Jesus, Tate, you couldn’t find something better than this?”

“You want to tell me what all this is about?”

“You already know,” he says. “It’s why so many of us got the call.”

He’s right, I do know. “Who’s the victim?”

“Guy by the name of Herbert Poole. Apparently he’s been all cut to hell.”

Traffic has thinned since the drive to Popular Consensus, but it’s still moving slow because of the recent rain. The intersection ahead has lost power to the traffic lights, half the drivers treating it like a traffic circle, the other half in too much of a hurry to care much about giving way. The gutters are flooding out into the streets. It’s another twenty minutes to Lakeview Homes, a good chunk of that time Schroder sits with his head back against the seat and one hand covering his face, the only sign that he’s still awake are his random patches of hiccupping. The rain disappears again. Still no stars.

Lakeview Homes overlooks some meadows and forestry on one side, all of it trailing out of sight into the darkness. Beyond it, and empty at this time of night, is a golf course that costs two hundred dollars a round. On this side of the forest it looks over suburbia with a long driveway heading out to the main road. Despite its name, the retirement home manages to be situated nowhere near any lake. The nearest body of water is a gymnasium with a pool six blocks away. There are already half a dozen patrol cars at the scene and one cab. There’s a line of detectives heading toward the field, they’re moving behind the big trees and emptying their bladders, the headlight beams helping them find their way.

“Jesus,” I say, and Schroder sits up and takes a look. “Every detective on the force is here and drunk.”

“It’s not our fault. How were we to know this was going to happen today?”

“Statistically, it was always going to happen. You didn’t keep anybody in reserve?”

“Jesus, Tate, you may not have liked Landry, but the rest of us did.”

“Carl . . .”

“Don’t worry,” he says, slapping me on the shoulder. “I’m the boss here, and I’m telling you, looking at a dead body has a way of sobering people up.”

“And so does losing your job. Best thing for your colleagues right now is to get back into those cabs and get the hell out of here.”

“And I’m sure between us we’ll all figure that out.”

At the moment the detectives do seem to be figuring it out. They’re coming back from behind the trees and leaning against the minivan cabs, none of which have left yet. Detective Kent is among them. They’re figuring out there’s a line here that if they cross will see them reprimanded, or worse, fired. There are old people standing at windows backlit by TVs and dining room lights, they’re staring out at the show, all of them hoping they’re about to get visitors.

“Jesus, that’s disgusting,” Schroder says, watching another detective race off behind a tree. “But better than pissing on the front lawn,” he adds, and chases off after him to do the same. The uniformed officers don’t know what to do. They’re caught between telling their superiors to go home and letting them contaminate a crime scene. The residents and staff are just as unimpressed, and it can only be a matter of minutes before the reporters arrive. This is going to end badly for Schroder and for every drunk cop here. In a sober condition, any of them would know being here was a mistake, but that’s the problem with drunk people—they make bad decisions. Sober, everybody knows they shouldn’t drink and drive, but when you’re drunk it never seems such a bad idea. That’s what landed me in jail last year.

The retirement community is full of units that are almost small houses but not quite, the roofs all black, the walls painted the same color as Bambi. The creative imagination behind the whole complex could have been shaped by Lego. There are millions of flowers everywhere just the way old people like them, only the flowers are in their final days before the cold weather robs them of life. There’s a connection between plants and the elderly—as soon as you turn sixty it must be compulsory to like roses and rhododendrons. The only thing I can see to stop burglars breaking in on a daily basis is the fact there isn’t much to steal except record collections and memories and clothes swinging in and out of fashion.

“Sir?” one of the officers asks, walking over to me. He’s young looking and nervous and this may or may not be his first crime scene, but it’s definitely one he wishes he wasn’t here for. “You look to be about the only detective here who’s not half-wasted.”

I don’t even have to think about it. I start nodding. “Tell me what we’ve got,” I tell him.

I follow him to a unit where two other officers are standing outside. There’s a front porch and a swing chair and the whole thing is soaking wet. On a nice day maybe the old folks sit out here and sip lemonade and talk about the war, talk about how far Christchurch has slipped, talk about the good ol’ days. The officers are talking to a guy in his eighties who looks pale, who has probably sat on this porch countless times in the sun but what he discovered half an hour ago drained the tan right out of him. A second guy, this one thirty years younger, has to keep wiping at the rain dripping from his fringe. He’s shorter and rounder and doesn’t need a name badge to tell me he’s in some administration role here at the home, probably the manager. He’s seen dead bodies before—you don’t get to work in this kind of place without witnessing your fair share of death—but no doubt what’s behind door number one is death of a different variety, death of the sort that requires crime scene tape and latex gloves and people looking for clues. Death like that often comes with the need for a mop and bucket. Best anybody can hope for is it comes with answers.

I follow the officer and duck under the tape and step onto the porch, the wooden decking slightly soft under my feet. Schroder calls out to me but I don’t wait. I can hear all the detectives talking back by the cabs, all of them trying to figure out just who should be working, their voices becoming louder as they talk over each other deciding who should stay and who should go, Schroder having the final say over all of them.

“This is exactly how we found it,” the officer tells me. He keeps wiping at the back of his neck at an itch that won’t leave. “Doors were closed. TV and lights were on.”

“You touch anything?”

“Just the door handle,” he says. “But the guy who found the body probably touched a whole lot more.”

“Somebody needs to get a cordon set up,” I tell him. “Nothing coming in from the street, and get some manpower into the fields out there to make sure nobody comes that way either, but tell them to be careful—for all we know the killer may have gone that way and left something behind. Biggest problem right now is the media. If they come here and see that,” I say, nodding toward the rowdy mob by the vans as another cab pulls up, “the unemployment rate in this city is going to rise tonight.”

“Yes sir.”

I step inside. The house is small enough that it doesn’t mess around with having a foyer or hallway entrance. Instead the door opens directly into the living room. A man and a woman are on the TV arguing over some food that one of them has accused the other of eating. There’s a cutaway shot, the woman sitting in front of a camera now, telling the audience that Derek is a jerk and just because she slept with him doesn’t mean he can eat her cornflakes. Derek comes on to tell us all how lazy the cornflake owner was in bed.

To get to the TV to turn it off, I have to walk around what made the old man outside turn pale. I’m guessing the dead man on the couch was one of his friends. The dead man’s clothes are sliced up and stained in blood, and he’s stained in blood too, like most of the surfaces in the room. It’s hard to tell how many times he’s been stabbed. Anything over one is bad, and in his case I’d say bad happened at least a dozen times. There are lines of blood on the ceiling, cast off from the knife—the blade slinging it onto the walls and ceilings the way an artist might sling paint from his brush onto canvas. There’s blood on the TV, on the coffee table, there’s blood over the guy’s dinner. From the amount of blood on view and pooled into the base of the couch it’s looking like the guy could be hung up from his feet and we’d be lucky to fill a cup. Something has been written on his forehead with a marker.

This isn’t a burglary gone wrong or a fight over who should or shouldn’t park out front—whoever killed this man invested a lot of rage into the act.

Schroder comes to the doorway and stops. He crouches down and undoes his shoes, which are covered in mud. He takes them off and in the process nearly tips over. He sits them off to the side of the door, then rolls up the cuffs of his pants, which are also soaking wet. Then he comes in and stands next to me. He looks down at his feet, then shrugs. He’s chewing on a piece of peppermint gum to mask the smell of beer, but his suit needs to chew on the same stuff to complete the illusion. He spends ten seconds looking at the body before fixating on me.

“Jesus, somebody must have really hated him,” he says, then he puts a hand on my shoulder for the second time today and hiccups into his other hand. “Look, Tate, you shouldn’t be in here,” he says, and before I can say anything he adds “but I’m grateful you are. I just need a little bit more time to get my head in the game. Forensics are on their way, should only be a few minutes.”

“And the others?”

“The others are loading up on coffee and breath mints so they can start asking questions. None of them are going to come within thirty feet of this room.”

“You should send them home, Carl, and you should go home too.”

“I know, but then what? Come back tomorrow and hope for the best? Somebody needs to be here, Tate.”

“And you could all be fired if you stay.”

“Yeah, then the department would have to hire you, wouldn’t they? They’d need at least somebody manning the phones.”

“Anything you find will get tossed out in a court of law if anybody gets a whiff you were drunk,” I tell him.

“I’m not drunk, and in twenty-four hours this case could end up being as cold as my last beer if we don’t do anything about it now.”

“You shouldn’t be here.”

“And neither should you. But I’m a realist, Tate, and right now I know I could do with your help.”

“Just saying that proves you’re drunk,” I tell him.

He crouches down next to the couch to get a good look at the dead guy’s face. “Herbert Poole with an e has been living here for eight years,” he says, and he really does sound sober. Out the door and in the distance one of the minivan cabs is being loaded back up with some of the detectives, including Detective Kent. Could be they’re all off to grab coffee and doughnuts. “Lots of friends, no enemies, and even if people here didn’t like him this doesn’t seem the way they’d show it. More likely they cut his roses or shorten a leg on his walker.”

The words on Herbert’s forehead say You didn’t care enough. It even has the apostrophe. “An ex-wife maybe?” I ask.

“He doesn’t have one. He’s a widower.”

“An ex-girlfriend? A son he didn’t get along with? It could mean a hundred different things.”

The living room is full of the kind of sentimental stuff that in one or two week’s time a family member will box up with the intent of putting it on display but will put it into storage instead. There are photos of children and grandchildren, days out at the park, at the beach, at sporting events. If life was more like a Harry Potter novel, the people in those photographs would be crying out and telling us what went on in this room tonight. There’s a half-empty tin of beer and a dinner plate resting on the coffee table, and aside from all the blood, the rest of the room seems to be immaculate. In life Herbert Poole with an e was tidy.

“He has two children,” Schroder says, “according to the manager. And his wife died about ten years ago from a brain tumor. We’ll talk to the kids. I don’t know, maybe one of them was pissed off with their dad.”

We say nothing for a few seconds, letting the tragedy of Herbert Poole and his family settle in.

“Anything taken?” I ask.

“Jesus, Tate, I can’t know everything yet.”

Herbert Poole’s head is tilting back as it rests over the arm of the couch, one arm pinned beneath him, the other in his lap, his body mostly on its side. His face is toward the wall, where a photograph of what is probably him and his wife from forty years ago stares back, though the features in that photo aren’t shared with the features on the dead man’s face. For Herbert Poole it was probably a good thing to look at while his life was draining out of him.

“Impressions? Thoughts?” Schroder asks.

“Bloody footprints head up the hallway, then head back,” I say, looking at the stains on the carpet. “Killer wandered the house for something.”

“Then put these on,” he says, and hands me a pair of latex gloves.

I step through the living room, careful not to get blood on my shoes, and into the hall. The footprints lead into the bathroom. The shower walls are wet and there is a pair of pants and a shirt wadded up on the floor. I poke at them, lifting a corner until I can see blood. There’s a wet towel lying next to them. The killer came in here and showered, he washed the blood off, then changed clothes but wore the same shoes. That could mean he had somewhere to go immediately afterward that wasn’t home. Forensics will pull hair from the clothes. They’ll find plenty of DNA—and if the killer has a record, we’ll find him. Problem is DNA is going to take a few weeks. Other problem is the killer may not have a record.

I head back into the hall. There are more photographs in the bedroom, faces of people yet to be devastated, yet to know a man they knew is no longer with us. I move from one photo to the next, random people with random thoughts, perhaps one of them random enough to have done this.

I open drawers and poke around, an entire top drawer dedicated to packets of unopened underwear and neatly folded hankies, beneath them all war medals that might belong to him or somebody else in his family. There’s one gray suit in the closet and lots of old man shirts, old man shoes, and old man ties. I thumb through some receipts. Poole had recently bought a few jazz CDs, some new slippers, a couple of paperbacks. There are letters from the hospital following up appointments—Herbert Poole wasn’t a healthy man. With his kidneys and liver shutting down, Poole’s murder is putting him into the ground about two months ahead of schedule according to the letters. Somebody just couldn’t wait. Which means it wasn’t about seeing Herbert Poole dead, it was about being responsible for seeing him dead.

I wander back down to the living room. Poole still has a blank look on his face like he can’t quite believe he’s caused all this fuss. You didn’t care enough. Care about what? Or who?

Schroder is talking on his cell phone, his spare hand rubbing at his face. There are more patrol cars outside now along with a few station wagons. The cabs have disappeared, along with ninety percent of the people that came here in them. There are forensic techs heading toward the porch. They’re wearing white nylon suits so as to not contaminate the scene like the rest of us already have. Another station wagon pulls up and Tracey Walter, the medical examiner, climbs out. She stands next to the wagon and ties her black hair up into a tight ponytail. I stand in the kitchen and listen to Schroder on his cell phone as the newcomers take over the scene. Nobody talks to me or pays me any attention. There’s a sense of authority here that was certainly lacking ten minutes ago. People are carrying aluminum suitcases full of forensic tools. Alternate sources of light are being set up, bright halogens chasing away every shadow. Within moments I’m standing in the only living room visible from outer space. Tracey approaches the body carefully, as if scared it’s about to jump up and run from her cold hands.

Schroder hangs up. Before he can say anything, his phone starts to ring again. He rolls his eyes and gives an apologetic smile. I head out onto the porch where the crowd has swelled. I learn one of them is Bernard Walsh, the man who found the body. He’s wearing a shirt and tie, and either Bernard is magnetic or he loves badges because there are at least two dozen of them attached to the lapel of his suit jacket. I introduce myself and lead him further from the porch, to where there’s no angle of the view inside. We stand beneath an oak tree that’s three storeys high with a trunk the width of a compact car. It shelters us from the few spits of rain coming down. Walsh is holding a cup of tea that is half gone and looks stone cold. He’s shaken up and tells me he hasn’t seen anything like this since the war—and he’s old enough to be talking about any war in the last century.

“I mean, Jesus, it makes no sense. It just makes no sense,” Walsh says. “Herb, Herb was a good guy. A real gentleman. Who the hell would want to hurt Herb?”

“Run through it for me.”

“Run through what for you?”

“You finding him. What happened? He didn’t show up somewhere? Why’d you go inside? You always go inside, or was his door open?”

“This place, don’t you for one second think we don’t know what this is. I used to be a photographer, came out of the war and needed something to do that didn’t involve people screaming. I worked for plenty of papers, saw plenty of things. Once I had to do a photo shoot of a slaughterhouse, and the cows were lined up for hundreds of feet, and at the head of that line they were getting shot in the forehead, you know? And the cows, each time they heard that cattle bolt gun go off, they knew. They were braying and panicking because they each knew their buddies were getting killed and they were next to get butchered. That feeling is here too, not in the same sense, and maybe one day in forty years you’ll know what I mean. This place, it’s like a lottery out here, you know what I mean? All of us gambling on who’s going to be the next to go. All of us losing our buddies and knowing we’re the next to go, but slap me seven ways from stupid, the way Herb went, ah hell, we know we’re all cattle facing the bolt gun but this . . .’

He doesn’t finish, he gives it a few seconds of thought before moving on, and I let him talk and burn off the tension. “We play chess against each other. There’s a few of us—we have an ongoing tournament in the community. We’re all about as good as each other, or about as bad as each other depending on who you ask. Mick, Mick was the best, but he don’t know it anymore. He don’t know much, his mind has turned to mush. Hell, he nearly choked to death a few months back on a pawn. I’ve seen people lose their minds and I’ll keep on seeing it. Herb, see, Herb lost his wife about, oh, going on maybe eight or nine years now.” He holds his hand up to his head as if receiving a psychic link, maybe to Herb’s wife, because suddenly he goes, “It was ten years. I remember now. Ten years next month. Or was it last month? Thing is, Detective, when you get to the age we are, time has this way of . . . how should I say this . . . well, time has a way of f*cking with you.”

“So, Mr. Walsh,” I say, cutting in before he moves on to the next thought. “Why’d—”

“Call me Bernie,” he says, “everybody else does and I don’t see no reason you should be different.”

“Okay, Bernie, I take it Herb didn’t show up for the chess game?”

“He always calls if he can’t make it. We all do. You know, it’s just common sense, right? Place like this, it’s only a matter of time before we’re heading upstairs to chat with the Big Guy. Only I wish He’d picked a different time for Herb, and I sure wish He’d picked a better way for him to go.”

“What time was this?”

“Seven o’clock,” he says.

I glance at my watch. It’s now nine-thirty.

“I got here and started knocking, and when he didn’t answer, I let myself in. Normally he’ll answer, but when people don’t answer in a place like this, well, it gets your mind running, son, it makes you think it’s time to dust off your funeral suit,” he says, looking at my suit, my funeral suit. “I thought and prayed at the same time, Detective—thought he’d be asleep, prayed I wasn’t going to find him as stiff as a board in his bed. I guess . . . I guess in a way the second part of that prayer was answered.”

“The door was unlocked?”

“I have a key. It was locked.”

“And the lights and TV, they were already on?”

“Yeah, Herb always watches the news, you know? He hated reporters, God, there ain’t a single journalist he’d spit on if they were on fire, except for a couple of the girls on the news at night, you know, the ones who can deliver the worst news and still look sexy doing it. Jesus,” he says, and he starts to cry, “tonight they’re going to be talking about Herb. They’re going to look just as sexy and . . . and . . . Christ,” he says, and he tips the rest of his tea into the garden. “I feel so old and . . . and . . .” he shakes his head. “And so useless.”

I put a hand on his shoulder. “We’re going to catch the guy who did this.”

He’s still looking down at the tea he just threw away, and at the contact of my hand he looks back up. “I’ve seen a lot, Detective,” Bernard says. “I’ve fought for this country. I’ve seen men die, good, loyal men have exploded in front of me, their goddamn guts and limbs flying everywhere. One second they’re there, the next they’re just soup on the ground.” He shakes his head. “Let me tell you this, Detective—I sure as shit felt safer in that world than I do in Christchurch.”

“When did you last see him?”

His face has gone red and he wipes at the tears. “I see him pretty much every day. It’s not like there’s much to do around here by yourself except be lonely or die,” he says, and then he smiles at the bleakness of the world before his face tightens as the loss of his friend comes crashing down around him. “Shit,” he says. “I . . . I . . . ah, shit.”

“You saw him today?”

“Huh? What? Oh, yeah, yeah, of course. He came over about four and we watched some horse racing on TV.” He smiles. “We like to gamble a little, not that it does us any good. I mean, sometimes we’ll place . . .”

“What time did he leave?” I ask.

“What time? I don’t know. Probably around five, I guess. He had to get back for dinner. It’s an option for us, we can either have our meals provided or we can cook them ourselves. Herb was pretty stubborn that way. He felt a man should always be able to put his own food on the table. But he was getting old and he knew his limitations. He’d let them bring him dinner, but he was adamant on making his own breakfast and lunch. So he had to be back in time for his dinner.”

Herb had eaten most of his dinner, which means the person who delivered it would have been and gone, but they’re still going to be somebody we need to talk to.

“You walk with him when he left?”

“Walk with him? Why would I walk with him?”

“So he left around five and that’s it.”

“That was it, until . . . you know, until I found him at seven.”

“You see anybody hanging around yesterday or today?”

“What, like somebody suspicious? People don’t tend to hang around here, son. If anything people like to stay away. Herb’s kids sure as hell liked to, just like my own do. You give them everything and this is how they repay you, by sticking you into . . .”

“Herb have a run in with anybody? Any arguments?”

“Jesus, what kind of argument would you need to have to end up like that? Anyway, everybody liked Herb. Everybody.”

“Not everybody,” I point out, and Bernie slowly nods.

“I’ll think about it long and hard,” he says, “I really will, but for the life of me there’s nothing. I don’t know why anybody would want to hurt Herb, not like that. There was so much blood in there at first I couldn’t even tell it was Herb, but the toupee was his. You see it?” He doesn’t wait for me to answer. “It was hanging from his scalp, like it had been unhinged. I used to give him hell over that toupee—it looked stupid, and everybody knew what it was. As soon as I saw it, I knew it was him. Had to be. No chance two people in this small world could have the exact awful taste in toupees,” he says, and forces himself to smile.

“And you haven’t seen anybody hanging around?”

He shakes his head. “It’s like I said, nobody wants to hang around us old folks.”

“What did he do for a living?”

“What? Well, he did nothing. None of us do.”

“I mean before he retired.”

“Oh, yeah, of course you did,” he says, and he offers a sad smile. “He was a lawyer.”

“What kind of lawyer?”

“I don’t know, really. He doesn’t talk too much about it. Nothing exciting from what I’ve always gathered, you know, contract law, dealing with properties being bought and sold, the mundane stuff we get billed about four hundred bucks an hour for.”

“When did he retire?”

He shrugs, then starts doing the mental addition. The rest of his body seems to shut down as he thinks about it and he becomes a statue for five seconds. Either he’s still got a psychic link to Herb’s wife, or he’s just gotten one to the man himself because when he starts back up he has an answer.

“A few years before his wife died,” he says. “He didn’t want to retire, but he got sick. Used to smoke, you know. It’s what ruined his lungs. He gave up smoking around the same time he gave up work. Back then the doctors told him he had about two years to live, only it was his wife that died first. Five years ago they told him he’d be dead within six months. Since then they’ve been telling him three or four times a year that he’s only got two months to live, and they’ll keep telling him too for another few years yet . . .”

He realizes his mistake and stops mid-sentence. He raises a hand up to his face and wipes at a couple of tears starting to flow, his hands shaking enough to be a danger to his eyes.

“You’re going to get the guy who did this, right?”

“Right.”

“What will happen to him?”

“He’ll go to jail.”

He slowly nods, but I can see he’s desperate to ask for more. “In the war, we had a way of dealing with things ourselves,” he says. “There was one guy, we don’t talk about it because . . .” he says, then remembers there’s a reason nobody talks about it. “It wasn’t good for him,” he says. “I wish—Christ, I wish I could have five minutes alone with the man who did this to Herb.”

Five minutes alone with Herb’s killer isn’t going to be a fun five minutes for Bernard Walsh. Forty years ago it might have been, but not now.

“You saw what was written on his forehead?” I ask.

He nods.

“You make anything of it?”

“Herb was a caring person,” he says. “Doesn’t make sense.”

Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t, but I don’t go down that path with him. I thank him for his time, and he wanders off and joins an expanding group of elderly people who are all absorbing the bad news, people who are used to seeing their friends driven out of here in a horizontal position. Tomorrow some of them won’t even remember this happened—maybe Alzheimer’s isn’t a disease, but the body’s natural coping mechanism. Witness statements will be full of descriptions of long-dead husbands and wives they haven’t seen in twenty years.

Schroder has a Styrofoam cup of coffee in his hand and is looking steadier as he talks to the other man who was on the porch when we arrived. The man is using his hands a lot as he talks, as if drawing pictures in the air, and Schroder has to keep moving his coffee so it doesn’t get knocked. I walk over, interested in the conversation, when Schroder’s cell phone starts to ring.

Schroder nods as he listens, and when he hangs up he’s looking pale.

The man he was talking to has wandered to the edge of the porch to chat to a younger woman, perhaps his assistant. I get the bad feeling Schroder has just been fired.

“I can drive you home,” I tell Schroder. “Forensics can still do their job, and the officers can take statements.”

“What? Oh, it’s not that.”

“No?”

He reaches down and picks up his shoes. “We’ve got another body,” he tells me, and two minutes later we’re back on the road.