“Yeah, that crossed my mind too.” Thankfully, they ran into nothing more menacing than a beady-eyed crow perched on a weathered wrought-iron chair. Peering through a small diamond-shaped window built into the end wall, Kane spotted a squat silver import inside. “License plate matches to Merris. So unless someone grabbed him for a pancake buffet, he should be inside.”
“You’ve got pancake buffets in your neighborhood?” Sanchez added something in petulant Spanish. “Seriously, it’s like you guys have hot and cold running maple syrup in your toilets up on that hill.”
“Sanchez, I’m four blocks from Chinatown and living with a boyfriend that on his good days can be called feral.” Kane gave his partner a nudge in the ribs with his elbow. “All we’ve got in that house are packets of shoyu and Sriracha.”
“Still, hot boyfriend.”
“Yeah, best thing about the whole deal.” Kane grinned, knowing he probably looked foolish. “Stupid crazy about him. Enough to give up maple syrup.”
“That’s just crazy talk, Morgan. Fucking crazy talk.” Sanchez stopped in his tracks, carefully sidestepping a concrete squirrel perched on a herringbone-tile patio spanning the back of the house. “Hey, check out the back door.”
Kane spanned his fingers over the hilt of his gun, easing carefully around an urn of strawberry plants, their tiny white buds just beginning to push through. The back door was open a crack, a filmy curtain hem fluttering through the space. He cocked his head, drawing close enough to listen through the slightly open door. Kane held his breath, concentrating on any noises coming from inside the house.
The crow shot out a caw, startling Sanchez. Kane fought back a chuckle, then nodded to the door. “Cover me. Let’s go in live and see if Merris just forgot to close up the place after tossing the bird there his morning liver.”
“Damned thing looks like it eats livers too,” Kel groused. He drew his weapon, keeping its muzzle down. “Let’s go in, Morgan.”
The back door swung open with the barest of touches, a testament to Merris’s attention to detail. Kane waited until Sanchez seated his feet into place, poised to go in on Kane’s lead, then called out, hoping to draw Merris out. “Professor Merris! This is the police. Your back door is open. We are going to come in. For your safety, please position yourself in the middle of a room with your hands up.”
The house echoed with Kane’s forceful voice, but no one answered. The crow bitched its displeasure, rattling off a long caw before taking wing. Somewhere in the neighborhood, a pair of dogs began to exchange a flurry of barks, trailing off after an old man’s weedy voice told someone to come in.
Kane craned his neck slightly, keeping an eye on the door as he reached for his call button. Clicking on the mouthpiece, he cleared a channel. “Dispatch, Morgan and Sanchez, 10-35. 910 at current address. Request possible assistance.”
He rattled off their unit codes, listening through the traffic as Dispatch gave them clearance to go in. A nearby unit caught the call, responding to their request for backup and Dispatch rattled back an acknowledgment. “Clear to go in, 5A17. Responding unit inbound to location. ETA two minutes.”
“Acknowledged, Dispatch.” Nodding once at Kel, Kane jerked his head toward the door “Let’s go, Sanchez.”
Merris’s house was cool, drenched in shadows and chill from the morning air and shrouded sun. The back door opened up into a mudroom, a matching pair of old Whirlpools dominating one long wall. A black metal shelving unit held cleaning supplies as well as several pairs of bright yellow Wellingtons, their rubber sides and soles scrubbed clean of dirt.
“Kind of a neat freak,” Sanchez noted softly. “Not the kind of guy who’d leave his back door open. Let’s push it in.”
The mudroom became a square kitchen, an avocado, black-and-white throwback from the 1950s. The appliances were vintage, gleaming a soft buttery green despite the lack of direct light. The air tasted of lemon, wax, and air freshener. There was no sign of a dog or cat, no bags of kibble or a stray hair caught up on the metal-and-Formica table set into a breakfast nook off of the kitchen.
They got five feet in when Kane spotted a glistening trail of blood speckling a tied-rag rug near an arch leading to the main part of the house. The rug bunched up against a shoe, a white sneaker with a coin-sized crimson dot soaked into its canvas top.
“Fucking hell.” Sanchez took a step back, requesting Dispatch for a lockdown on the street. His gun stayed pointed down, his shoulders stiff and ready should someone or something burst out from the front of the house. “Dispatch, acknowledging response.”