I was never more comfortable than when I was around dead bodies. They were calm, they were predictable, they were everything that put my mind at ease. Trying to decipher the vagaries and intricacies of human interaction was exhausting, like running a marathon with your mind. But puzzling over a dead body was relaxing, like a crossword or Sudoku. What were these bodies telling me?
They were face down in their plates—not just head down, but literally face down, as if they were looking at their plates when their heads lowered. Sara’s plate was covered with the cascade of her hair, black streaked with gray; I lifted some strands of it and saw that her head and plate seemed the same as her brother’s. There didn’t seem to be any force of impact on the food, which you might have seen if their heads slammed down. So they lowered their heads slowly, and straight forward.… I repeated the motion with my own head, seeing how it felt. “They fell asleep,” I said.
“Why?” asked Mills.
“I’m working on that.”
Nobody lifted Officer Glassman’s arm. “Why are their arms hanging straight down?”
“Because they’re … ah—” I almost said because they’re asleep, but that only described the current position, not how they got in that position. What had their hands been doing when they fell asleep? No one eats with their hands straight down at their sides; they’d be up on the table, or maybe resting in their lap. I looked at the silverware—it was scattered across the table, like it had been dropped haphazardly. Two knives, two spoons, and a fork. “Where’s the other fork?” I lifted the other side of Sara’s hair, but it wasn’t under there.
“Here,” said Nobody, stopping to pick it up from the floor under Sara’s chair. She handed it to me with her cuffed hands and scrunched her nose into a sniffing scowl. “It smells.”
I held it close to my nose; it smelled strongly of chemicals, like maybe a cleaning solution. “It’s not bleach, but it’s something like that.”
“Poison in the food?” asked Mills.
“The smell’s too strong,” I said. “They’d have known it was there.”
“Unless the food was smellier than the chemicals,” she said. She leaned in over the table, looking closer at the casserole. “Fish? And curry powder.” She sniffed again. “Pakistani.”
“How can you possibly know that?” asked Mills.
“I’ve been Pakistani a couple hundred times,” said Nobody. “Whoever used the curry didn’t know how, though. It smells awful.”
“That happens when you lace your curry with detergent,” I said. I grabbed Officer Glassman’s head and raised it, revealing his face covered with flecks of rice and herbs and his mouth full of a thick, white froth.
“Drain cleaner,” said Mills. “I’ve seen that effect before. There’s no way they would have just dozed off like this, though—swallowing drain cleaner is horrifically painful. It eats you apart from the inside.”
“Then there’s probably a sedative in there as well,” I said. “One drug to knock them out, another to kill them, and strong, smelly food to cover it all up.”
“Why would a Withered kill with poison?” asked Nobody. “Doesn’t he have claws or … maybe teeth? Jessica and Derek were cut to ribbons.”
“But Corey was hit with a truck,” said Mills. “It’s different every time.”
“More to the point,” I said, “why would he use poison when I never would?”
“Not everything is about you,” said Nobody.
“But almost everything here has been,” I said. “Jessica’s death stood out because it was the one idea that didn’t come from me. Now neither does this. I think we have to consider the possibility that we’re looking at two unrelated cases.”
“A Withered that’s reading your mind,” said Mills, “and a pedophile hunting little girls. Which makes this a revenge killing.”
“Murder-suicide?” asked Nobody. She looked at the scene, frowning. “Sara gets fed up with his crap and decides to take them both out, out of guilt for not stopping him earlier?”
“You have a one-track mind,” I said. “There’s no way this is suicide.”
“Why not?”
“You saw this kitchen when we ate here on Sunday—it was covered with dirty dishes she’d used in cooking. The same when we helped bring back pans and plates from the town meeting. Sara leaves the dishes until after she eats, habitually. So if she’d cooked this meal the kitchen would still be messy. Somebody else cooked it.”
“Or the killer cleaned the kitchen,” said Mills. I glared at him, and he held up his hands. “I’m just saying. Weirder things have happened.”