Page 19
The next morning, my body felt unnaturally light and cool, and my head was clear again, like a fever had broken. I found my phone, dismissed the notifications and messages from the various apps; there wasn’t anything important, of course. I was on leave or suspended or whatever Peterson had decided.
I showered again, and when I dressed and went into the kitchen, Darnell was frying eggs. The smell of hot butter and cast iron and toasting bread filled the air.
“Coffee’s in the pot,” he said.
I poured myself a mug. After a few sips, I said, “Do you want me to do something?”
“No, thanks. I appreciate you asking, though.” He turned the eggs and said, “How’d you sleep?”
“Great.”
He looked at me. Then he said, “Ah.”
I saluted him with the mug.
He smiled and said, “Gray,” and then he finished cooking in silence.
We ate in silence too, aside from the scrape of forks on plates, the crunch of toast, the soft sounds of chewing and swallowing. Darnell was good at a lot of things, and cooking was one of them. The eggs were perfect, the yolks still runny, the whites cooked through, seasoned just right. Lots of butter on the toast. Before—when things had been normal—I’d had to be careful. Because, you know, there was always good food. If you only eat once or twice a day, though, it’s less of an issue.
“What are you going to do today?”
“Watch porn. Jack off. Smoke weed.”
“Sounds like high school.”
“By high school, I was into fisting.”
He burst out laughing. His coffee spilled, and he mopped it up with his napkin. He had a nice laugh. I wondered when the last time was that I’d heard him laugh.
“I think it’s okay if you take a day off,” he said. “You’ve been running yourself into the ground. Why don’t you have a nice, lazy day around the house? Catch up on sleep. Watch some TV.”
“Porn.”
“I think your body needs the rest.”
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll have a nice, relaxing morning. And then by noon, I’ll be ready to blow my brains out.”
He was reaching for my plate when I said it. He took the plate, stacked it with his own, and laid his hands flat on the table.
“I know,” I said.
He picked up his napkin, the one that was damp with coffee, and set it on the top plate.
The coffee tasted too bitter now. I rubbed my eyes.
Finally, I said, “I’m an asshole.”
He picked up the plates and went to the sink. As he ran the water from the faucet, he said, “If you’re thinking about hurting yourself.”
I went to my room.
From the kitchen came the sounds of Darnell cleaning up. A little more splashing than usual. The thump of cabinet doors closed too hard. The cast iron clanging when he knocked it against the sink.
This was why I had a line of guys around the block wanting to wake up next to me.
Eventually, Darnell finished. The house was silent for a few minutes. And then his familiar tread moved toward my room. He stopped in the doorway.
“I’m going to run some errands.”
I nodded.
“I get upset when you talk about hurting yourself.”
“I shouldn’t have said it.”
“Are you okay if I leave? I don’t want to leave if you’re in distress.”
“God, Darnell, it was a joke.”
The words rebounded off his stiff silence. And then he said, “I’m glad you think this is all so funny.”
He didn’t slam the front door, but he closed it pretty damn hard.
I heard him start his car, and then the sound of the engine moved away. In its absence, the house was full of a staticky quiet. The air felt like it was charged, and a low, restless hiss registered at the threshold of my hearing. It was probably partly the sound of blood in my ears and partly the sound of the air conditioning, but it felt like the air was charged. Like the house was about to blow.
I was an asshole. Big surprise.
But he didn’t have to take everything so personally.
I went around and around on that for a while until I decided if I didn’t find something to do, I really was going to blow my brains out.
I got up. I walked around. There wasn’t anything to do. Darnell had cleaned up the mess that the deputies had left. The breakfast dishes were done. There wasn’t any laundry to start. I could go to the gym, but it had been a while. I could go for a run, but it was hot. Porn and jacking off sounded great in theory, but my dick didn’t seem interested. Weed sounded better, but I really didn’t want to fuck up a drug test. I mean, fuck it up any more than I probably already had. If—
But it was like Darnell’s threat. It was like Peterson’s decision to put me on leave.
That if was too big. If they took this away from me, after they’d taken everything else.
On my fifteenth pass through the kitchen, I noticed the folded paperwork. Someone—probably Darnell—had tucked it into the mail organizer that hung on the side of the fridge. But it wasn’t mail. It was a thick sheaf of official-looking documents. I thought I knew what it was.I’d had to type up a few of those documents in my life. I’d had to hand out a few of them too.
It was from the Dore County Sheriff’s Department, and it was an inventory of everything that had been taken while the deputies had been processing the scene. My bedding—I hadn’t noticed that; Darnell must have made up the bed with fresh sheets before bringing me home from the hospital. A sample of the carpet from my bedroom. Some of my clothing. My guess was that the clothes had been in or near the bed, and they wanted to see if they could match any trace evidence to the body. A set of kitchen knives.
That stopped me. Everything else had been from the bedroom, where the killer had left Tip. But the knives were in the kitchen. So, there was only one reason they’d have taken them—if they had a reason to think they were connected to Tip’s death. And that meant that whoever had killed Tip had used a knife.I saw, in my mind, his body again. In my bed. Sprawled out, his underwear tangled around his legs. No visible wounds. Which meant he hadn’t just been killed with a knife. He’d been stabbed in the back.
I dropped onto the sofa, still holding the inventory, staring at it but not really seeing it. Knives were ugly weapons. And they made for ugly deaths. I mean, every death is ugly, but knives—they were different from guns. The psychology was different. The physical proximity of a knife attack meant you had to be right next to the victim. It meant you didn’t have the distance, the illusion of detachment or anonymity, that a gun provided. And it wasn’t as simple as pulling a trigger either. The human body doesn’t like having things stuck in it. Don’t let a twink hear me say that. With a knife, you have to have enough physical power to drive it into the body. And you have to have the right mindset. To want it badly enough, to put it crassly. To feel the shock of impact, the knife slicing flesh and muscle. You have to be able to stand the blood.
Which was why a lot of knife-related violence had to do with desperation or rage. People driven to extremes. Especially knife-related killings.
Who hated Tip enough to kill him with a knife?
I made myself stop. Go back. I was jumping to conclusions. Yes, the psychology was important. But it wasn’t a hard-and-fast rule. People used knives because they were convenient. Because they were cheap. Because they were easy to get and even easier to get rid of. Lots of people carried knives—lots of violent, dangerous people. Tip could have been murdered by a dealer, by some white nationalist prepper, by a serial killer.
But if it had been something like that, the other pieces didn’t fit. Stranger killings didn’t lead to elaborate cover-ups. Whoever had murdered Tip, they wanted me and Darnell to take the fall for it. That’s the only reason they would have gone to the trouble—and the risk—of bringing the body here.
So, we were back to a killer Tip had known. That was actually the norm, if you could use the word norm for anything related to a murder. In spite of how TV shows and movies made it look, most killings were done by people the victims knew—often, people they were close to, either family or sexual partners.
Eddie Wheeler in his fucking recliner with his fucking ESPN .
That was a jump too. But it brought me back to the right question. If Tip had been killed with a knife, and if his killer had been someone he’d known—someone who had struck out at Tip in a moment of intense emotion, grabbing a weapon close at hand, in a dysregulated moment when the usual constraints of socialization were stripped away—then, who could it have been? And why? Most humans had a lot of built-in safeguards to prevent them from killing another human. Some were social. Some were biological. But that’s why psychopaths were the exception rather than the rule. So, what had pushed Tip’s killer beyond those safeguards?
That was the million-dollar question, I was starting to suspect.
A related question, and almost as important, was why the killer had chosen to target me and Darnell. The first answer that came to mind was that it was because we made such perfect fucking patsies. I mean, Tip’s injuries had been similar enough to mine that it wasn’t difficult to draw the connection. And I hadn’t helped things by—well, screwing the pooch, as my dad would have put it. And Tip’s story about the big, bearded man who had attacked him—even though I still thought it was bullshit—also made Darnell an easy target for a frame job.
But that only moved the question back a few inches. Because—why us? Convenience? Something more? Was this about us, instead of about Tip? Had the whole frame been planned from the beginning?
I didn’t have any fucking idea.
I got up and paced the house. I stopped at the fridge and stood there with the door open and cold air washing over my bare legs. No beer. I made coffee. It wouldn’t be as good as Darnell’s. But it gave me something to do, gave my body familiar motions: filter in basket, water in the reservoir, scoop out grounds. The water heated. The machine made its weird hissing, bubbling sounds. Then the coffee began to drip. I’d spilled some of the grounds, and I thought Darnell would probably clean those up. I got a paper towel and wiped them up anyway. How long did it take to make coffee?
I was right: it wasn’t anywhere near as good as Darnell’s. It was strong enough, in fact, that I thought I could feel it stripping the enamel from my teeth. But the caffeine hit my system, and the warm mug felt good in my hands as I resumed pacing.
If it weren’ t me, I thought. If it were somebody else. If this were a case.
Most cases, you worked backward: you started at the scene of the crime and worked your way out from there. You worked the scene. You worked around the scene. You followed anything you got—the victim, physical evidence, witness reports—and kept moving outward. You moved backward in time. And you looked for where things started to cross. Where things came together.
I looked around the house. The recliners. The comfy, hideous sofa. The tangle of charging cables. Here we are, I thought. The scene of the crime.Or one of the scenes, since Tip had been murdered somewhere else.
If there’d been anything to find, the deputies would have found it and taken it. What had they taken? My clothes, my bedding, my knives. No incriminating footprints. No latents that pointed to a stranger in the house. Nothing that said anyone but Darnell and I had been inside this house. But someone had been in here. And they’d brought a dead body inside.
For the first time, that fact really registered. I mean, I’d understood it—I’d touched Tip, and I’d seen him, and I’d known. But now, trying to think about this like it was a case, I saw what else it meant. And the questions it raised.
I let myself out the back door, carrying my coffee with me in spite of the thick, muggy air. The concrete slab of patio was rough under my bare feet, and then, after that, the grass was cool and whispered softly. I made my way around the house to the driveway. My car was parked there now, but the night the killer had brought Tip’s body here, it would have been empty. I’d been fucking around at the Beaver Trap, and Darnell had been wherever he’d been.
I made my way to the sidewalk and studied the house from that angle, sipping my godawful coffee. The driveway ran from the street up along the side of the house. It didn’t go all the way to the backyard—it stopped at a chain-link fence about three-quarters of the way back. But at night, if a car pulled in there, it would have provided a conveniently deep patch of shadow. Especially if the back porch light was off. It had been off when I’d come home; I remembered that. All the lights had been off. I’d thought, at the time, that had been Darnell’s little message to me.
Was it that simple? He—if the killer was a he—had parked in the driveway, where the side of the house hid him from view, and then taken Tip through the backyard and into the house? If I were doing it, that’s what I would have done.
That meant, of course, that the killer knew the layout of the house. He’d planned this. He’d had some sort of idea about how to get inside. He might have even known that Darnell always left the door unlocked for me. And he’d either known or suspected that he’d be able to find a time when the house was empty. I didn’t like that. Without truly thinking about it, I’d had the half-formed belief—or maybe it was simply expectation—that Darnell was always home. He was a homebody, after all. He didn’t particularly like going out. But he’d been gone the night the killer had come here. And gone how many other nights as well? Gone, and I hadn’t known because I’d been out trying to nut. What else didn’t I know about Darnell? What else had I taken for granted in the last year?
I gave the street a considering look and then barefooted it across to Mrs. Estes’s house. The asphalt was hot enough that I immediately regretted the decision. I tried to hop from one foot to another, and that meant trying to keep the coffee from spilling. When I got to the grassy verge, the soles of my feet were broiled. I’d saved the coffee, though.
Mrs. Estes answered the door in a housedress. She was somewhere in her eighties, her graying hair in curlers, and what I could see of her neck and shoulders and chest was covered in age spots. She had one of those security doors, and even though we’d been neighbors for more than a year, she didn’t open it.
“Hello,” she said through the mesh.
“Hi, Mrs. Estes. Sorry to bother you. I wanted to ask you about the other night, when all the deputies were here.”
“Oh. Uh huh. Yes. I remember.”
“By any chance, did you happen to see someone come to the house earlier that night?”
She stared at me. With one hand, she clutched the housedress, gathering it at her throat. “I really don’t think I should be talking to you.”
“Oh no, it’s okay. I’m not going to take a lot of your time. Did you see a car that night? Before the deputies, I mean.”
“I already talked to the police about this.”
“Right, but—”
“I’m very busy,” she said as she shut the door. “I’m sorry.”
I stayed on the porch, studied her front door, and drank more coffee. I flexed my toes against the cool, polished concrete of the porch. She had a jute welcome mat that said GOD BLESS in what was supposed to look like cross-stitch. I wondered, if I knocked again, if she’d open the door with a shotgun.
After another minute or two, I went next door. Skyler and Hailey Zamora were a young, cute, het couple who had been incredibly disappointed to learn that no, under no fucking circumstances did I want to come over for board game night. I mean, not that I’d said it that way, but they’d eventually gotten the message. They’d also been shocked that I hadn’t seen Avengers: Endgame , part whatever the fuck. I’ve got a gift for disappointing people.
I knocked. They had a stoop instead of a porch , and as I stood there, I could feel the back of my neck starting to cook. From inside came muffled music, something poppy and sad. Skylar had cut the grass recently; the smell still hung in the air. Footsteps moved on the other side of the door, audible even over the world’s saddest love song.
Then nothing.
I knocked again. The music was still playing. The back of my neck was starting to get that prickle, like if I stayed out here another five or ten minutes, I’d have the beginning of a sunburn. I drank some coffee. It was starting to hurt my stomach, but in a good way. The way I felt sometimes pulling overtime, no chance to grab anything to eat, nothing but coffee or an energy drink to keep me going. For a while, they’d had this brand called Bang. The cotton candy flavor was the best. I’d get a headache after about five swigs—that’s how you knew it was good.
I was still standing there when Hailey peered through the front window. I looked at her. She looked at me. It was like watching the soul leave her body in slow motion. I raised my mug in hello, and she scrambled backward. A moment later, her hand shot out, and the blinds dropped. Her little poppy song changed to something that, under other circumstances, was probably a real panty dropper.
Harvey Sweeney lived on the other side of Mrs. Estes. He was old too; this neighborhood was in the process of turning over, and young couples like Skylar and Hailey, or me and Darnell, were still the exception rather than the rule. But Harvey wasn’t old old. I mean, he was, like, forty or something. Maybe fifty. He worked from home, and he had one of those expensive e-bikes that he never rode, and I told Darnell he was probably a big old homo and super closeted, and Darnell told me it was none of our business.
I knocked. And then I had a minute or two to contemplate my life choices. No shoes had certainly been a decision. And even though I hadn’t been outside long, sweat was starting to stick my shirt to my chest. All things considered, I probably should have made more of an effort to be nice to the neighbors. Maybe I should have offered to watch Mrs. Estes’s cat. If she had a cat. If she ever went anywhere.
It was hard to explain why I felt better than I had in a long time. Maybe it was the coffee.
Harvey answered the door and then shut it again. Not all the way, but enough that I could tell he was bracing it with one foot—I guess in case I decided to charge inside and, what? Murder-sodomize him? I wasn’t sure which one would scare him more. I thought about telling him that trick with his foot was a great way to get his toes broken.
“Yes?” he said. He had thinning brown hair in a Boy Scout haircut, and he’d gone the dad bod route.
“Hi, Harvey, sorry to bother you.”
“Do you need something?”
No, I thought. I’m just out here for my fucking health. But I smiled and said, “I just have a quick question.”
“Is that coffee?”
“Not really.”
He stared at me.
“Like I said, I have a quick question. The other night, do you remember when all the deputies were here?”
“The police already talked to us. They asked us all sorts of questions about you. They wanted to know all about that boy, if he ever went to your house.”
He delivered these facts in a kind of brassy staccato. Behind them, I could hear the rest of the message: we know about you .
I was so caught up in a half-formed plan—something about trying to catfish Harvey on Prowler, if I could ever figure out his profile name—that I almost missed what he said next.
With a smug little cock of his hips, Harvey added, “So, I told them the truth.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“I told them the truth. I told them about all those boys coming over.” And then, like he’d been waiting for it—which, obviously, he had—Harvey said, “This is a decent neighborhood. Decent people live here. You need to take your drama elsewhere.”
But that didn’t make any sense because I didn’t bring hookups home. Darnell and I had agreed: our home was our home. “What boys? When?”
Eyebrows arched, Harvey asked, “Darnell didn’t tell you?”
The cattiness felt so staged that it would have been funny if I weren’t on the brink of a heart attack. “Harvey, what are you talking about?”
“The other day, the day the police came,” he said, and he made that little, satisfied line with his mouth again. “Everyone saw it. They showed up in a cute little sports car. The blond onestayed in the car. And the brunet walked right up to the front door.” With the satisfied air of someone scoring a point, he added, “Mrs. Estes thought they were hired escorts.”
He was talking about Rory and Jordan; that much was obvious. They’d come to the house. My house. The same day that Tip’s body had been found here. They’d walked up to the door.
“Did they go inside? What time was this? Where did they park? What else did you see?”
My tone made Harvey shrink back, his eyes scanning me, one hand outstretched for the door.
“What time?” I said.
“Afternoon. I don’t know. Late afternoon.”
I’d been at work. And Darnell should have still been home, although that was another of my assumptions, because I didn’t know when he’d left to go wherever he’d gone.
“They parked on the street,” Harvey continued, still watching me like I might try something. Make an attempt on his virtue, probably. “I could see them from my office window. Not that I was snooping. I couldn’t help it. If you want privacy, you should tell them—”
“What happened? They parked here. The dark-haired boy got out. What did he do?”
I wasn’t sure what I was expecting—some elaborate hoax that had allowed Rory to move Tip’s body inside. Maybe a wooden crate marked VENTRILOQUIST’S DUMMY. But they’d been in a little sports car, Harvey had said. Would they even have room for Tip’s body?
Some of the satisfaction came back into Harvey’s voice as he answered. “He knocked on the door.”
I shook my head, mostly because none of this was making any sense.
Harvey took it as disagreement. “He did. He walked right up there and knocked. And he was hardly wearing anything, just these little shorts that left his legs completely bare, and a tank top, and it was white, and it was very tight.” A hint of color crept into Harvey’s face, and he hurried on. “Darnell was not happy.”
“Darnell answered the door? What did Rory say?”
“I don’t know.” Some of that campy cattiness sharpened its claws again. “But he touched himself. In public. Decent people shouldn’t have to see that kind of thing. Darnell practically threw him off the porch.”
What did any of that mean? Not the touching himself part—this was Rory we were talking about, so pretty much anything was possible. But why had Rory and Jordan come here? Because they’d heard something about Tip? But then, why had Jordan stayed in the car? And why would Darnell have gotten angry? Most importantly, why hadn’t he told me?
That, more than anything, told me the most likely explanation might be the correct one: Rory had shown up looking to trick, and instead, my boyfriend had answered the door.
But something else worked its way through the fog. “You told the deputies about this?”
“Of course,” Harvey said. “It’s my responsibility as a citizen—”
I turned and started back toward the house. This time, I didn’t feel the asphalt under my feet. The heat haze made everything shimmer. On our house, the glare of the sun made the windows spark and catch little white tongues of fire. I felt lightheaded. The heat. I had the strangest thought that the house was burning down.
As I went up the stairs to the porch, I emptied the last of my coffee over the struggling roses.
Inside, with the cool of the air conditioning locking down around me, I tried to focus. I tried to concentrate. Rory and Jordan showing up at my house wasn’t good, as far as the deputies would be concerned. Brother Gary and Red Alvin would see it as confirmation of further links between me and Tip, or between Darnell and Tip, or between all of us.
Why hadn’t Darnell told me?
A lot had happened in the last day. A lot had gone wrong. Maybe he hadn’t wanted to start another fight by asking why the college ass I’d trawled had shown up on our doorstep. Maybe, I thought with something between amusement and panic, he was saving it up. Ammo. For this fucking therapist.
He was still gone. Still running his errands. The house was silent except for the whisper of air in the ducts.
I went into his office. His laptop was on, the screen locked. I entered the passcode. I opened up a browser. I went to his credit card company. I logged in. He had one of those password managers, and this was his device, so all the two-factor stuff was already done.
The charge was still pending, and it was for a Hampton Inn, two nights ago. A hundred dollars and change, probably because the hotel was on a stretch of highway between Butt Fuck and Nowhere. He’d told me that he’d driven for a while, and that must have been true. The Hampton was, according to Google Maps, almost ninety miles away. Could he have driven out there and back before I got home?
I leaned back in his chair. And I heard a voice in my head asking, Now what the fuck kind of question was that?
The Google Maps result had a phone number. I placed the call and navigated through the automatic menu until a woman said, “Hello?”
“Hi. My name’s Darnell Kirby, and I had a room booked the other night. I didn’t end up using it, and I was wondering if I could get that refunded.”
“Let me check that for you, Mr. Kirby.” I figured that was probably the politest no I was ever going to hear in my life, but I was wrong when she said, “I’m so sorry, Mr. Kirby, there must be a mistake.”
I waited for her to tell me that yes, as a matter of fact, I had checked in, and I’d slept the whole night peacefully in the room, and several hotel employees conveniently remembered seeing me.
“There’s a note on your reservation asking us not to cancel the room, even in the event of a no-show. And unfortunately, we do have a policy on refunds—”
I disconnected.
He hadn’t gone to the hotel.
He’d lied.
He’d prepared a lie.
No. The leather of his office chair stuck to my skin as I peeled myself away and stood. No, that wasn’t right. He’d prepared an alibi.