Page 27 of Deathmarch

The basement door had a lock, similar to the lock on the front door, one that needed a key and could be locked either from the outside or the inside. The key in the lock had a bloody string hanging from it.

Mike said, “We figured the killer pulled it from around Lamm’s neck after he shot the man.”

Harper silently agreed as he moved past the door and walked down the stairs. Switched on the light. Whistled.

“Right?” Mike called after him. “Chase said he’s seen army depots stocked worse. The old guy was no slacker.”

Harper strode to the gun cabinets lined up against the wall, holding close to a hundred weapons, from handguns to semiautomatics, not all legal to own by ordinary citizens. On top, and next to the cabinets, hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition waited in carefully marked boxes.

“How did nobody at the PD know the extent of this?” he shouted up. “You know what this is?”

“A very bad day waiting to happen,” Chase responded. “Hell, if Lamm ever snapped…”

Harper didn’t even want to think about it. He turned from the disconcerting pile of weaponry.

“Six bunkbeds,” he called up. They stood ready at the far end of the basement. “Maybe Lamm had family out of town he planned to bring here for the apocalypse.”

Harper wrote his notes, then moved on to the mountain of canned food and MREs that occupied the middle of the space, carefully stacked on wooden pallets. He did a quick sketch and estimated the inventory. He was about to move on when a small detail caught his eye. One stack, only half-finished, possibly newly started, set askew from the others.

“Looks like one of the pallets was jiggled around.”

He stepped closer and crouched to check the concrete floor. No muddy footprints. Then again, if the perpetrator or perpetrators had spent some time upstairs, their boots could have dried by the time they reached the basement.

Harper grabbed the corner of the crooked pallet and pulled. As soon as he moved it a few inches, he could see the corner of a steel safe. “Here we go.”

He dragged the pallet aside until he cleared the safe—keypad entry busted—then opened the door with the tip of his boot. And he found exactly what he expected.

“Located the empty safe under the food stockpile,” he said as he went upstairs.

Two heads snapped to him.

“Cleared out?” Chase asked.

Mike lowered the camera. “What? Nothing left?”

“Killer didn’t miss a thing,” Harper told them, then he drove back to the station, thinking the case over from the beginning, step by step. In vain. He walked into Broslin PD without a single new revelation.

Leila looked up from her keyboard. “The lawyer’s with her. He got here a little after you left.”

“Thanks.”

“How are things at Lamm’s place?”

“Messy.” He paused at the counter. “You should go home. Thanks for all the help.”

She glanced at the clock on the wall. “I wanted to wait until you got back, but I wouldn’t mind checking on the boys. You know teenagers.”

Harper did. He’d certainly been up to no good at that age. “They could be sleeping the sleep of the dead, or up and smoking up a storm, drinking the tequila you’re saving for those margaritas this weekend.”

“Exactly. If you’re sure you don’t need anything else…”

He needed a lot of things. A moment of sanity, for one. And then someone to tell him what the hell was going on. He needed to get past, as quickly as possible, that the prime suspect was his ex-girlfriend. He needed to find a way to lock away old memories and focus on the here and now without letting the past color the murder case he was handling. But since Leila couldn’t help him with any of that, Harper told her to head home and catch some sleep.

“Contact information for next of kin for Lamm is on your desk.” She shut down her computer. “You have a good night too. Maybe the Bianchi girl will confess.”

Harper snorted. “Maybe I’ll win the state lottery.”

“Nope. That’s mine.”