“I’m going to come inside,” I continued. “To make sure you’re okay.”
I didn’t move. I felt a bit like Curly from The Three Stooges, when he woke to discover his feet had dried in a bed of cement and he had to chisel his way out. A small but very insistent voice in my brain was screaming to get outside to people, to safety, to call 911 for a wellness check. But then a louder voice—the pickax to the cement—countered with: there’s no sign of distress. There’s no indication she’s even home. Her boss was brutally murdered two days ago. Maybe locking the door on her way out this morning just slipped her mind and Earl Walker of 2F was making a big deal out of nothing. So I unplanted my feet and slipped into the apartment.
The smell was my first indication that I’d made a mistake.
How’d that episode of the Stooges end? Oh, right. Moe used dynamite to blow Curly’s cement shoes off. Brilliant.
Stale blood and loose stool should have been enough to turn me right the fuck around, but I instead pulled out my phone, tapped the flashlight app, and used it to scan the dark interior. The window on the opposite end of the living room faced west and hadn’t yet gotten hit with late-afternoon sunshine that would have otherwise penetrated the curtains, which were still pulled shut. The beam of light roved over a couch—worn out and tired-looking, probably secondhand—a television and a cluttered, wall-mounted shelf, then to my left, a remodeled kitchen with an island counter. A plastic bag of grocery store apples—a dozen at least—had been ripped open, and several had rolled across the granite top.
On the floor, in what appeared to be the threshold of a bedroom, lay a person who I had to presume was Marie Yang. She wore a T-shirt about two sizes too big and pajama shorts, and looked like she’d been woken from bed earlier this morning. In one upturned palm was an apple, in the other was a rotary index that looked to have belonged to an antique scale meant for measuring pounds and ounces. In what remained of her left eye stuck the handle of a knife hone.
CHAPTER NINE
Officer Stud had shown up while me and Earl Walker had been waiting for police to arrive on scene. Now he stood in the open doorway of 2F, bulging muscles packed into a sexy, tear-away cop costume that looked about to tear-away if he breathed too much. Walker hung on to Stud like a damsel in distress, both hands clinging to a bicep the size of my head, with one leg raised and snaked around Stud’s equally enormous tree-trunk thigh. Walker’s robe had fallen away to reveal a good bit of skin that’d probably not seen direct sunlight in a decade. I sat on the floor of the stairwell, in between the two apartments, my knees drawn up and hands dug into my hair.
I’d answered an initial round of questions from the uniformed officers responding to my 911 call—how did I know the victim, why was I here, what did I touch, why didn’t I call for help earlier, on and on like that. And once I’d managed to get a word in edgewise, I explained the ongoing case with Homicide, that I was an official consultant with the assigned detectives, and this death was maybe—probably—very likely—related to their investigation. So Calvin had been called and I’d begun constructing the simplest and most to-the-point explanation that wouldn’t cause his blood pressure to peak.
Radios crackled. Officers murmured to each other. Walker cooed over Stud. And a steady, familiar tread finally came up the stairs.
I raised my head.
Calvin stood on the landing, staring at me.
Quinn maneuvered around him while yanking on a pair of latex gloves and peering through the doorway of 2R.
I slowly got to my feet. “Calvin—”
He raised a hand, effectively shutting me up. To Quinn, he said quietly, “You go ahead. I’ll be inside in a minute.”
Quinn nodded, cast a look at me, then said, “You smell.”
“It’s BO. Thanks, Quinn.”
She shrugged and disappeared inside Marie’s apartment.
Calvin glanced past me and to the doorway of 2F, where Walker was trying his damnedest to strum Stud’s washboard abs like an instrument. Calvin’s expression narrowed and he looked at me again.
I shook my head. “It’ll take too long to explain.”
“Come with me,” he said, his voice low and steady and a touch terrifying in its calmness. Calvin led the way downstairs, then took the collar of my shirt and pulled me around the staircase, out of view of the uniformed officers infesting the building. He pushed me back against the wall and asked, with his hand still planted in the middle of my chest, “What the fuck, Sebastian?”
“Hang on—”
“No. I don’t want to hear defense, excuses, or any of your usual bullshit.”
“Bullshit?” I echoed.
“That’s right,” Calvin said. “You never listen to a word I say, and it’s not cute anymore.”
I grabbed his wrist and yanked his hand from my chest. “Don’t talk to me like that.”
“Then why do you insist on making my life a comedic tragedy? I’m so goddamn mad, if we weren’t married, I’d toss your ass in a cell and lose the key for a day or two.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, my entire body prickling and then going numb, like a current of electricity had just run from the crown of my head to the tips of my toes.
“‘I’m not being asked to consult on a mystery or a homicide.’ Does that line sound familiar? You fed it to me this morning, and Ibelievedyou.”
I swallowed hard before saying, “I’m trying to track down the ownership history of the spiritoscope.”
