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Chapter 2
DECKER?”
Decker peered around the corner to see a soaked, shivering, and barefoot Jamison standing farther down the hall from where he’d just come.
“You got your gun?” he asked quietly. Wave after wave of electric blue light was pouring over him. He felt nauseous and dizzy.
Jamison shook her head.
He motioned her toward him.
She hurried forward, turned the corner, saw what Decker already had, and stopped dead.
“Good God!”
Decker nodded. It was a fitting expression for what they were both seeing.
After all, the manwashanging from the ceiling.
A rope had been inserted through a hook that had once held a chandelier that was now lyingon the floor.
The noose had been placed around the man’s neck.
Yet death by hanging did not typically cause blood loss.
Decker stared down at the wooden floor. The blood had pooled and then flowed toward the wall, where it had encountered the frayed electrical cord of a floor lamp and begun the electrical shorting process.
Before Jamison had appeared, Deckerhad used his foot to tap out the sparks after unplugging the cord. Part of a square of carpet and a dangling strip of wallpaper had caught on fire. He had used his wet jacket to beat out the flames on the wall, and had rolled up the carpet to smother the fire there. Then he’d stepped back so as not to further interfere with the crime scene. It was right then that Jamison had called out.
His gaze ran up and down the man’s body, searching for a wound that might explain the copious amounts of blood.
He saw none. And he couldn’t do a deeper probe now. That would have to await the police. But something else couldn’t wait.
Giving voice to what he’d been thinking, Jamison whispered, “Do you think there’s anyone else in the house?”
“That’s what we needto find out. Do you have your phone?”
“No.”
“Neither do I. And I didn’t see one in here. Okay, I want you to go back to your sister’s house and call the cops. I’ll finish searching the place.”
“Decker, you need to wait for the police. You have no backup.”
“Someone may be hurt, or the killer may still be here.”
“It’s the latter possibility I’m worriedabout,” hissed Jamison.
“Iama police officer,” replied Decker. “I’m trained to do this, and I’ve got a gun. And the odds are very good that if the killerisstill here, he’s smaller than me. Now go.”
Jamison slowly turned and then ran down the hall and back out into the rain.
Decker cleared the first floor. The house had a second story and, if it was a true copyof Jamison’s sister’s place, a basement. He moved back down the hall to the stairs leading up. He took the steps two at a time, feeling his thigh muscles tighten a bit with each upward lunge. While spending ten years in uniform before becoming a detective back in Ohio, he had gone into homes where people had died. There were procedures you followed to clear spaces as safely as possible, and all ofthem were grafted onto his brain. Still, it wasn’t really like riding a bike, for one very compelling reason.
Bikes didn’t shoot back at you.
There were two small bedrooms with closets upstairs and a Jack-and-Jill bathroom in between. Decker cleared all of them and found nothing. The place looked abandoned.
Maybe there was nothing to find except the hanging dead manon the main floor. He slipped back downstairs and found the door to the basement.
