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“Nearly twenty years. I’m born and bred.”
Barbara knocked on the door and got no answer. “Daryl, if you’re in there, say something or we’re coming in.” She looked back at Clarisse and shrugged. “He’s overweight and has diabetes and he’s not good about taking his insulin. He’s not that old, around forty, but maybe a heart attack?”
“One way to find out.”
Barbara gripped the doorknob as Clarisse got ready to deploy her pepper spray. She didn’t expect to find her adversary inside, but stranger things had happened to her.
The door opened and Barbara stepped through.
“Oh my God,” she cried out.
Clarisse pushed past her and looked at the bed.
The dried, congealed blood was everywhere, and the assailant long gone.
She made a sweep of the room and then stepped closer to the corpse on the bed, avoiding the spots of blood on the wooden planks.
“Is this Daryl?” she asked.
Barbara hung back by the door. “Y-yes. All that blood. What the hell happened? Did he have some sort of accident?”
She looked at the cut that ran from one earlobe to the other.
“I think you should call the sheriff’s department.”
“And tell them what?”
“That a man has been murdered.”
“Murdered! Here?”
Clarisse turned back to look at Barbara. “Go do it now,” she said in a strained voice.
Barbara turned and clattered back down the stairs. She could hear the older woman bouncing off the walls in her haste.
She bent down and scrutinized the dead man’s face and then recoiled in horror.
No way. It cannot be. Please.
She stepped back and glanced at the man’s arm. She edged the sleeve up to the elbow and then slowly turned the arm toward her so she could see the inside of the forearm.
She saw what she needed to see and pulled the sleeve down and put the arm back.
It was a tat of Superman’s insignia.
Shit.
Unfortunately for Clarisse, she had chosen burgundy gloves to wear today. And thus she didn’t notice the small bit of congealed blood that had leached onto one of her fingertips.
Clarisse stepped away and looked at the shelves lining one wall. They were filled with comic books. She rushed over and then stopped and stared at the one on top of a large pile. It was, she knew, a copy of a special edition Superman comic. But was itthatone? She opened the cover and looked on the first page.
The initialsBDandREhoused inside a drawn-in heart.
She thrust the comic back, her panic rising. Now she had something else to look for, and she needed to do it quickly.
She rushed across to the opposite room she had noticed when they had reached the second floor. Clarisse pushed the door open using her gloved hand. It was a small room that was obviously used for storage. Boxes and old bed frames and the clutter and castoffs of seemingly several lifetimes were piled in here.
Her sweeping gaze stopped at the far wall. And there it was. She lifted her iPad and took a picture of what was written on the wall in black Magic Marker.
