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The smell hit us before I could finish feeding the key into the slot and I cursed, my nose wrinkling as I flicked the safety off my gun and pushed inside.
“Don’t touch anything,” I growled to Becca behind me.
“Oh god,” she croaked, her voice nasally. No doubt plugging her nose. “What is that?”
I would know that smell anywhere. Flashes of time-tainted memory of my parents dead on the floor, their blood soaking into the carpets assaulted my mind.
I pushed through them, lifting the neckline of my t-shirt to cover my mouth and nose with my gun hand extended.
My eyes watered from the force of the odor, and I kicked past mail piled on the floor in front of her door and into the dusty apartment.
“Christ, Julia,” I hissed, knowing what I would find as I cautiously stepped through the kitchen, noting the upturned retro chair and the molding coffee in the antique mug on the table.
Everything in here was so outdated. Julia wasn’t fucking around when she said she didn’t need much. Everything in the whole place appeared to be thrifted if not dived for out of dumpsters. What the fuck did she do with all the money we paid her?
“Corvus,” Becca said in a quiet voice behind me. “I-I don’t think I can go in there.”
“You wanted to come with me,” I reminded her in a hushed tone. “Get over here. Stay close or I won’t be able to protect you.”
Her light feet rushed over, sticking to my ass like she was told.
“Whatisthat?” she whined, choking on the smell no doubt coating her throat like it was coating mine.
There was only one thing it could be.
I peered through to the left and right, toward the open living room and bedroom, but nothing seemed amiss in either. Just more old furniture. Several stacks of yellowing paperbacks towering around her bed and filling the side tables.
In front of us were two doors. One no doubt led to a bathroom, but the other… the other would be her office. It was a stipulation of the job offer. She needed to have a separate office. One that could be locked. With a safe to keep her notes in and the ability to connect a landline phone.
I opened the door on the left.
Bathroom. Untouched.
Becca moved closer to my side. I couldn’t hear her breathing anymore as I opened the other door, twisting the knob with two fingers before shoving it the rest of the way open.
I already knew what I’d find, but that didn’t make it any easier to swallow.
“Fuck,” I cursed, giving the room a quick once over before lowering my gun.
Behind me, Becca vomited on the floor, gripping on to my arm to keep herself from falling over.
I waited until she was finished and returned to standing.
The reek of her corpse was nearly enough to make me follow Becca’s lead, but I’d smelled worse. Seen worse.
Though that didn’t mean the gruesome picture of violence in front of us didn’t unsettle the absolute fuck out of me.
Julia sat in the wooden chair in front of her wooden desk by the curtained window. Her head bent over a desk covered in scattered blank note paper. Motionless.
Her skin was tinted in shades of red and green, slipping in places where it should’ve been sedentary. But it wasn’t the disgust of her corpse itself that made my stomach squeeze. It was the objects sticking out of her flesh. Hanging out now that time had worn her body down.
The sharp ends of pencils and pens and little silver bits I thought might’ve been paper clips.
A line of what looked like staples ran down the back of one of her arms.
But the piece de resistance, the cause of her death, appeared to be the cord from the ancient landline phone wrapped threefold around her thin neck, the skin bloated now around the tight beige coiled line.
“Oh my god, I just dumped my DNA all over this crime scene,” Becca said, still trying to catch her breath from retching so hard.
