by Gayle Wilson
"My dog's back there. In the bathroom."
Was that supposed to be a warning? "Does he bite?"
For a fraction of a second there was a flash of something in her eyes. Shock or amusement. Maybe both. And then she shook her head.
"He's terrified. I tried to get him to come with me to the door, but he's hiding behind the toilet. He wouldn't budge."
"And he's bleeding?"
She shook her head again, the amusement he had seen in her eyes only seconds before disappearing. "He must have stepped in it. Or walked through it. There's a lot of blood. Too much for just a cut."
"A cut?"
"When I first got home. I noticed blood on the shower curtain. I thought Dan had cut his finger, but... There's too much for that."
"Okay." Mac deliberately kept his voice low and calm. "Is there anybody else inside the apartment?"
"I called Dan's name when I got home from work, but he didn't answer. I thought that meant he'd already gone, but now..."
"The dog in the bathroom and maybe your ex-husband. And you think he might be the one who's bleeding?"
He realized that he was letting her anxiety get to him. Why the hell would Tate want to hurt Sarah Patterson's ex?
"I don't know. I just saw the blood, and nobody else has been here."
Mac recognized her growing frustration with his questions, but if there was anything a policeman hated, it was going into a situation where you didn't know what to expect. It was always the unexpected that got you killed.
"You stay here—" he said again, only to be interrupted
"I'm not staying out in the hall." she said, her voice determined. "Not until I know what's going on."
She was beginning to get her equilibrium back, maybe because she was no longer alone. There was a tinge of color along her cheekbones. Awareness in her eyes. The shock had worn off, to be replaced by a need to know.
Mac couldn't blame her for that. This was all probably much ado about nothing. The dog had cut his foot on something. With everything that had happened the last couple of days, she'd seen the blood and gone off the deep end.
"Then stay behind me and stay close. And don't touch anything."
He stepped past her, moving inside the apartment. He scanned the living room, but there was nothing out of the ordinary going on in here.
Through the open door to his left he could see into a small kitchen. The light over the sink was on, rendering the glass of the windows behind it opaque.
He glanced at her over his shoulder and then tilted his head to the right, questioning the location of the bedroom. She nodded, her eyes darting in that direction.
A light shone out into the hall, although the hallway itself was dark. He headed toward the light, moving cautiously across the living room, aware that she was right behind him.
As they neared the doorway, he spotted the switch on the wall to his left. Before he stepped through, he reached out, flipping it up and flooding the hall with light.
Nothing unexpected here. The soft gleam of worn wood. Walls a dirty, rental-property beige. An open door to the left, the source of the light he'd noticed earlier. A closed one on the right, which he assumed to be a closet. Dead ahead was the open door of the bedroom.
He stepped forward far enough to peer into the bathroom. A trail of bloody paw prints, fading in intensity, led across the tile to the dog, who was huddled in the corner. He looked up at Mac, his mouth open and panting. He was trembling, and he didn't offer to move from behind what he obviously considered to be the safety of the toilet.
Mac checked out the rest of the room, but there was nothing else of interest. He turned off the water, which had filled the tub, steam drifting upward from it. The shower curtain had been pulled back, so he couldn't see much of it from where he was standing. What was visible didn't show any blood.
The only other item in the room was a wicker clothes hamper. No place an intruder could hide.
He moved further down the hall, stopping in front of the door on the right-hand side. The one he assumed was a linen or utility closet. He jerked open its door to be confronted by neatly organized shelves holding sheets and towels and cleaning supplies.
Nowhere to hide here either. Deciding to err on the side of caution. Mac bent, looking under the bottom shelf.
Not even if he's a midget.
Which left the bedroom. His eyes shifted to its waiting darkness. As they did. he realized Sarah Patterson had been right.
The blood her clog had tracked had come from somewhere inside that room. The prints were out here in the hallway as well, although against the age-darkened wooden floor, they were harder to see than on the bathroom tile. Once Mac picked up the pattern, it was obvious they led back into the bedroom.
Son of a bitch. Mac thought, as the adrenaline began to pump.
He would normally be calling for backup right now. Except nothing about this particular situation was normal.
He was on suspension. He had no department-sanctioned reason to be calling on Sarah Patterson. And no right to be checking out her apartment with his weapon drawn.
Despite the fact that the hair on the back of his neck had begun to lift, as far as he knew nothing criminal had taken place here. There could be a dozen explanations for the blood he saw, including the one she'd mentioned.
Her ex-husband could have had an accident. He might be bleeding to death while Mac wasted time checking out an empty linen closet. Looking for a bogeyman who'd left a message on her answering machine.
There was no reason to believe Samuel Tate was, or ever had been, in that bedroom. No reason, according to the experts at the FBI. to think Tate had anything to do with this at all.
Influenced by all those months of frustration. Mac had bought into Sarah Patterson's panic. Wishful thinking, old buddy.
He moved, stepping back to the left-hand side of the hall and motioning her to close the distance between them. She obeyed, glancing into the bathroom as she passed the open door. He heard the dog whine when it saw her, but thankfully the mutt didn't seem inclined to follow.
Mac edged along the hall, conscious that she was right behind him. When he was as close to the bedroom doorway as he could get without revealing himself, he stopped to listen, his back against the wall. Other than Sarah's breathing, and his own, he could hear nothing. He turned his head toward her, putting out his right hand, palm up and facing her. Again, she nodded her understanding.
Transferring the .38 to his right hand, he reached out with the left, feeling around the frame of the door for the switch inside. He located it and then, taking a deep breath, pushed the switch up.
The light came on, but nothing else happened. No shot fired at the door. No sound of anybody reacting to that sudden blaze of illumination.
Taking another breath and settling his left hand under his right, he edged far enough into the doorway to see inside the room. Nobody was standing. No indication of danger. Not in his initial scan.
The second verified the impressions of the first. The closet was open, revealing a row of hanging clothes and some shoes neatly arranged in a line on the floor. The bed had been made, although the coverlet was subtly disordered, pulled up on the side facing the door, exposing the dark space beneath it.
And the bloody prints, more distinct than they had been on the floor of the hall, led from the far side of the bed across the pale blue throw rug at its foot. Whatever the source of the blood the dog had found, it was on the other side of that bed.
Mac considered the closet again. The door was one of those cheap sliding deals, where one panel slipped behind the other to allow access to either side. Which meant there was enough room for someone to be hiding inside, despite the fact that nothing in there appeared to have been disturbed.
His eyes on the far side of the bed, he walked over to the closet, moving as silently as he could. Using his left hand, he reached out and pushed both of the sliding panels to the other side of the opening. He moved in front of the closet at
the same time, leading with his weapon.
More clothes. Undisturbed. The same precise line of shoes continued on the side he'd just exposed. Nothing else.
It took him only a couple of seconds to verify the closet was empty. He turned back to the bed, his eyes examining the space under it, exposed by the disordered bedspread. Nothing was moving there, either.
Truth or dare, he thought, putting his left hand back under the right. Then he took a couple of quick strides, which brought him to the foot of the bed. The blood on the throw rug was thick, matted into the fibers.
And he could smell it now. Along with that scent was the distinctive miasma that often accompanies violent death. The powerful sphincter muscles relax as life leaves the body. As do those of the bladder.
Not a kid. Dear God, let this be anything— anybody—but don't let it be another kid.
He took the final step that would bring him around the end of the bed. prepared, he believed, for what he would find.
He wasn't. He couldn't have been.
He turned his head, swallowing against the bile that had risen to burn the back of his throat. And he realized Sarah was right beside him, near enough to see what had sickened him.
"Dan." she said softly. "Oh. God. Dan."
"That's your ex?"
She nodded. And then, as he watched, she put the fingers of both hands over her mouth. She retched once before she turned and ran across the room.
He forced his eyes back to the body, which lay sprawled between the bed and the wall. There was probably no good way to die, and it was always possible that what he was looking at had been done postmortem. With this much blood, however...
Whoever had killed Danny Patterson's father didn't seem to have taken much time with it. Nothing like the slow, sadistic tortures Samuel Tate enjoyed inflicting.
This death had been relatively quick by virtue of the violence with which it had been delivered. Dan Patterson's throat had been slashed from ear to ear. cut deeply enough that he'd almost been decapitated.
And then, just for good measure it seemed, the blade that had been used to accomplish that had been shoved halfway down its length into one of the still-opened eyes.
Nine
"So you were gone...what? Maybe forty, forty-five minutes at the most?"
Sonny Cochran was asking the questions and being as patient as it was in his nature to be. They were all sitting in Sarah's living room, while the crime scene technicians worked up the bedroom and bath.
"About that." Sarah's voice sounded relatively steady, given the situation.
Other than those first few seconds, she hadn't seemed on the verge of fainting. And judging from the sounds he'd listened to after she'd left the bedroom, she wasn't going to be sick again. There wasn't anything left to come up.
Mac could see the dog from where he was sitting. One of the techs had gotten him out from behind the John, and then they'd tied him to the leg of the kitchen table.
His leash was long enough to allow him to reach the doorway. For a while, he had gotten up expectantly whenever someone arrived. Now he'd given up on being released, lying forlornly in the opening, his muzzle propped on his front feet.
Forlorn. That fit everything here. Mac thought. The decaying neighborhood. The building. That poor, terrified dog. And right now, even the woman Sonny was questioning.
"You didn't notice nothing out of the ordinary when you got back to the apartment?"
"There was a glass on the counter."
"A glass?" Sonny's tone betrayed his interest. Or at least it did to Mac, who knew every nuance of his partner's voice.
"I knew I hadn't used it. I figured Dan had. While he was working."
"Still there?"
"In the sink. But I rinsed it off. I didn't know..."
She didn't finish the sentence, but it was obvious what she was thinking. She'd had no way of knowing then that the glass might have significance to a crime. Fingerprints, for example, although that would have been a fluke. They didn't usually get that lucky.
"And in the bathroom..." she began again.
"You saw something in the bathroom?" Sonny prodded when she hesitated.
"There was blood on the shower curtain. Up high. Like someone had pushed it back to get to the tub."
"That's why you thought your husband had cut his hand," Mac added, making the clarification for his partner's benefit.
Nobody had attempted to throw him out. He was letting Sonny take the lead, staying in the background, especially when anyone else was around.
As long as Morel didn't decide to show up—and there was a snowball's chance in hell of that—there shouldn't be any problem with him being here. Even with the efficiency of the department grapevine, he doubted the techs would know about his suspension.
"Dan's always smashing or nicking a finger. He's a contractor."
Present tense, Mac noted. None of this had sunk in. The shock was too great. Which was, perversely enough, why she was handling it as well as she was.
"The shower curtain had been pushed aside." Sonny said, bringing her back to her narrative. "Why would they do that, you think?"
"I thought Dan had washed off the cut in the bathtub. At the time I thought it was strange he hadn't used the lavatory."
"Need to check that drain," Sonny said to Mac, making a note.
"Tub's full," Mac warned, putting a quick end to the idea that they were going to get a blood sample there.
"I was going to take a bath." Sarah's tone was slightly defensive.
"Just make sure they get the curtain." Mac advised his partner.
"This was Tate." Sarah said unexpectedly. "I told you it was Tate on the answering machine last night"
"It's too early in the investigation to try to determine—" Sonny began.
"What do you think happened, Detective Cochran?"
Her animosity was obvious. "You think somebody just waltzed in off the street and killed Dan?"
"That's possible," Sonny said evenly. "Right now, just about anything's possible."
"The outer door of the building was unlocked when I got here. Security seems pretty lax." As he said that. Mac remembered the kid at the window.
He had thought at the time that he'd looked out in response to the sound of a car pulling up to the curb or maybe to the headlights. But it could be that the kid kept an eye out for any kind of movement out front. If so, he might have seen something that could be useful.
"They prop it open," Sarah said.
"Who does?" Sonny asked.
"I don't know. I always assumed it was somebody on the ground floor, but. ..I really don't know for sure."
"So anyone can get into the building without buzzing one of the tenants." Sonny was obviously thinking about the possibilities that presented. "You get a lot of traffic in and out here?"
"Not on the third floor," she said flatly. "Look, the idea that this was someone who wandered in off the street was supposed to be a joke—"
"What about the kid on the ground floor?" Mac asked.
For the first time during the course of the interview, Sarah turned her head to look at him directly. "What about him?"
Her tone was definitely unfriendly, and Mac couldn't help but wonder why. "He was looking out the window when I pulled up. I wondered if that was a regular thing."
Sarah's eyes continued to consider his face, the thoughts moving almost visibly behind them. "You're thinking he might have seen whoever came into the building this afternoon."
"He saw me."
"He was in the park then."
Then?
"You mean when the murder took place?" Sonny asked.
She nodded.
"How do you know that, Mrs. Patterson?" Mac asked.
"Because he was with me. We went to walk the dog while Dan was working in here."
"You said your ex-husband came to put in a security system."
"That's right. Actually, he was going to do that tomorrow. I gave him—" She stopped, her
eyes widening.
"Ma'am?"
"I just remembered that I gave Dan my extra key."
"So he could get in tomorrow while you were at work?"
"Do you think they could look for it?" she asked without answering Mac's question.
"For the key?"
Sonny seemed puzzled by the request, but as soon as she had said the word key, Mac knew what she was thinking. Whoever killed her ex-husband might have gone through his pockets. If that key was missing—
"We'll get them to look," Mac promised. "So you're saying the kid wouldn't have been at that window while your ex was in the apartment."
"Dwight—that's his name—was waiting in the hall outside my door when I got home from work. Dan showed up a few minutes later. I took Toby and the boy to the park. It was after dark when we got back. I saw Dwight inside his apartment, and then I came upstairs."
"That's when you called your ex-husband's name and got no response," Mac said, helping the story along with the information she'd given him before.
"I thought he'd done what he needed to do and left. Dwight couldn't have seen anything. Not anyone coming in or leaving. Whoever this was must have come up here after we left for the park."
Was she trying to steer them away from questioning the kid? Mac wondered. He put the question in the back of his mind, because what she had just said opened up another, more intriguing possibility. "Unless he was already here."
There was a small silence before she spoke again. "What does that mean?"
"You go into the bedroom before you left to walk the dog?"
"You think he could have been back there waiting for me to get home?" Her voice was tinged with a new horror.
"Did you go into the bedroom?"
She shook her head, her eyes focusing on the door to the hall. "I went to the kitchen for the key. I came in here to pick up Toby's leash first. I didn't go in the back at all. But if he was already here waiting for me..."
Then this wasn't a burglary gone wrong. That was what Mac had been thinking as well. The knife in the eyeball hadn't seemed to fit with somebody getting caught in the act of robbing the place. Not even some crackhead.