by Bryan Smith
Which brought him back to square one. He had a dead woman in his house. A murdered woman. And not even the merest hint yet of why or how this had happened.
He heaved a breath and shook his head in consternation. “Goddammit.”
And now he was faced with a new question.
What next?
He couldn’t just stand here and fret over the situation forever. He’d already established he wasn’t in any immediate personal danger. The perpetrator, whoever he or she had been, was gone. Unless, maybe, the person was hanging around somewhere outside, waiting to see what happened next. He did another quick tour of the house, peeking out windows in search of lurking creeps, but didn’t see anybody. Back in the living room, he returned to the question of what to do next. He knew what the police would expect of him. They would expect him to report discovering the corpse. In the eyes of the law, he should be calling 911 right now. His phone was on the nightstand next to his bed. He thought about going back to the bedroom to retrieve it, but his feet didn’t seem inclined to turn in that direction, at least not yet.
The big reason for his hesitation was the issue of culpability. If he summoned the police, they would inspect the scene and ask many of the questions he’d asked himself. He had a sick feeling he would immediately be pegged as the prime suspect in the woman’s death, because who else could have done it?
Though every instinct he had rebelled against the idea, he moved a few steps closer to the dead woman, almost close enough to reach out and touch her, though he refrained from doing that. Up close, those marks were even uglier. The killer’s grip had crushed her throat. Pete leaned in closer still, tilting his head side to side to examine the marks. He saw what looked to him like thumbnail indentations on the underside of her chin. Pete, of course, had no real forensic expertise, but it looked to him as if the killer had strangled the woman with his bare hands. This was good news. Despite the tragic element of the situation, he couldn’t help smiling. It seemed likely some of the killer’s DNA was embedded in the woman’s skin. The police might initially suspect him, but ultimately the physical evidence would absolve him of involvement in the crime. The rest of it might remain inexplicable for some time to come, but the thing about DNA was that it didn’t lie. He was fortunate he’d thus far refrained from touching the woman and thereby leaving traces of his own DNA on her body. At that point, his smile began to slip as he thought about the way he was leaning over her. He then thought about true crime and cop shows he’d seen, in particular the ones in which people were convicted of heinous murders on the basis of a single stray strand of hair recovered from the scene. A strand of his own hair might already have fallen on this woman.
Pete let out a yelp of alarm and jumped back. He bumped into the coffee table, causing it to skid backward. And that was when he saw it—the item that had been hidden beneath the table.
A woman’s black handbag.
THREE
There was little doubt the expensive-looking handbag had belonged to the dead woman. Many months had passed since he’d last had a female guest in his home. The last one had been Mary Wilson, a girl from work he’d dated a handful of times. He’d been unsurprised when she decided she wasn’t interested and broke it off with him. Romantic failure was, after all, one of the big recurring themes in his life. By this point, he was certain he would never get married or have a chance to start a family. For the most part, he felt accepting of this fate. It was just his unfortunate lot in life. Things could be worse. He had his health. A roof over his head. A decent income. He’d liked Mary, though, and a little part of him still experienced pangs of regret when he thought about her, which was more frequently than he would have wished, given that he still saw her at work every day.
He approached the couch again and knelt in front of the handbag. There was zero chance the bag was something left behind by Mary. For one thing, he would have noticed it resting there beneath the coffee table at some point in the intervening months. For another, if Mary had left the bag here, she would have asked him to bring it to work and return it to her. There was also the fact that he’d pulled the table aside to sweep beneath it countless times since then. No, this bag had absolutely belonged to the corpse on his couch, which meant her wallet was likely inside it, unless the killer had taken it with him (or her, he immediately amended again, though he seriously doubted a woman had committed this brutal act). If the wallet hadn’t been taken, it almost certainly contained the murdered woman’s driver’s license and possibly numerous other identifying items.
Aside from the essential fact of the dead woman’s presence, perhaps the most frustrating thing about the situation for Pete was his lack of knowledge about … well, every goddamn aspect of it, pretty much. Answers to the bigger questions—the identity of the murderer, for instance, and the how and why of the victim being deposited on his couch—remained frustratingly out of reach. There was now, however, a good chance he could at least attach a name to the corpse. All he had to do was reach into the purse, extract the wallet, and examine its contents.
Except that he couldn’t. The reason was the same one that had nearly caused him to fall over the coffee table moments ago. By putting his hands all over a murdered woman’s belongings, he would thoroughly contaminate them with his DNA, thereby contributing to the evidence against him.
“Shit.”
Leaving the bag undisturbed, he got to his feet and began to restlessly pace about the small open part of the living room. He mumbled to himself and ran his hands through his hair—making an unruly mess of it—as he resumed the thus far fruitless attempt to reason out what had happened here. This process continued for another frustrating several minutes, until he again accepted the hopelessness of arriving at a solution with the evidence at hand. He didn’t have the skills for this. He wasn’t a cop or a private investigator. This was a job for professionals.
“Fuck it.”
He went into his bedroom to get his phone, which was right where he’d left it before going to sleep last night, at the edge of his nightstand near the base of the lamp. Snatching it up, he hurried back out to the living room, where he tapped the phone icon on the screen and prepared to punch in 9-1-1. He’d firmly made up his mind. Getting the police involved was scary, but it had to happen. He was in over his head. It was time to bite the bullet and take the hard first step of putting this nightmare behind him. He tapped the ‘9’ button and the number appeared at the top of the screen. His forefinger then immediately moved to the ‘1’ button … where it hesitated, hovering above the screen.
Pete frowned.
The hesitation was not another case of his nerves getting the better of him. It was instead rooted in something he’d glimpsed obliquely while in the bedroom, a little something off that hadn’t registered until just now. He hadn’t noticed it upon awakening and crawling out of bed, but he’d still been a bit groggy at the time, so that was understandable. He’d even missed it when searching for signs of a break-in. Now, however, he was fully awake, alert, not so focused on the doors and windows, and he’d still almost missed it.
Feeling almost numb with dread, he returned to the bedroom, moved to the side of the bed, and stared down. He swallowed with difficulty when he saw the thing he’d glimpsed moments ago. It was easy to see why he’d missed it. Not much of it was visible. Only a tiny bit of sheer black fabric peeked out from beneath the bedspread on the side of the bed opposite of where he always slept. Leaning over the bed, he pulled the bedspread back and groaned when he saw the rest of the flimsy, lacy garment. It was a tiny negligee. He could only surmise that it had belonged to the dead woman, but what was it doing in his bed? He’d gone to bed alone last night. This was indisputable fact as far as he was concerned and something already covered in his mental review of the previous evening, which had been nothing more than a quiet and unremarkable night alone at home. There were no holes in his memory of the evening, at least that portion of it for which he had been awake.
He could onl
y conclude someone had come into his room and slipped the little scrap of sheer fabric underneath his bedspread without waking him, a person who could only have been the dead woman’s killer. It seemed like such a bizarre and pointless thing to do, every bit as inexplicable as the presence of the corpse in his living room. He couldn’t understand why a murderer would dispose of a victim’s body in a random person’s home rather than in a more standard way, such as dumping it in a ravine or some other remote, rural location. Unless the killer was some kind of macabre prankster. Or unless …
Pete frowned.
Could this possibly be part of an orchestrated effort to frame him for the woman’s murder?
His first instinct was to scoff at the idea. He could think of no good reason anyone would do this terrible thing to him. He mulled it over a moment longer and frowned, realizing that might not be entirely accurate. An image of a stunned-looking Shane Watson being escorted out of the building yesterday came to him then. Pete didn’t know the details yet, but it was clear Watson had been abruptly terminated from his position with the company. He’d been unceremoniously given the boot, not just warned or put on probation, as was the usual way of things when the company had issues with an employee. Whatever the reason for his dismissal, it had to have been something serious. Criminal-level serious, possibly.
Pete could see that being the case. So what, though? If something like that was the reason for Watson’s firing, what did it have to do with him?
Not a damn thing, that’s what.
Then again, there was a chance his guess was way off the mark. Maybe Watson’s firing did have something to do with the man’s abusive treatment of him. Perhaps it had been a mere contributing factor rather than the primary reason. That seemed plausible. Pete had never reported the behavior, but maybe some well-meaning third party had done so on his behalf. In that case, Watson might still hold it against him if the issue had been brought up during that closed-door meeting. Pete then might have become a convenient target for his rage. Watson couldn’t strike back against Brinkley Solutions in any meaningful way, but he could lash out at a meek little former coworker.
A low whimper emerged through Pete’s tightly clenched teeth.
He thought about Shane Watson’s size. In particular, those big hands. The hands of a brute. The man was big and strong enough to have strangled the dead woman with his bare hands. His constant acts of aggression against Pete suggested he had the temperament to commit such an act.
There was a thread of real logic to all of this, the first hint of it he’d encountered since discovering the body in his living room. He had identified a possible motive and a suspect capable of perpetrating the act. Still eluding him was an answer to the question of how the man had gotten into his house without forcing his way in or tripping the alarm.
He was still desperately trying to figure that part of it out when he heard the strident knock on his front door.
FOUR
Pete yelped in surprise when he heard the knock. The shock of hearing the sound was exacerbated by the bizarre situation confronting him this morning, but he would have been startled by the intrusion even on a normal weekend morning. Unexpected knocks on his door were a rare thing. He had a large and aggressively worded sign warning off solicitors mounted inside the screen door. It had proven quite effective over the years. On extremely rare occasions, especially dense and oblivious people ignored the sign and knocked, but this was the first time it had happened in almost a year.
The knock came again, louder and more strident this time.
Pete sat on the edge of his bed, deciding he would wait right there until the unknown caller gave up and went away. It would happen sooner or later, unless the person knocking was a thief checking for unoccupied homes. The knocking might be a precursor to kicking the door open and making a quick snatch and grab of something valuable before the police could arrive. Thinking about it made him smile. If that happened, the intruder would get a hell of a shock shortly after bursting inside. He pictured the thief screaming at the sight of the dead body and running out of the house without any loot.
He was chuckling at this image when he heard a faint voice calling out to him from the porch. The smile froze on his face, slowly giving way to a frown. There were a couple of strange things about what he was hearing. Though the sound was faint, he could tell the person on his porch was a woman. He hadn’t had a female visitor since his last date with Mary Wilson, many months ago. The second strange thing was that whoever it was knew his name.
The knocking and yelling got louder. The deep state of agitation evident in the woman’s voice was worrisome. She was making enough noise to attract attention from neighbors. Maybe enough to prompt one of them to pick up a phone and call the police. And having the cops show up at this stage of things was the last thing he wanted. It had taken this unexpected intrusion for him to fully realize this. He didn’t want to talk to the police about this until he was calmer and had rehearsed a speech designed to highlight the impossibility of him having anything to do with the woman’s death. And maybe not even then, because a new idea was occurring to him, one that was questionable from a moral standpoint and absolutely a thing that would cause the cops to view him in a decidedly less than favorable light.
If they found out about it, that is.
The presence of the body in his house was the big issue. The simplest way out of the current dilemma was obvious. All he had to do was remove the body from the premises. Problem solved. Many troubling questions would remain, of course, but in his pantry was a box of big black trash bags. He could wrap the corpse up in some of those, wait until nightfall, and, when he was as sure as he could be that no one was watching, carry her out to his car, stash her in the trunk, and drive out of the city to some remote rural location to dump her. In a way, it would be a shitty thing to do. She had been a human being. A person with real feelings and hopes and dreams, with loved ones who cared about her. Dumping her somewhere like a load of trash would be a reprehensible gesture of disrespect for her basic humanity and the person she had been. This was undeniably true and Pete hated that aspect of it, but there was a powerful allure in the possibility of a relatively clean solution to his problem. Yes, she had been a human being. It sucked that someone had killed her. Pete hadn’t known her, though, and all she was to him was a pile of highly inconvenient dead meat.
A tentative feeling of relief came over him at knowing he’d settled on a course of action. He felt lighter now, as if a burden had been removed. To a degree, it was an illusory feeling. The problem was still very much with him and would be until he was rid of the corpse many hours from now, but he embraced the feeling anyway. His plan was one of avoidance. It meant he wouldn’t have to face the cops and their questions. Knowing this added to his sense of relief.
Meanwhile, the banging on his door had only intensified.
“Dammit.”
Pete got up and walked out of the bedroom. Once he was out in the living room, he could hear the woman’s voice more clearly. It sounded familiar. She was still repeatedly calling out his name. He frowned as he tentatively approached the door, where he lifted one of the blind slats covering the window and peeked out at the woman on the porch. His frown deepened when he saw who she was. He couldn’t imagine why Mary Wilson had decided to pay him an unannounced visit after so many months. She had made her lack of interest in him quite clear after that last date. Though their subsequent interactions at work had been civil enough, there was always an underlying chill in her voice every time she was forced to converse with him. There had never been the slightest doubt in his mind that she was out of his life permanently on a non-professional level.
And yet here she was.
As puzzling as this was, her demeanor was an even bigger mystery. He had never seen her so visibly upset about anything. She was always calm. Even when she’d cut things off with him, she’d done so in a nearly emotionless way. Well, she was anything but calm and emotionless now. Seeing the obv
ious strain in her expression was almost like looking into the face of a stranger.
She stopped yelling and banging on the door the instant he peeked out at her. Though he’d been careful to lift the blind slat only a tiny fraction of an inch, he knew it’d been enough to make his presence known, a guess confirmed by her next words.
She sighed heavily and spoke in a calmer tone, although still loudly enough to be heard through the door. “I can see you looking out at me, Pete. Please open the door so we can talk. It’s important.”
Pete glanced over at the dead woman before replying. Peeking through the blind slat again, he cleared his throat and raised his voice. “Just a minute. I, uh … just woke up. Let me put on some clothes.”
The look on her face was not a happy one. “Hurry, please. Trust me, you need to know about this. You might be in danger.”
Pete frowned. “In danger? From who? Or what?”