by Adira August
Hunter had his notebook on the table, but he took no notes. He wanted her to know he was taking her seriously, but he wouldn’t put anything in his notebook that could be subpoenaed by a defense lawyer who would make her sound unstable.
“You think I’m delusional.”
He shook his head. “I think the universe is full of things we don’t understand. I’m sorry, but I do need to search the house. The bodies were moved from somewhere else. I need to know and be able to demonstrate that there’s no evidence of them in the house.”
He shut the notebook and placed his hand near hers on the table, but did not touch her. “Mrs. Farleigh, there are indications they were killed far from your property. It might be an ordinary human monster we’re dealing with, who used the empty cider shed to hide them.”
“Really?” Hope softened her features.
“Really,” he assured her. He took the prepared permission to search form from his pocket, placed it in front of her and put a pen on top.
She signed it quickly, shoving it back at him. “Do what you need to. But don’t come back. I don’t want to know.”
THE CEO WAS a surprisingly small woman with perfectly-coiffed silver hair that surfed around her skull like a spun sugar whirlpool. Except she wasn’t a CEO. Mrs. Osment was a program director. The program was a drug trial the medical school attached to her much-venerated Ivy League university was conducting.
Avia had not choppered across the Sound to Mrs. Osment, but had her flown to Martha’s Vineyard, instead. The day was brilliant, the maples and oaks around Cyrano’s, a sprawling shingle-style restaurant, tinged with red. Delores had specified a corner table on the second floor when she made the reservation.
On the plane, Avia had wondered aloud how Delores would even know to make such a singular request.
“I told her to,” Ben mused, looking over some documents he needed before his meeting. “I’m only sorry I didn’t get to take you to Cyrano’s first. Try the lobster mac and cheese.”
“Mac and cheese will impress her the women I want to break protocol for me?”
Ben had given her a smug look and gone back to his report.
The table Ben recommended gave the women a panoramic view of the white-capped Atlantic and the Manhattan skyline.
Being Benedict Hart, billionaire of exquisitely good taste, he was right about the lobster mac ‘n cheese. It was the perfect meal on a breezy October day.
Once she’d taken a bite, Osment failed entirely to remain the professional fundraiser intending to stroke Avia into writing a large check. She rolled her eyes and waxed poetic over the divinity of the dish. Soon they were chatting away about the phase two trial.
“So, this ‘prodromal phase’ idea means a person who doesn’t seem to have symptoms, probably does?” Avia asked.
“These are subtle indicators. Things that separately seem like normal ‘hitches’ in daily life. One day you have to concentrate harder to do the same task, for instance. Most of us would just think we were tired or distracted. Being distracted can be a symptom. Developing a minor physical tic. It’s the suite of symptoms that indicate HD isn’t something you suddenly get when you develop an obvious spasm in your hand.”
In your hand. “So that would actually be an advanced kind of thing, not an early thing?” Avia asked.
“Exactly!” Osment’s eyes twinkled with pleasure at Avia’s quick grasp of the concept.
But Avia lost her appetite. She fished out her notebook. “So, development of the disease is a long process related to these ‘huntingtin proteins’ if I have that right?”
Osment took a quick glance at Avia’s notes. “Yes, that’s it. Spelled like the name of the gene. The huntingtin proteins build up over a lifetime, is the working hypothesis. Patients often simplify their lives not knowing exactly why they are doing so, exchange a high-stress job for one less demanding, for instance.”
Or stop competing at the highest levels of sport to sit in front of a computer. Avia decided to jump right to the point.
“Tell me what you need.”
“Phase two of our mHTT reduction trial is not placebo-controlled. At this point we are continuing with the smaller phase one group. But we want to add a second much larger group of younger patients we can track in terms of the premanifest and prodromal stages.”
“They’d still get the drug? And that’s not placebo-controlled, either?”
“Correct. We’ll follow them for a lifetime, tracking the effectiveness of the treatment against the onset of symptoms.”
Avia took a slow breath. This was the big question. ”Is it possible after the treatment, these people might never have advanced HD? I mean no chorea? They’ll die from something else?”
“We don’t know.” Osment gave Avia a look full of sympathy. “We’ll follow them. If the huntingtin protein builds up again, we’ll repeat the treatment. That’s our intention, not a guarantee. It depends on the outcome of the clinical trial in terms of efficacy and side effects.”
“What do you need?” Avia repeated.
“To find participants. Train and pay practitioners across the country to administer the protocol locally.”
Avia gave her a hard look. “You’re not answering my question.”
“One-and-a-half million dollars,” Osment said promptly. Reading a major donor’s readiness to give was her most valuable skill. “In addition to what we already have.”
Screw subtlety. Avia took the envelope from her bag and placed it in front of Osment. Then she took out a check and her pen. She pointed at the envelope. “Patient’s name and his doctor’s contact information. He gets in. No placebos. No mention of how you found him. Absolute discretion.”
Osment nodded.
Avia wrote the check.
“THAT WOMAN NEEDS therapy,” Twee said when they were back in Hunter’s Bronco.
“I imagine she’s had some,” Hunt told her. “She found her father’s body in the kitchen of that farmhouse when she was four years old.”
“Sweet Jesus. And someone killed her mother, too?”
He took an entrance ramp to I-25. “She also found her mother’s body. Twenty years later. Also on the kitchen floor with the doors and windows of the farmhouse locked from the inside.”
Carol Twee shuddered. “You read the reports?”
“Skimmed them this morning. I’ll go over them more thoroughly later,” he said. “What you need to know for now is that police arrived within ten minutes after the discovery of the bodies both times. In neither case were they able to discover anyone in the house, any sign of anyone else in the house or any sign of forced entry.”
“We’re trying to solve those murders, too?”
“You asked last night how whoever messed up the accessway knew. There’s no clear view of where we were from any structure except the farmhouse. Do you think we were being spied on by someone hiding on the porch peeking around the corner?”
“No way,” she answered. “It would put them in plain view of anyone driving by on the street in front of the house.”
“Can you think of a vantage point other than the house itself, from which we could be observed? And overheard?”
Carol Twee shuddered. “Overheard?”
“We were on the wraparound porch when you said we should do the collection of the oil last night with flashlights.”
Can’t be,” she said. “We both saw the condition of the door and windows. No one can jutht stay in a house for years.”
He noted her lisp. A single slip, but he knew it was a stress sign. “You have another explanation?”
She thought, but had no answer.
He took the exit for the Hortt Orchard neighborhood. “We haven’t eliminated all the possibilities. We didn’t enter the utility porch or examine the kitchen door. I’m good at my job, Twee, and so are you. We’ll figure this out.”
“LIEUTENANT!” CAL DERRICKSEN CALLED, getting out of the driver’s side of the construction truck Hunt parked behind.
Cal Deericksen was a very short man who did a very big job as a construction site manager specializing in high rise buildings. Hunter knew he’d been involved with Merisi for several years. Though they didn’t live together, they seemed very committed.
But Hunter suspected for Mike it was more “close friends with benefits,” while Cal was definitely besotted with the young detective.
“Call me Hunt, Cal. We’ve been over this,” Hunter told him. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you taking the time. I know how busy you are.”
“Not today. Or tomorrow,” he grinned. “So, I’m glad to get out and do something fun. Catch!”
He slid the ladder down for Hunt to ease to the ground as if it was a six-foot step ladder instead of a 100-pound piece of construction equipment. Hunter managed to get it to the ground without dropping it. Cal grabbed a stabilizer from a long aluminum tool box welded to the floor of the truck.
“I was over by house before you came. You want to inspect the gable vents, right?”
“Yeah. I’m looking for a way in or out other than doors or windows.”
Cal cocked his head. “This is about small children?”
“I’m not really sure, why?”
Twee had quietly joined them. She and Cal smiled a greeting. They’d met a few times visiting Merisi in the hospital last spring.
Cal strapped on a toolbelt that looked like it came from a kid’s Construction Man Halloween costume kit on his small frame.
“Lieutenant?” Twee motioned Hunter aside. “If you’re going to be tied up on ladders and roofs, I’m going to look for the oil evidence. He messed it up, but the pieces are still there.”
“Isn’t that like looking for a needle in a needle factory? They aren’t on the surface, anymore.”
“Some might be,” she said. “Hydrocarbons fluoresce under ultraviolet. It looked stirred, which means it’s not packed down anymore. Some of those spots should be visible. We won’t have the pattern, but we could get enough to match the oil from the victim’s car. We get the car today, right?”
“Yeah. Okay, good.” He looked around. “I can call a uniform to help.”
“I’m better on my own,” she told him.
Hunter watched her walk back to the Bronco for her equipment. Cal had been busying himself with the ladder while Hunter talked to Twee. Now, he tossed Hunt a pair of work gloves. “Grab an end?”
They carried the extension ladder across the lawn. “Why did you assume we were thinking about children?” Hunter asked.
Cal glanced back. “You seem to believe an adult could get in and out through the vent space. I’ll measure when I get up there, but they look maybe ten-by-twelve.”
“Inches?”
Cal laughed. “Inches.”
They set up the ladder so it reached to about a foot under the vent. “Stay here. If you want to climb a thirty-foot ladder, you don’t wear cowboy boots.” Cal climbed quickly with as much concern as a kid mounting their elementary school stairway.
“Hiking boots?” Hunt called up.
“If you got ‘em.”
Hunter ran to the Bronco. His hikers were in a box along with a few tools he’d found handy at crime scenes and campsites. He quickly switched footwear and trotted back to the ladder.
Climbing up, Hunt found Cal standing on the second story roof. A rectangular gable vent was tucked under the peak. Using a measuring tape, Cal dictated notes into a recorder clipped to his shirtfront. “Six and one-half inches, height. Fourteen and one-half inches, width. Stay on the ladder, detective.”
That last was not a request. Derricksen might have to stand on tiptoe to be five foot five, but this was his domain. Hunter stopped at the top of the ladder.
“Watch.” Cal stood to the side and worked an angled metal pry tool under the edge of the vent cover. Flakes of paint spilled down. Hunter heard a distinct crack.
Cal dropped into a squat. “Look.” He pointed at the roof he perched on, where it met the attic gable under the vent.
Hunter looked. A bird dropping. Otherwise the old gray shingles were clean except for a few twigs and a tiny spill of just-deposited paint dust.
Cal tapped the frame of the vent cover. “I can’t swear to it, but I’d bet my own money this thing is fifty years old. Could be more. The screw heads have so many layers of paint they’re just irregularities on the surface.”
“So no way it’s been opened.”
“Not that I can see,” Cal agreed. “But even if you remove it, the opening will only be seven by fifteen. Inches. About the same as a sheet of legal-sized notebook paper.”
“So, something a six-year-old might wriggle through.”
“If he’s naked and not too chubby.”
Hunter used his cell to get video and images.
They moved the ladder to the opposite side of the house. The vent was the same size. But the paint was peeling and cracked, the shingles freckled with paint chips.
“That doesn’t look as impenetrable,” Hunter told him from his perch on the ladder.
“It’s just surface weathering.” Cal checked the compass app on his phone. “Northwest facing. Lot’s of afternoon high altitude sun, lots of high wind and the odd blizzard.”
He poked around, using the tip of a pocket knife to test the wood frame for solidity.
“What?” Hunter asked when Cal paused, looking puzzled.
“Somebody knew what they were doing. I’d expect ice dams and wood rot. My guess is this roof was added when they installed the furnace. Probably along with that utility porch, but after the kitchen.”
“The kitchen’s not original?”
“Oh no. Probably had a very shallow foundation. They used to have to dig out a hole to make a place for the furnace. Put a new modern kitchen on top. Run a gas line up to the fancy new stove.” He leaned back against the gable next to the vent. “These people spent some more money and had a basement dug out. A half-basement, anyway.”
Hunter was impressed that Cal had taken the time to inspect the house when he’d arrived.
Cal shook his head, coming away from the gable. “Odd.”
“What?”
“You caught the smell near the house?”
Hunter nodded. “Figured a sewer line breach by tree roots.”
“Possible. But you said this place has been empty for twenty years. So where’s the sewage coming from that’s making the smell so strong and why does it smell by this vent?” Cal motioned Hunter to join him.
Hunter mounted the roof. He leaned close to the vent and sniffed. A cold prickling raced over his body.
Somebody was on the other side of the vent.
He straightened and placed a hand on Cal’s shoulder, raising an index finger to his lips in a “quiet” signal.
Cal’s eyes got big. He darted a glance at the vent and slowly nodded his understanding.
“The house is over a hundred years old,” Hunter said. “Probably find a lot of strange stuff what with one renovation after another. Could be a leftover stove pipe carries the smell up here.”
Hunter was adept at lying under pressure. Cal opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He coughed into his hand.
“Sorry, mold sensitive.”
“Yeah, fall is the worst,” Hunter agreed. “So, you don’t think this one has been opened, either?”
Cal swallowed hard. “No. Ah—it’s solid.”
Hunter smiled encouragement. “Could you do me a favor, then, and go on down? Maybe hang out so you can see my car? I left it open for the technician and I don’t want kids swiping my stuff. I just have to get a couple pictures.”
Cal would normally not leave the cop alone to negotiate the ladder. It was ingrained in him to treat all “civilians” as if they had nerve damage and suicidal tendencies. But his heart was racing and he was afraid every word he forced
out made Hunter’s suspicions obvious.
“Sure.”
On the ground, Cal backed up until he did have a view of his truck and the Bronco. And as he waited there on the neat lawn under the brilliant deep blue sky in the bright sunlight, he realized he was afraid. Cal Derricksen casually trod the steel skeletons of buildings twenty stories high. But now he trembled slightly in the face of shaded windows staring out from the murky recesses of the covered porch.
Anyone could be watching him.
Hunter was taking his time. That was smart, doing as he’d done on the other side. Being professionally thorough. Cal dropped to one knee and retied his boot. It kept him from screaming at the cop to hurry.
Finally Hunter came down. They carried the ladder back to the truck and secured it. Cal climbed in behind the wheel and Hunt closed the door behind him.
“How did you know?” Cal asked through the open window. “I didn’t hear anything.”
“The smell. There was sewage but there was something else, too. Something just as strong. Body odor.”
Cal clamped a hand over his mouth. Hunter yanked the door open as the little man leaned out and retched. But it remained dry heaving and he soon collapsed back in his seat, arms flung across his eyes. “God, I’m such a weenie.”
“No, you’re not,” Hunter said, closing the door. “Look, maybe go get a soda to settle your stomach. Merisi will be here soon. You can come back, say hello.”
“Thanks, but no.” Cal started the engine. “I’m going to be worried enough without actually seeing him here about to go inside that.” He tilted a head toward the house. “Don’t tell him I know. Best he keeps his head in the game.”
CAROL TWEE PULLED off her dark glasses and pocketed the ultraviolet flashlight. She’d already found six examples of the oil deposit. And now, she’d found something that made the oil irrelevant.
What irritated her was that her first thought had been how much it would please Hunter Dane. What irritated her more, was her own inexplicable anger at him for being who he was. Who everyone knew he was. Hunter Fucking Dane. Robot. Iceman. Android.