Where the dead lay

THIRTY

Behr felt like he was walking on a dirt cloud as he moved across the hardpan lot toward the house on Traub. It was a location that hadn’t previously been mentioned in Ratay’s stories, nor was it on the Caro list. Thick humid air ringed halos around the few working streetlamps in the vicinity, diffusing their glow. Besides that, the house and those immediately around it were dark. When he reached the structure, he saw the windows remained intact. It wasn’t vacant, as Austin thought, or somehow the scavengers had steered clear of the place so far, the way hyenas avoided the carcass of an animal that had died of disease. Behr pulled out his Mini Maglite and turned it on as he reached the house. There was a marshal’s sticker on the front door warning that seizure proceedings would be conducted within the next thirty days. He shined the flashlight into the windows and saw a front room that was empty save for a couch, a couple of chairs, and a table. He knocked on the door and waited, but was greeted only by silence. Behr stepped down off the porch and continued around the house in a loop, peeping in the windows where they were low enough and where there weren’t curtains pulled shut, as was the case with the back bedroom.

Behr knocked on the back door and waited again, but once more got no answer. Finally, he arrived at the front and climbed back up on the porch. He knocked a last time, waited, and tried the doorknob, which was locked solid. Then it was back to the car for his lock-pick kit. He chose the rear door for obvious reasons of cover, although the street, and much of the neighborhood beyond it, seemed deserted. He paused when he saw that the lock was a Primus high-security double-cylinder dead bolt.

He was familiar with the lock, having tried them before to mixed results. They featured reinforced trim rings and a tapered housing to protect against wrenching the cylinder. The keys came with side milling that prevented bumping, and the series offered an integrated anti-pry shield that hindered picking. He went to work anyway and stayed at it for a good ten minutes, the Mini Mag clenched in his teeth until his mouth ached. He paused only to rest his jaw and wipe the sweat from his face. The first lock- the latch bolt in the knob-had yielded, but he was having more trouble on the dead bolt above it, which looked newly installed. The door was seated so firmly that he wondered if a wedge of some kind had been employed, or if the door had otherwise been sealed shut from the inside. He considered his options for a moment, glancing at the nearby window. Nothing said “call the cops” like the sound of breaking glass, even when the neighbors were uninterested, so Behr crossed that option off his list before returning to his car again, zipping up his kit as he went. This time he returned with a less sophisticated burglary tool-a short steel crowbar-and with it he went to town on the doorjamb. He chiseled away above the doorknob, wedging the sharp claw end of the crow between the door and frame, jacking it forward and back until the wood cracked under the assault. Paint and wood chips began to fall at his feet. Before long the door began to loosen in its mooring. He wiggled it, using the knob, and then went back to chipping. Bit by bit he cleared a space until he could see the smooth metal bolt that had been securing the door and giving him so much trouble. A power saw could cut through it in seconds, but that would make a window break seem subtle, so he began chipping away at the wood that held the metal housing that received the bolt. This was harder work, and the crowbar spun repeatedly in his hands, causing blistering across his palms. But the wood succumbed to the crowbar’s teeth, and finally, the door was shaking freely in its frame, the bolt now wobbly with an inch or two of travel. Behr dropped the crowbar, stepped back, and kicked the door. Big black foot scuffs from the soles of his trail shoes appeared on the surface, and he was sure the sound that resulted woke the neighbors all the way to Gary, but the door finally swung open.

Behr stood sweating for a moment in the newborn silence. He glanced around and saw no lights go on nearby. He snapped on a pair of latex gloves, picked up the crowbar, and entered the darkened house. He’d been in so many one-floor bungalows of this type in and around the city he felt he could diagram it blind. He made his way down a narrow hallway past two closed doors. The air inside was hot and close, and there was a smell of decay in the air that told him a rat had died under the floorboards. He made his way into a sparsely furnished front room. He knew there would be a small kitchen off to one side or another and the bathroom opposite it. He tried the lights, but found the utilities had been cut off. He swept the corners of room with the small beam of his light and saw a chair overturned. There was an unplugged flat-screen television, its viewing surface shattered, set off to the side of the room. He saw a few plastic balls with numbers on them that had rolled against a baseboard that told him the place was indeed once a pea shake, as Austin had said. He kneeled to inspect what he was pretty sure was a bullet hole in the floor from a small-caliber weapon. As he got close to it, he took out his Leatherman tool and peeled a short knife blade from it in order to pry the bullet or fragment free. But then he saw the fresh knife marks around the original hole. Someone had beaten him to it. He leaned his face down close but couldn’t find any blood. He stood, and from that moment stepped more lightly and made sure not to touch anything, because he knew he was at a crime scene.

He made a cursory sweep of the small empty kitchen and bathroom, and then, his heart hammering, made his way down the hallway toward the bedrooms. He gripped the doorknob of the first one gingerly and turned it, pushing the door open. That’s when the smell hit him. There was no rat under the floorboards. It was a body. A smallish man was stretched out on a bare, blood-soaked mattress, his head nearly severed from a gaping slash along his throat. Behr stepped closer, using the inadequate stripe that his Maglite produced to inspect the body. The blood on the mattress was dry, and he could tell from the desiccated condition of the body that it had been there for many days, and that the smell, as bad as it was, had already peaked and had actually begun to diminish.

He moved to the body and carefully felt around in the pants pockets enough to know that any wallet or identifying documents had been taken. There was nothing under the bed save for some blood spots, where it had seeped through the mattress before drying down. He checked the small closet, which was barren, besides a few T-shirts and a fleece-lined denim jacket.

Behr steeled himself and went back to the body. The head was thrown back, teeth bared and eyes clenched in an aspect that connoted great suffering. The throat had been chopped out by a beef knife, a machete, or some other heavy-bladed instrument. Whether or not one blow had been sufficient to cause death, the killer hadn’t stopped there. It looked to Behr as if a half a dozen strikes had rained down on the man. He noted there were no defensive wounds on the hands or arms, which suggested that others had held the man down. The body had been through the swelling and the draining process and now lay on top of the dried, foul remnants of that natural progression.

Behr stepped back and then made his way out of the room toward the next bedroom when he thought of Pomeroy’s instructions and realized he needed a way to steer clear of what he had discovered. He couldn’t call it in. It would lead to dozens of questions about his involvement and how he had come to be there, and even one question was going to be too many. He considered an anonymous call but couldn’t do that from his cell phone because it would be traceable, and he didn’t trust it from a pay phone either, even if he could find one that worked. He was at the door to the next bedroom when an idea came to him. But first he turned the knob and pushed. The door stopped with a slight, soft bump. Something was behind it. He pushed a bit harder and the object yielded, sliding across the smooth wood floor. He stepped into the room, which was set up as a makeshift office, with a desk and chair and ancient built-in cabinetry, one door of which was open. He trained his flashlight on the object at his feet.

“Oh no,” he said aloud.

Behr stood across the street a decent distance away, among a group of residents, far-flung neighbors, drawn by the sirens, who had gathered in the coming morning light to watch. A pair of patrol cars had been the second to arrive, with sirens and lights. Homicide had been next. Then Violent Crime. Then some brass, and a team from Coroner’s. He watched them go in. The windows became illuminated by utility lights that were switched on inside, and that light was peppered by lightning storms of camera flashes. And then he saw something he couldn’t remember witnessing more than two or three times in the entirety of his career: when the crime scene teams exited the house, almost to a man, they were crying. He was too far away to see the tears, but there was no mistaking it. Eyes were wiped with the backs of hands, the shoulders of fellow officers were clapped, and arms were squeezed as the group tried to collect its strength and buoy one another in the face of what they were dealing with.

Before long the first gurney was carried out, bearing a zippered black body bag. Then, after a pause, the second stretcher came out. This one held a black body bag as well, but it was only half filled by the small figure inside it. A gasp rippled through the crowd and Behr felt dread and sorrow anew at the sight of it, just as he had inside the room. It was an image that would never leave him, seared as it was into the backs of his eyeballs. The body of a boy, two or three years old, dead of dehydration, curled at the base of the door. He was too small even to reach the doorknob.

The murdered man could have been the boy’s father, or an uncle, or maybe there was no relation, and Behr deduced that the boy had been left behind undiscovered after the killing. Or perhaps he had been discovered and left behind anyway. The bile had risen in the back of his throat when he’d seen the figure lying there, when he’d touched the boy’s papery skin checking for a pulse that was long gone. He didn’t know whether he’d been hours, days, or a week too late, he just knew he hadn’t found his way to the house in time, and that the thought of his failure would never leave him.

The stretchers were loaded into a coroner’s van, which drove away. There was more flash photography inside the house, and the group on the street started to disassemble. Behr turned his gaze from the house and found Neil Ratay, the black circles under his eyes behind his glowing cigarette tip visible in the coming dawn. The reporter, not the police, had been whom Behr had called, and the first to arrive on the scene.

“What’s happening?” Ratay had said when he had reached the dark, quiet street.

“You’re working the pea-shake stories. I need you to do something for me, and you’ll get something for it,” Behr said. Then he had told him to call in the bodies to a police contact he could trust, to request the units and the teams, but to have it done by cell phone, to keep it off department radios and thus off the police scanners that would have brought every news organ in town into it. Behr told Ratay to claim he’d been tipped to the scene by a source he couldn’t name and that he’d found the door open. And then he let the reporter into the house for his look.

“I don’t know what to tell you to prepare you for it-,” Behr began.

“Don’t,” Ratay said, and plunged in through the now unlocked front door with Behr’s flashlight. He exited moments later, pale and unsteady, just before the first units arrived. He had lit his first cigarette with trembling hands and hadn’t stopped smoking since. They hadn’t spoken a word to each other during all the police activity, mainly because Behr had fallen back away from him so they wouldn’t be seen together, but also because there was nothing to be said.

Now, preparing to leave, Behr approached.

“I guess ‘thanks’ isn’t the word, but-,” Ratay started.

“Yeah,” Behr said, “same to you.”

Then Behr saw a silver Crown Vic roll onto the set. A familiar figure got out. Captain Pomeroy crossed to an officer Behr didn’t recognize, and they exchanged a few words. Pomeroy moved to the edge of the activity and took out his cell phone. Behr was wondering if he had even been seen. Then his phone rang.

“Yeah,” Behr answered.

“I tell you to keep shit quiet, and this is what you bring me?” Pomeroy’s voice came through the phone. Behr moved away from Ratay.

“I couldn’t call it in,” Behr said. “You said ‘no contact.’ It was the best I could do.”

“A goddamned reporter?” Pomeroy said.

“Yeah, one-and one the department’s already in business with. One you can trust. That was the trade-off so you wouldn’t end up watching it on TV.”

“You know what it’s gonna cost me to buy time on this?”

The truth was, after seeing what he had in that house, Behr didn’t care all that much.

“What else do you have for me? You must have something else,” Pomeroy demanded.

“Not yet,” Behr said. He knew Pomeroy was looking for something solid, not some weak theories and rumors about a family.

“Are you jaking it on this, Behr?” Pomeroy barked.

“Does it look like I’m jaking it?” Behr barked back. They were almost to the point where the cell phones were unnecessary.

“Then find me these fucks before they act,” Pomeroy hissed, backing down the volume.

They stood there, Behr and Pomeroy, the gulf of the street between them, cell phones pressed to their ears. Before Behr could think of anything else to say, Pomeroy hung up, pocketed his phone, and entered the house with angry strides.

“What the hell was that?” Ratay asked when Behr rejoined him.

“Nothing,” Behr said. He changed gears. “So your contact asked you to hold the story?”

“He did. And I will. Not as long as they want me to, but for a minute or two anyway. There’ll be a giveback too, of course.”

“Right.”

“Not to mention the giveback to you for putting me in this,” Ratay went on.

“File it,” Behr said, “no sweat on that.”

“You want to tell me what you’re working that got you here?” Ratay asked.

“I would, Neil, but I can’t.”

“I figured,” the reporter said, and looked at him with eyes that seemed to bore right through him. Behr felt like the man knew the whole deal, and in a sense he did. He may not have had the specifics, but he certainly knew that these things generally concerned the same type of players-morally bankrupt animals- who were after similar ends-monetary gain, and some way to fill the empty pits of their souls.

They stood there for a moment, then Ratay spoke. “Hey, Frank, not that it’s any of my business…”-Behr knew what was coming-“but is everything all right with you and Susan? She seems like she’s walking around under a rain cloud.”

“I don’t know, man,” Behr said, feeling unable to hide the truth at the moment, “we’re in different places on the track. That’s become clear lately.”

Ratay nodded his understanding.

“She’s great,” Behr continued.

“She is, indeed.”

“I just… don’t know if it’s the right thing for everyone right now.”

Ratay sighed out a mouthful of cigarette smoke, dropped the butt, and toed it into the ground. “Well, don’t be too quick to write it off, you’ve still got some life left in you.”

Behr gave a grim nod. “Less every day,” he said. Should he go on and tell Ratay what he really thought? That it was a shit world, lousy with fear and not knowing and death, full of people in a constant state of panic and desolation, the more they learned the more the truth swam away, and that was why so many of them turned to God, even though He didn’t do much back for them. None of it would be new to Ratay, and Behr didn’t imagine Ratay would want that for Susan, especially if he knew her current condition.

The reporter didn’t argue with him, and instead seemed to be arguing with himself over his pack of Camels and whether he should light another. Then a man in a suit with a gold badge hanging around his neck stepped out of the house. Ratay put away the cigarettes. “There’s my guy. Time for the horse-trading.”

He crossed the street and Behr went to his car.