“So this is the third day he’s MIA, but everything goes down with the trooper last night? If the nurse and the old man are connected with Kincaid’s homicide, then where was the old man for the two days prior to last night?”
Triston folded his notepad. “No idea.”
Susan looked back at the house. “Show me the evidence of a struggle.”
“Looks like it started in the bedroom. We have traces of blood that someone tried to wipe up. Still tacky, so pretty fresh. Come on.”
She stepped aside and followed Triston down the hall into the bedroom that was back past the kitchen.
“Dr. Trammel, the guy who runs the physical therapy, had his staff call some area hospitals thinking maybe Darville had an episode or something,” Triston said as they walked through the house. “But no one had a James Darville on their patient list. Trammel said he didn’t know what else to do, so he called 911 and asked if we’d come over to take a look. My guys gained access through the front door, which was unlocked. They saw that the place had been turned, and called it in. We didn’t even know it was connected to the trooper until the nurse’s name came over the wire.”
The bedroom was like the rest of the house, old and unkempt. The bed was large, the frame a thick dark oak that appeared to weigh a ton. There were no sheets or blankets on the mattress. An old gray armchair with a ripped seat was in the corner, with clothes draped over it. Dresser drawers had been left open, as had the closet. The items on top of and inside the nightstand were scattered about and toppled over.
“We contacted Rebecca Hill’s employer,” Triston continued. “A place called Traveling Healthcare of New York. They’re out of Mount Kisco. Woman there said she talked to Rebecca on Monday and that everything seemed fine.”
Susan walked around the perimeter of the bedroom. “What does the old man have to do with our trooper homicide?”
“That’s why you’re here.”
“The locks weren’t broken. Knobs are all intact. Hinges are good, and no windows are open or busted. You think she did this?”
“Makes sense,” Triston said. “And after tossing the place, maybe she found what she was looking for and took off with the old man in her car. Did Kincaid mention a passenger when he called in the 10-38?”
“No, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t one.”
He knelt down next to an old radiator that had been painted silver and pointed to a piece of flooring that had been removed. “This wasn’t put back exactly like it should’ve been, and it caught my eye.” He ran his fingers over the grooves that had been carved out. “Opens up to a pretty large storage area under the floor. I think whatever was in there was what Rebecca might’ve been looking for.” He lifted the panel of flooring to reveal a hole about a foot long, a foot and a half wide, and a foot deep.
Susan bent down next to the sergeant and shined her flashlight inside the hole. It was empty, dust balls in the corners.
Triston took Susan’s hand and aimed the beam at the bottom of the bed. “You see where the bed frame used to be?” he asked. “Where there’s no dust?”
“Yeah, I see.”
“I’m guessing there was a struggle in here. This bed is solid oak and really friggin’ heavy. Would take a lot to move it halfway across the room like that.”
“Then maybe she had help,” Susan replied. “From what I saw in the pictures at her apartment, Rebecca Hill is five feet tall and one hundred and ten pounds. No way she has an encounter with the old man that’s fierce enough to move this bed like that. She has a brother, though. He looked like he was in good shape.”
Triston moved her hand holding the flashlight from the bed to the opposite side of the nightstand, by the closet. “There’s the blood we found. You see the droplets there? Maybe half a dozen?”
“Yup.”
He stood up and walked to the closet, pulling the door away from the wall. “Got some more here that they tried to wipe up.”
The smear of blood on the wall was fairly sizable and ran down to the floor. Someone had attempted to clean it, but the walls were too dirty, and all it did was leave streaks of pink stain.
“So maybe Rebecca is already here with Darville, and her accomplice comes knocking and she opens the door to let him in. Maybe Darville falls asleep, and while he’s sleeping, Rebecca and whoever she’s with toss the house. But she can’t leave everything messy, so she does a half-ass job putting things back the way they were so the old man wouldn’t notice.”
Triston nodded. “That would lead you to believe the old man wasn’t part of the plan. If they were always planning to take him, they wouldn’t care about cleaning up.”
Susan walked to the wall and studied the blood. “Right. But they woke him up when they were pulling apart the floor. That’s when the struggle started. That’s when the plan fell apart.”
“Sounds plausible to me.”
“What was in the floor? What did they find that was worth taking the old man and killing a cop over?”
“Gotta be a bunch of cash, right? What else would you keep in a hidden compartment in the floor? Could’ve been enough cash in that hole to start a new life somewhere else. Who knows?”
Susan turned away from the wall, and the beam of her flashlight caught something in the corner, next to the bed. She walked over, bent down, and grabbed it. It was a small gold locket, half-rusted and beat up with time. She could faintly see the initials SG engraved on one side. She shined her light farther along the baseboard and under the radiator.
“Got more evidence of a struggle,” she said over her shoulder as she reached under the dusty radiator and pulled another object out. “Let’s get forensics in here to do their thing.”
“What’d you find?” Triston asked, watching her.
She turned the object over in her hand, studying it. “First I found a locket,” she said. “Then I found this tooth.”
6
Even before his vision had a chance to clear, the old man knew the ghosts were standing at the far end of the room. They were gray corpses, hand in hand, just inside the line of shadow near a small corridor that led to a set of hurricane doors. A boy and a girl. Tattered clothes, frail frames, overgrown and matted hair. Their skin was too damaged from the decades of decay to determine exactly how old they were, but they were young. He’d seen them before. He’d seen the others come too. As his vision sharpened, he locked in on their eyes. Fresh. Focused. Very much alive. It was too dark to make out the details of their faces, but he could feel them staring. At him. Through him. From across the room.
“Go away!” he barked. His throat was dry and sore. He coughed and bent over, covering his face until the hacking stopped and the spasms in his chest ceased. When he sat up, he could feel the pain in the back of his head. The boy and girl were gone. He was alone again.
“Hello?”
He waited for a few beats to see if they would return, but no one came. He let out a thin breath and relaxed, realizing just then that he was sitting in a wheelchair. Both of his legs were in braces, positioned up and out from the chair so he couldn’t bend his knees. He tried to recall where he was and how he’d ended up there, but nothing came except the increasingly familiar sensation of walking through a thick fog. He knew his name was James. And he knew he didn’t like being called Jim. He also knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he’d run out of detergent and would have to get another bottle before a new load of wash could be done.