Linwood Barclay - Too Close to Home

We came around the front of the house, where there was a patrol car in addition to Barry’s unmarked cruiser, an officer parked behind the wheel. Barry sidled over, talked to the cop through the open window, said we were all going in for a tour. Barry hardly had to ask the guy for permission, but he was being extremely polite today.

“Okay,” he said, leading the way to the front door. “Let’s go in.”

As we entered the house he said, “Don’t touch anything.” He held the door for us. “In fact, you might want to put your hands in your pockets just to be sure.”

We complied. Derek went in ahead of me, and once the three of us were just inside the door, we all stopped, like we were on some sort of historic house tour and Barry was our guide.

It didn’t take long for us to realize we weren’t on that kind of tour.

The carpet immediately in front of us, and at the base of the stairs, was nearly black with blood. And even though the bodies of the Langleys had been removed, the stench in the house took our breath away. A hand came out of my pocket and went instinctively to my mouth.

“Yeah, sorry about that,” Barry said as I slipped my hand back into my pocket.

I took a look at Derek to see how he was coping. Trying to breathe through his mouth, eyes darting around. I could make out his fists clenching in the front pockets of his jean shorts.

“Right here,” Barry said, pointing to the blood closest to us, “is where Albert Langley died, where his body was found. We think he went to the door, that one or more persons had knocked on it and he was shot very shortly after opening the door. And then over here,” he said, guiding us around the blood and over toward the stairs, “was where Donna Langley’s body was discovered.” There seemed as much blood there as by the front door. “She must have come downstairs when she heard the commotion, and that’s where it happened.”

“Dear God,” I said, and took another look at my son, who was stone-faced. Hesitantly, I said, “And Adam?”

“Down the end of the hall here, at the bottom of a half flight of stairs, by the back door.”

Before we could proceed any further into the house, Barry wanted us to slip on some booties in a bid not to contaminate the crime scene any further. He pulled three pairs of them from his pocket, and we all took a moment to get them on. This, of course, necessitated taking our hands out of our pockets, and Derek and I leaned against each other, taking turns, to slip them over our shoes. They were crinkly, a bit like paper, but much stronger.

Once that was done, Barry motioned for us to follow him along the hallway, which we both walked down as though we were tightrope walkers, hands back in our pockets, careful not to let our shoulders brush the walls. I noticed light-colored powder on many surfaces within the house. On doorknobs, stair railings, the corners of walls.

Barry, who’d been watching me, said, “Fingerprinting.”

“Of course,” I said.

To Derek he said, “We’ll be wanting to get a set of your prints.”

“Huh?” said Derek.

“Not to worry,” Barry said. “We already know you’ve been over. But if the killer, or killers, left any prints behind, we have to be able to weed out the ones that don’t matter.”

“Right,” said Derek.

We’d reached the end of the hall, where the steps came up from the back door. We looked down onto a third puddle of dried blood. I felt myself getting woozy.

“Derek,” Barry said, “have you noticed anything? Something that seems out of place? Something missing? Something that’s there that wasn’t there before?”

I’d been inside this house several times over the years, and to my eye everything looked in order, aside from the obvious signs. The place had not been ransacked. Cushions hadn’t been tossed. It didn’t look, for example, as though someone had been searching for drugs after murdering the occupants.

Unless, of course, they knew exactly where to look for whatever it was they’d come to get.

“I just. . I don’t notice anything,” Derek said.

“Let’s do a slow walk-through,” Barry said, directing us to turn around and head back down the hallway. “We’ll start in the kitchen.”

It was a relief to go in there. So long as you didn’t actually breathe, there wasn’t anything to tip you to what had transpired on the other side of the wall. Donna, who’d had more than her share of quirks, was also something of a neat freak, and the kitchen showed it. Nothing out of place, no dishes in the sink, everything in perfect order in the fridge, which Barry opened by pulling on the side of the door itself, and not the handle, which had also been dusted for fingerprints.

“Mrs. Langley was here, packing stuff for the trip,” Derek said. “She was feeling kind of woozy.”

“Right,” Barry said. “That’s what Langley’s secretary said was the reason they’d come back. The cooler with the food in it, some other groceries, they were all still in the SUV, they hadn’t had a chance to bring it back in yet before they were killed. So nothing here, nothing looks out of the ordinary?”

“No.”

“Okay, let’s head upstairs.”

Stepping over Donna Langley’s blood at the bottom of the stairs was like trying to straddle a puddle at the edge of a curb after a rainstorm. Thankfully, once we were up the carpeted stairs, there were no more blood pools.

“Again,” Barry said, “try not to touch anything.” We’d kept our hands in our pockets, except for when we navigated the blood and needed our arms to maintain our balance.

“Okay,” said Barry, easing himself into the first door on the left. “This is Adam’s room, but you probably already know that, right, Derek?”

Derek nodded.

“Just have a look, see if you notice anything out of place, out of the ordinary.”

I figured Barry Duckworth, who had kids of his own, realized the fact that this room looked as though it had been tossed was not necessarily evidence that some bad guy or bad guys had been here searching for something. It was a teenage boy’s room, and at a glance, it could have been Derek’s. There were heaps of clothes on the floor here and there, the bed was unmade, magazines about computers and skateboarding and girls littered the top of his desk. Posters adorned the walls, including one that was drawn in the style of a World War II recruiting ad, showing a smiling soldier holding up a mug of coffee and saying, “How about a cup of shut the fuck up?”

Also like Derek’s room, there were computer parts everywhere. Three monitors, half a dozen keyboards, countless wires and cables, boxes from computer games, an old-generation Nintendo system shoved under a desk, three computer towers.

Barry sighed. “I don’t know how you’d tell, exactly, whether something was missing from here, but what do you think?”

Derek studied the room from where he stood, didn’t say anything for about half a minute, then, “It looks fine.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah.”

Barry moved us back into the hall. The next room was a guest bedroom and looked as pristine as a hotel suite, not much to spot in there. We all poked our heads into the bathroom, and it looked as though Donna had left it ready should company drop by.

Well, somebody dropped by.

All that was left on this floor was the master bedroom. “I don’t know whether you’ve ever seen this room or not,” Barry said to Derek, “but go ahead and have a look.”

I was relieved he hadn’t said the same thing to me. I looked in over Derek’s shoulder, and the bedroom looked pretty much the same as it had the only other time I had seen it, except maybe for the fingerprint dust all over the dresser.