Colin Harrison - The Finder

Footsteps disappeared through the doorway, through the kitchen, and out the door. Ray heard a car start up and disappear.

Silence now.

He smelled blood.

Just wait another minute, he told himself. Be sure. Finally he pushed open the closet door and stumbled out to the floor, legs numb, pulling golf balls and shoes with him. On the bed lay Richie, his face a bloody mass-no nose, no cheeks, a hole that had been a mouth. His smooth chin had been driven into his windpipe, and in general the oblong spherical shape of the head had been flattened. Nearly every blow had hit Richie's face, cratering his skull. The few errant swings had glanced off the wet mass onto the pillow, leaving golf-club imprints. For the brief period that Richie's brain had continued to deliver information to the heart, the left ventricle had kept pumping blood up through the aorta and out the crushed face, leaving Richie's head in a pool that now faithfully followed every wrinkled depression in the bedspread, soaking downward as it went. After the heart stopped beating, lividity occurred-the seepage of fluids from the highest part of the body to the lowest, which meant in this case that blood and other fluids would continue to leak from Richie's ruined head for some time to come. Indeed, Richie's crushed forehead had now paled to a purplish white, the flesh drained. His popped eyeballs seeped blind tears of viscous matter.

Richie had never had a chance, his shirtless body still sprawled in the position of deep sleep, hands out, shoes off, his boxer shorts askew, belly soft, a tattooed lightning bolt adorning his hip bone. Next to him, the bedside table drawer had been yanked open. On the floor lay the bloody golf club, bent in the middle now. Blood had sprayed the walls and ceiling. The police would have no difficulty re-creating what had happened.

The police. The Suffolk County detectives knew what they were doing, would be all over the place sooner or later. No doubt Richie's killer and the girl had left all sorts of indicators of their presence-her prints on the edge of the glass, etc., but maybe there was an explanation for that; they visited Richie earlier in the evening. It was Ray who was the anomaly in the life of Richie. So now he took the trouble to find the Clorox in the basement, wet a rag with it, and wipe every surface he had touched. Clorox destroyed DNA. Nerve-racking as hell; he had to remember every one of his steps in the house. He felt a thin trickle of sweat begin under his arms. Of course he'd left skin cells and hair fibers around, especially in the closet. The cops would swipe hundreds of different surfaces. His DNA was on file, too, somewhere. The department took it in case they needed to identify your remains.

He forced himself to find a vacuum cleaner and vacuumed out the closet, every golf ball and shoe, and then threw them in again. The problem was that flecks and spots of blood were all over the floor and he was walking in them. Blood on my shoes, soaking into the minute scratches in the soles, he thought, I have to get rid of them. Didn't help to have the dead Richie behind him, watching, sort of. He flicked off the bedroom light, in case a neighbor looked in and saw the faceless body on the bed. He pulled the bag out of the machine, then dropped it, the Clorox, and the rag into a trash bag and took it with him, right through the basement again and out the ground doors.

He let the door close quietly, aware that he had not turned out any other lights in the house or checked to see if the front door was locked. Was that good? He wasn't sure. But the fact that he had broken into the basement doors disturbed him. It suggested the entry point of Richie's murderer. The police would examine the minute edges of the place where the metal was cut and see no weathering, that it was fresh. Ray had accidentally created a false clue-one that could point at him. He knew that the paint on the carbide blade would match the paint of the metal ground doors. Another thing to get rid of, he told himself. Shoes and saw blade. Also get rid of the saw itself; the matching paint dust would have been sucked into the motor; they'd find that in five minutes, match it using gas chromatograph tests. Wait! he thought. There would be matching paint dust on his clothes, too. Shoes, bag, saw, all clothes, he told himself, get rid of them.

He retreated into the woods again, half expecting police cars to pull up any minute. The night breathed a soft warm breeze. He slapped at a mosquito. A car passed. He had not seen Richie's killer. Maybe I should have jumped out of the closet and stopped him, thought Ray. But the guy was swinging a golf club with murder in his heart. Ray wasn't quite satisfied at this line of rationalization. He would've had a moment of surprise. It was at least possible he could have saved Richie. But then what? He'd have to have fought the guy. He thought he remembered the guy taking guns out of a drawer, the sound of it. Yes, the girl told the guy about the guns and opening the drawer was the first thing he did. Were the guns loaded? If so, Ray could have jumped out of the closet and the guy could have wheeled and shot him in the face.

Maybe it was better he'd stayed in the closet.

When he reached his truck, he took off his boots so as not to wipe blood on the pedals and floor mat. I'm being careful, Ray thought, but something is bugging me, something I missed. He put the shoes and the saw in the big plastic bag, along with his coat, and tied it off, then dropped it in the back of his truck. He could dump the bag here but preferred to do so elsewhere, maybe separate the items first.

I'm thinking like a criminal, Ray realized. He sat in his truck and forced himself to take long breaths. I might have stopped it, he thought. He couldn't tell the police much about the murderer. I don't know his name, I never saw his face. But the girl was called Sharon. They could find Sharon and then the murderer. But Sharon could just say she was elsewhere the whole night, with the murderer. Ray was the one without the alibi. Even if the cops believed him, he would have to tell them everything, back to the Chinese guys and then crawling in the pipes. They'd probably arrest him, too, since he'd then also be connected to the deaths of the two Mexican girls. The stranger your story, the more likely the police would put the cuffs on, get the wacko off the street. He wondered whether he should tell his father about Richie. The advantage would be that his father would understand the situation better, how dangerous it was. But it might make him worry. It also might make him want to kick the whole thing over to his old NYPD colleagues and be done with it. And then they'd arrest Ray, no matter who his father was.

No, no, he thought, I can't tell Dad about this. The man can't be lying in his deathbed thinking that his son is a murder suspect.

He started the truck and turned it around on the dark road, unable to resist driving by the house on the way to the highway. It had been, what, an hour or more since he'd crawled out of the closet? He approached the house-not sure why he wasn't seeing it.

Then he did see it. The lights were out, every one.

Ray pushed the accelerator in fear, sped past. The lights. He'd left all the lights on and now they were out. But wait-he'd turned off one light, in the bedroom. If it was the killer who had returned to the house to turn off the lights, had he noticed this? Or smelled the Clorox? Seen the blood smears on the rug? Maybe even seen the cut basement ground door?

I know about him, Ray realized, but now he knows about me.

He was exhausted from his drive back to the city and he was anxious, too-unusual for him. Seeing Richie dead like that had shaken him up, loosened up some old stuff he'd thought he'd carefully tied back together a while ago. The old loose fucked-up stuff in his head. The bad stuff. He needed to soften it fast, blur it out. And to do that he wanted something more than getting quietly buzzed on a few beers, something deeper. He'd smoked opium a few times in Pakistan, never got hooked. At midnight, he remembered, Gloria cleaned the Dilaudid machine.