Jason Pinter - The Mark

I stared hard at it. The blood droplets seemed to end there. I swallowed, my heart doing a drumroll.

“Henry?” Amanda had entered the living room. “Oh, my God, Henry, what is all this?”

“I’m over here,” I called out. “I don’t know yet.”

I held my breath, reached out and gripped the doorknob. The metal was cold and I jerked my hand away. I could hear running water. I rapped my knuckles on the bathroom door. No answer.

“Hello?” No response. Just the flowing water. Blood pounded in my temples as I took a deep breath.

Again I grasped the doorknob, this time turning it. The door was locked from the inside. I cursed under my breath. I had to get in there.

I went to the door on the right. The knob turned easily, and I entered what appeared to be Hans Gustofson’s bedroom. Photos were scattered everywhere. His desk was torn apart. A cork posterboard had been removed from the wall, pushpins scattered like multicolored sprinkles over the red carpet. The bed covers were thrown about, the mattress ripped apart like a drunken medical examiner had taken his frustration out on a cadaver. Files had been emptied out of a small bureau and dumped on the floor in a heap. Other than that, the room was empty.

I slid open a closet to find clothes dumped all over the floor, pants with their pockets turned inside out. I grabbed a wire hanger and bent the metal against my shoe until I’d straightened it into a makeshift spear. Back to the locked door, I eased the metal spike into the small hole on the outside of the knob. I jimmied it around, felt it catch. Pushed lightly, then felt a pop as the lock disengaged. I looked back at Amanda.

“Henry,” she said. “Please…”

The knob turned. But when I pushed, I felt resistance from inside. Something was blocking the door.

There was just enough room to peek my head in. Craning my neck, I peered through the tiny slat.

When I saw what the obstacle was, it took all I had not to vomit.

A shoe was propped against the door. The shoe was connected to a leg. The leg was connected to a man, fully clothed, his head covered in matted blood, sitting atop the toilet. It was Hans Gustofson, and he was very dead.

There was a large gash by his right temple, and his skull looked deformed, almost misshapen, like a lump of clay hit with a baseball bat.

The blood spatter by the front door. Hans had been brained there, his head smacking off the wall. But it hadn’t killed him. At least not right away. Somehow he’d managed to perch himself on the toilet. Very Elvis of him.

I held my breath, feeling my stomach churn, and gently moved his leg, now captured by the prison of rigor mortis, out of the way. His body shifted.

I stopped pushing. Made sure he stayed balanced on his death throne.

Then without warning, Gustofson’s body slipped off the toilet and went crashing to the ground. His maimed head smacked wetly off the tiling. I bit my fist to stop from screaming as his dead eyes stared at me from the floor, his body horribly contorted.

I closed my eyes, stepped back, felt faint.

I’d seen a body once before, visiting the medical examiner’s office back in Bend for a story I was writing. I’d felt like throwing up then, too. The ME, a surprisingly young and attractive woman named Grace, had laughed.

Don’t think of it as a person, she’d said. All it is is a husk, like a snail shell. The soul is gone.

That helped a little. But not much.

I gently opened the door. Easy, Henry. He’s just a shell. Like a steak with eyes.

I looked over the prone body. Gustofson had been an amateur bodybuilder as well as photographer, always snapped at high society events with tree-trunk arms wrapped around the supermodel of the moment. I could tell from the acne scars on his cheeks and thinning hair that he’d recently been resorting to chemical enhancers. Very Barry Bonds of him. Hans Gustofson was once one of the foremost chroniclers of the human experience and now here he was, dead in his bathroom. And for what?

I looked at the gaping wound by his temple. The death blow. Pushing the horror of the situation away, I focused on the facts. Tried to distance myself.

Strangely, the medicine cabinet was untouched. The only part of the house that didn’t look like it had been ransacked. It could only mean that either the killer had found what he was looking for, or the item was too big to fit inside such a small space. But the question remained: Why would a gravely wounded man come here to die?

“Oh, Jesus fucking Christ.” Amanda was standing outside the bathroom, her hand covering her mouth and nose. “Is he…”

“Yeah,” I said. “He’s been dead awhile.”

“It’s like nobody even noticed,” she said, her voice remorseful, distancing herself from the crime and focusing on the facts. Just like I had. This allowed you to see the story from a more comprehensive angle and was a by-product of journalism. Right now, it was all I had to keep myself from breaking down.

“But why would he come here?” she added.

“Well, when you gotta go, you gotta…” I left the joke unfinished. This wasn’t the time.

“If you’re dying,” Amanda said, “and your world is about to end, there has to be a reason to come here if not for help. There’s no phone. It’s like he was checking up on something.”

“Maybe he knew whoever attacked him hadn’t searched the bathroom. Think about it. You’re lying on the floor. Some guy’s just bashed you with a big hunk of metal, you’re laying there dying while he’s tearing your home apart. What could be so important that you’d ignore medical help to find it?”

“The package,” Amanda said. “What DiForio and that man in black wanted. Maybe that’s what was so important. Maybe that’s what the killer missed. You think that maniac who found us in St. Louis did this?”

“Maybe. It would make sense. But I honestly don’t know.”

The package. The reason John Fredrickson had assaulted the Guzmans. What the newspapers assumed I’d stolen. What a stranger was trying to kill me for. What the cops thought I was hiding. Gustofson had it, and whoever killed him failed to find it.

But one thing was for certain: it was here in the bathroom with us.

Amanda looked at me, and suddenly she reached forward and wrenched open the porcelain top to the toilet. We gazed inside. Nothing but water, levers and rust. She replaced the top.

“So where…” she said, thinking aloud. I maneuvered around Gustofson’s body and opened the cabinet beneath the sink. Nothing but Rogaine, unidentifiable pill boxes and an unopened pack of condoms. The medicine cabinet was stocked with hair gel, cologne and shaving gear, but nothing to arouse suspicion.

I stepped back and surveyed the bathroom. There had to be something. My eyes went to the ceiling, looking for a fake smoke detector, anything. I kicked over the hamper, sifted through a pile of dirty clothes with my shoe. Nothing.

Amanda checked behind the toilet, as I silently gave her credit for being brave enough to do so. She came up, her eyes defeated.

“There’s nothing here,” she said. “Maybe Hans did just come here to die on the toilet. He knew he’d thrown his life in the shitter and that’s where he wanted it to end.”

“No,” I said, still searching. “There has to be something.” Then I looked at the bathtub and saw it. Tiny chips of blue paint were sprinkled by the drain. As I looked closer, tiny cracks emerged in the tiling, invisible if you weren’t looking for them.

Slowly I brought my hands up to grip the hot and cold knobs. I turned them. No water came out. Amanda’s eyes went wide.

I turned around, looked at her, nodded.

I yanked both knobs as hard as I could. There was a terrible crunching sound as the knobs tore away from the wall, spraying blue paint and dust everywhere. Tiling cascaded down into the bathtub as the room filled up with steam and dust. Coughing, I waved the detritus away and peered into the two-foot wide, six-inch high hole I’d created. Inside was a thick manila envelope sealed inside a plastic bag.