Дэвид Балдаччи - The Fallen

“You got your gun?” he asked quietly. Wave after wave of electric blue light was pouring over him. He felt nauseous and dizzy.

Jamison shook her head.

He motioned her toward him.

She hurried forward, turned the corner, saw what Decker already had, and stopped dead.

“Good God!”

Decker nodded. It was a fitting expression for what they were both seeing.

After all, the man was hanging from the ceiling.

A rope had been inserted through a hook that had once held a chandelier that was now lying on the floor.

The noose had been placed around the man’s neck.

Yet death by hanging did not typically cause blood loss.

Decker stared down at the wooden floor. The blood had pooled and then flowed toward the wall, where it had encountered the frayed electrical cord of a floor lamp and begun the electrical shorting process.

Before Jamison had appeared, Decker had used his foot to tap out the sparks after unplugging the cord. Part of a square of carpet and a dangling strip of wallpaper had caught on fire. He had used his wet jacket to beat out the flames on the wall, and had rolled up the carpet to smother the fire there. Then he’d stepped back so as not to further interfere with the crime scene. It was right then that Jamison had called out.

His gaze ran up and down the man’s body, searching for a wound that might explain the copious amounts of blood.

He saw none. And he couldn’t do a deeper probe now. That would have to await the police. But something else couldn’t wait.

Giving voice to what he’d been thinking, Jamison whispered, “Do you think there’s anyone else in the house?”

“That’s what we need to find out. Do you have your phone?”

“No.”

“Neither do I. And I didn’t see one in here. Okay, I want you to go back to your sister’s house and call the cops. I’ll finish searching the place.”

“Decker, you need to wait for the police. You have no backup.”

“Someone may be hurt, or the killer may still be here.”

“It’s the latter possibility I’m worried about,” hissed Jamison.

“I am a police officer,” replied Decker. “I’m trained to do this, and I’ve got a gun. And the odds are very good that if the killer is still here, he’s smaller than me. Now go.”

Jamison slowly turned and then ran down the hall and back out into the rain.

Decker cleared the first floor. The house had a second story and, if it was a true copy of Jamison’s sister’s place, a basement. He moved back down the hall to the stairs leading up. He took the steps two at a time, feeling his thigh muscles tighten a bit with each upward lunge. While spending ten years in uniform before becoming a detective back in Ohio, he had gone into homes where people had died. There were procedures you followed to clear spaces as safely as possible, and all of them were grafted onto his brain. Still, it wasn’t really like riding a bike, for one very compelling reason.

Bikes didn’t shoot back at you.

There were two small bedrooms with closets upstairs and a Jack-and-Jill bathroom in between. Decker cleared all of them and found nothing. The place looked abandoned.

Maybe there was nothing to find except the hanging dead man on the main floor. He slipped back downstairs and found the door to the basement.

There was a light switch at the top of the stairs, but Decker didn’t move to turn it on. He didn’t know if the electrical short had affected the lights in the rest of the house, but, right now, darkness was his friend. He tested each step before fully placing his weight on it. Still, there were some slight creaks and he winced with each one. He reached the bottom of the stairs without anyone trying to attack him.

He looked around. It was quite dark down here and he couldn’t see very clearly, but the space appeared to be unfinished. There was the musty odor that one often associated with unfinished basements.

He cautiously moved forward and almost fell to the floor. Regaining his balance, he quickly retreated.

He had to risk a light now. He skittered back up the steps and flipped the switch. The lights came on. His gun pointed in front of him, he slowly came back down the stairs until he saw what he had tripped over.

The face looked up at him as the electric blue pulses once more started drumming against him.

It was a man, who looked to be in his late thirties. He had dark hair and pale skin, and was of a medium build. He appeared to be about five-ten, although it was hard to be accurate about that since he was lying on the floor.

All those observations flowed automatically through Decker’s mind from his long career as a cop. And they were secondary to the single most important observation he was making.

The man was in a police uniform.

Decker knelt down next to him and checked for a pulse at his neck.

There was none, and the skin was very cold. He felt the limbs. They were stiff, indicating that rigor had begun. Decker’s experience as a homicide detective caused him to automatically consider both the cause and the timing of the death.

He ran his gaze over the body, looking for wounds, but saw none. He wasn’t going to move the corpse. He had already compromised the crime scene enough.

He focused on the man’s mouth. There was a bit of foaming there. That could be an indication of at least a couple of ways he could have died.

A fit.

Or poison.

Okay, cause of death is not obvious. What about timing?

He looked at the man’s nostrils. Blowflies. Female. They’d already laid eggs, but the infestation was minimal. Blowflies could smell dead flesh from miles away and were a policeman’s best friend, because with the biological death clock having commenced, the invasive insects would help determine the time of death.

But when Decker put all of these forensic elements together, mental alarms started sounding. Something was definitely not making sense.

If the limbs were stiff, that meant the deceased had been dead for a while. In fact, the body could be reversing the rigor and moving from the large muscle groups back to the small, which meant the person could have been dead quite a long time. And while that jibed with the coolness of the body, it most assuredly did not align with what else he was observing.

His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of sirens approaching.

He quickly retreated up the stairs, holstered his gun, stepped out onto the front porch, and waited.

A squad car pulled up to the house about fifteen seconds later.

While Decker had been inside, the storm had lessened somewhat, though lightning still crackled and thunder still boomed. At least it wasn’t raining sideways anymore.

As the police officers exited their vehicle, Decker called out and held up his FBI creds. Both cops pulled their weapons and one trained his Maglite on Decker.

“Hands out where we can see them!” shouted one cop, who looked young and a little nervous.

Since Decker already had both hands up in the air where they could definitely be seen, he couldn’t do anything more than say, “I’m a Fed. My partner called this in.”

The cops advanced until they reached the stoop. The other cop, who looked to be in his forties, with a trim, graying mustache, holstered his gun, took the creds, and checked them. Then he illuminated Decker’s face with his light.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

“Two dead bodies inside. One hanging in the living room. One in the basement.” Decker glanced at the man’s uniform. “I don’t know if he’s a cop or not, but the guy in the basement is wearing the same type of uniform you are.”

“What?” snapped the older cop.

“You say he’s dead?” said the young cop, who was still pointing his gun.