Russell Andrews - Hades

At the top of the landing, she stopped.

"He's in the master bedroom," Justin said. Before she could step forward, he took her hand. "It's not going to be pleasant," he said. "He was beaten to death."

Confused, trying to comprehend: "Beaten how? Punched?"

"No," Justin said softly. "It was with some kind of implement. A club, a bat, I don't know. Gary said his face is… well… like I said, it's not going to be pleasant."

"I can do this."

"Are you sure?"

"No. But stop asking me questions, 'cause I won't even think I can do it for very much longer."

"All right. Let's go."

He walked in ahead of her, his body momentarily shielding her husband's corpse. He took in the sight of the mangled and bloody body of Evan Harmon. Justin had to close his eyes for a moment, but that didn't cause the horrific image to go away. He knew the image would now be fixed in his memory forever; this was not the kind of picture one could remove merely with wishful thinking. Every bone in Evan Harmon's body seemed to have been crushed. His face was particularly gruesome. Even his eye sockets were shattered, and his nose was flattened and formless. Under his light brown hair, part of his skull was visible where the skin covering his forehead should have been. His teeth were scattered on the floor near him, looking as if they'd tumbled from a collector's jar. On his neck and forearms were round, deep burns. Justin heard Abby moan behind him, turned to see her eyes widen in shock and horror and the excruciating awareness of the pain her husband must have endured before his life ended.

"That's Evan?" he asked, his voice low and hoarse.

"His face," she said. "His face…" Her breathing was heavy now, coming in short, heavy bursts. "What are those burns? Why does he have all those burns?"

"Is it Evan, Abby?"

She nodded. Made a coughing noise and a thin stream of vomit escaped from her tight lips. She immediately wiped it away with her hand.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes," she said. "His hands. Our wedding ring. Those shoes… he just bought those shoes yesterday. No, two days ago. Maybe yesterday… I don't know…"

"It's all right," he said softly. "It doesn't matter."

She was breathing quickly now, unable to tear her eyes away from the devastating scene. "And his sweater," she wailed. "Oh god, I gave him that sweater."

The glass of vodka dropped from her hand, landing softly on the thick carpet. She looked down, watched the liquor spread into the fibers, but made no move to pick it up.

"It's his favorite sweater." Abby looked up at Justin in bewilderment. It was what murder did. She understood that her husband was dead. She understood that some sick fuck had been in her house and committed an unspeakable act of violence. She understood that life as she'd known it had now changed forever. She didn't comprehend how a favorite sweater had somehow been defiled. Didn't see how something so delicate and beautiful had become a part of the tragedy, had been changed into something ugly and unusable. Something repellent.

"His favorite sweater," she said one more time.

"I know," he told her. And then he said, "Let's go back downstairs."

After getting Abby settled onto the living room couch, and putting another glass of vodka in her hand, Justin went back to the bedroom, and spent twenty minutes there, alone. At one time, he had considered himself a truly good homicide cop. Not now. His skills had been dulled over the years. But certain memories remained, memories that told him he had to trust his instincts and his feel for the crime. So for the first few minutes he just stood there, forced himself to look at the violence that had been inflicted upon Evan Harmon, made himself take in the aura of the room, the sense of space, some kind of physical feel for what had occurred.

He knew that CSU would have to go over everything with a fine-tooth comb. But still, those were just facts. And selective facts. He wanted to remember everything. There had been too many times when something supposedly unimportant had been overlooked or ignored, but his memory had come into play and dredged up a solution. There was one case up in Providence. He had been a young cop, working on one of his first murders, and he wasn't the lead detective. A twelve-year-old girl had been battered and beaten to death. Her hands had been cut off and placed next to the corpse. The parents were suspects, but their grief seemed real and there was nothing to tie them to the murder or to any sort of motive. But Justin remembered, at an early interview, that he'd noticed something odd: he'd been in several rooms-the kitchen, a bathroom, the living room, a front porch-and every single room had an ashtray with a nail clipper in it. CSU had paid no attention to that, neither had Justin-it just seemed like a quirk. But at a second interview, the mother of the girl had begun to bite her fingernails and her husband had suddenly and violently swatted her hand away from her mouth. The woman had shrunk back in fear when his hand had moved. Justin realized the nail clippers were no longer on view, so he went to the lab, had them blow up one of the photos that had been collected of the dead girl's hands, and he saw that the girl had bitten her fingernails down until her cuticles had bled. He went back to the house, arrested the parents, and at the station he separated the man and woman, eventually got the woman to talk about the fury that erupted from her husband whenever she or their daughter bit their nails. She saw her husband repeatedly hit the little girl when she bit her nails in his presence, knew that this last time she'd put her hands in her mouth he'd hit her hard enough to knock her unconscious. That's when her husband had banished her from the room. Later, he'd told her that the girl had run away. But she knew that was a lie. She knew he'd killed her…

Justin could still picture those nail clippers, sitting in their ashtrays. Unassuming, unimportant items that held the key to a deep-rooted sickness and to death.

Looking around Evan Harmon's bedroom, he didn't see anything that struck him as an oddity. The splatters of blood on the walls, the carpet, and the bed had to be seen as normal, considering the brutality of the murder that had taken place. Everything in the room was extremely ordered. The bed was made, the bathroom spick-and-span, the clothes in the closets undisturbed. It looked as if the room had been tidied and made pristine by a maid prior to the murder. There was no sense that the room had been lived in that night. No shirt tossed on a floor, no book laid aside, no speck of toothpaste spit onto the side of the bronze bathroom sink. It looked like a hotel room.

He reached into the dead man's right pants pocket and pulled out a wad of cash. Justin flipped through it, over two thousand dollars in hundreds. So much for robbery. He shifted Evan's body, pulled a wallet from the back pocket. Driver's license, two different American Express cards, one MasterCard, all platinum. An ID card for Harmon's money management company, Ascension-it looked like one of those treated IDs that allowed you to open lobby doors and pass through turnstiles so you could get into the right elevator bank of a large building.

Justin spent two minutes just crouching over the body, staring at it. The strange, multiple burn wounds on the arms and legs and torso. The bloody sweater. The bloodstained pants. The highly polished black loafers, worn without socks. Two minutes was long enough for what he needed. He had the mental picture in his head. From here on in, the CSU guys could come in and gather their facts. And he was happy to let them do so.

Justin was a big believer in facts. But he knew that facts were only part of what composed any kind of final truth. He wasn't sure he could define what the rest of the composition was. Only that, like those damn nail clippers, it was, on the surface, usually unimportant, overlooked. But underneath that surface, it was usually the key. And the key fit a door that led to places most people would never want to go.