Carla Neggers - Abandon

“He took the place for a month.” The superintendent, a wiry, middle-aged man with sparse tufts of close-cropped hair, had led Rook and Mackenzie to an ell off the rundown building. “That’s the most he ever takes it for. He comes and goes. He don’t call himself Harris Mayer, though. Harry Morrison. Pays in cash.”

Rook stood on the sidewalk behind the super. The rain had stopped, but thunder still rumbled in the distance. “When did you see him last?”

“A week ago. Maybe more.” He stuck the key in the door, shook his head. “Hear that? Air-conditioning. He keeps it going full blast. His choice – he pays the bills.” He unlocked the door, pushed it open, then jumped back. “Oh. My goodness, my goodness.”

Rook drew his weapon and saw that Mackenzie had done the same. He instructed the superintendent to move back onto the sidewalk and gave the door a kick to open it wider.

The worn wood floor of a small entry was splattered with dried blood. It was plainly blood. Careful of where he stepped, Rook entered the studio, immediately recognizing a smell that air-conditioning couldn’t suppress.

He glanced at Mackenzie, right behind him. “Mac, this isn’t going to be good. You’ve never -”

“I’m okay, Rook.”

“You know Harris.”

A tightness around her eyes betrayed her emotion, but she gave a curt nod. “So do you. Let’s just do this.”

They moved into the adjoining room, the furnishings threadbare and cheap but serviceable. Ancient air conditioners in a front window and a window in the kitchenette clunked and groaned.

“There,” Mackenzie said, nodding to the floor in front of a shut door. “More blood.”

She stood to the side, and Rook pushed open the door.

The smell was worse. There was blood everywhere.

Harris Mayer was sprawled in the old bathtub, his body partially covered with a flowered shower curtain that had been ripped from the rod.

“Knife wounds,” Mackenzie said from the doorway.

Rook looked back at her. “They’re not self-inflicted. He’s been here awhile. Days, not hours.” He shook his head and grimaced. “Hell.”

She didn’t respond, just spun around without a word and bolted. Rook didn’t follow her and he couldn’t do anything for Harris. Whatever his flaws he hadn’t deserved this. Rook returned to the main room and checked the rear exit next to the kitchenette, but it was secure. He got out his cell phone and made the calls he needed to. The D.C. police. His superiors. T. J. Kowalski.

T.J. was to the point. “Mackenzie led you to him?”

“Just get here.”

“On my way.”

When Rook returned to the street, Mackenzie was talking to the superintendent. Her skin was grayish, but she was rallying after the shock of finding Harris. Already, he could hear a siren. Cruisers would arrive first, with D.C. detectives not far behind. Harris’s murder fell under their jurisdiction.

Rook stood close to Mackenzie. “Anyone you need to call?”

She nodded. He still had his phone out and handed it to her. Her hands shook slightly. “I got sick to my stomach,” she said as she dialed. “Bet I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t been on antibiotics.” She cleared her throat. “Chief? Yeah, it’s me. It’s not a good scene here.” She’d called him on the way to the rooming house and now gave him the facts of what she and Rook had found. She spoke crisply, without emotion. But when she disconnected, she tilted her head back and exhaled at the sky. “I should have thought of this place sooner.”

A fresh breeze stirred, the storm quickly blowing out the heat and humidity – the stink of exhaust fumes, garbage and dog excrement. That no one had smelled the body in the studio wasn’t a huge surprise. And if someone had and not reported it? Again, no big surprise.

“I didn’t know,” the superintendent said, repeating his mantra about minding his own business.

“Did you see anyone with Mr. Mayer?” Rook asked.

“No, sir. I mind my own business.”

The first cruiser stopped in front of the building, with T.J. right behind it, his grim expression underlining the stark reality of the scene in the seedy studio. Rook had quickly adjusted his thinking. J. Harris Mayer, his would-be informant, wasn’t hiding at the beach. He was dead.

Bernadette wasn’t surprised to find Gus’s truck in her driveway when she arrived at the lake. The weather had delayed her, and it would be like him to make sure she got home alive. As she got out of her car, she could feel the stiffness from the long drive in her lower back, her right hip.

Getting old, she thought, welcoming the feel of the cool early evening air, freshened by the passing front. A stiff breeze blew through the trees. She could smell the sharpness of wet pine needles and hear birds all around the lake, twittering and fluttering now that the storm was over.

She found Gus down on the dock, the wood soft and wet under her driving shoes. The lake was choppy, churned up by the wind. “My cell phone died or I’d have called,” she said. “I pulled over during the worst of the storm and had coffee and pie.” She smiled and added, “Peach pie.”

Gus eyed her in that frank, uncompromising way he had. “I almost called the marshals on you.”

Bernadette’s heart jumped at his seriousness. She knew him so well. She remembered the tears and anger and hope she and her friends had felt when he’d left for Vietnam. They’d thought they understood the world, but they’d understood nothing. He didn’t write during the months he was gone. But she didn’t write, either, and only years later did she recognize her fault in that omission. She’d simply tried not to think about Gus Winter and what he was doing, where he was. And when he came back and kept to himself, hiking, working, she’d pushed ahead with her own life and left him to his. Then came his brother and sister-in-law’s deaths, a tragedy so impossible to imagine that it paralyzed everyone – everyone except Gus.

“Gus,” she whispered. “What’s happened?”

“Harris Mayer is dead. Mackenzie and Andrew Rook found him earlier today.”

“Harris? How?” Bernadette tried to grasp what Gus had just said, and pictured Harris, with his bow ties and wingtips, his patrician manner, his compulsions. “I can’t believe it. Did he have a heart attack? It wasn’t -” She paused to catch her breath. “Gus, was Harris murdered?”

Gus wasn’t one to dance around a point. “He was knifed to death.”

Bernadette heard herself gasp, but she couldn’t speak. She stared out at the water, spotting two loons near the opposite shore. They were territorial birds, the only pair on the relatively small lake. They’d had babies in June, and she’d taken delight, as always, watching them ride along on their parents’ backs.

I just want to watch the loons.

“Beanie?”

Years in the courtroom had accustomed her to suppressing her emotions, but she could feel her throat tighten. “Harris got such a kick out of the loons. He and his wife would sit out here for the longest time. I never had the patience.” She blinked back tears and turned to Gus, who didn’t seem to have moved at all since she’d arrived. She tried to pull herself together. “Things change. Harris was flawed, troubled, brilliant, selfish…”

“I’m sorry, Beanie.”

Gus’s simple statement ripped right through the shield she was trying to put up around her emotions. Tears spilled down her cheeks. She wiped them away quickly, turning from him. “Who told you?”

“Nate called. Mackenzie and Rook found Harris at a rooming house in a rough section of Washington.”

Bernadette nodded. “I know which one. Mackenzie and I – she was with me when I went to rescue him one day. She must have remembered. Is that what Nate told you?”