Peter Clement - Mortal Remains

With that, she bade him good-bye, and left.

Thanks for the comforting words, Melanie, he wanted to call after her. Instead, he simply lay there, trying to put what she’d said out of mind. Only to end up thinking instead about the surface of his gut shredding itself raw as the E. coli bacteria deepened their hold and even more toxins flooded into his bloodstream. He tried to prepare mentally for the hemorrhages that were bound to follow. What lay ahead wasn’t hard to imagine. He’d seen too many patients lying in their crimson waste to have any illusions about it. He started to regret having lied to Janet about the seriousness of it all. He wanted to see her, to see Brendan. Especially if – No, he mustn’t think that way. Wouldn’t, dammit. But another round of pain skewered him so hard he couldn’t help but think the worst.

That same morning, Friday, November 23, 8:05 A.M.

Hampton Junction

Mark navigated the red Jeep by following the loom of the road under a foot of fresh snow.

“Still not answering,” Lucy said, snapping her cellular shut.

They’d been trying to raise Victor since seven.

The coffee he’d gulped down before leaving the house seemed to repercolate itself at the back of his throat. Let him be getting wood. Or be gone for a walk. Maybe off on a drive.

But the Victor he knew would not only have been by the phone, eagerly awaiting Mark’s call, ready to divulge whatever he’d discovered, but also would have called Mark by now, perhaps a dozen times over.

Ice coated everything, and the frozen world seemed metal hard, cast in silver, gray, and black. Even the shiny surface of the snow had a jaggedness to it.

Mark’s grip tightened on the wheel.

Victor’s car stood in the driveway.

A Tiffany lamp glowed warmly behind the front window.

No smoke rose from the chimney.

They walked up the unshoveled steps and knocked on the front door.

No sounds came from inside.

Mark reached for the handle, turned, and shoved the door open.

It revealed a long, dim, central hallway leading toward the back of the house.

Empty.

“Victor?” he called.

No answer.

“It’s Mark Roper and Lucy.”

Still no reply.

Mark stepped inside, making his way between the antique tables and shelves loaded with porcelain figures that lined the walls. The place seemed cold. “Stay here,” he said, continuing down the corridor. A peek through the door on his right revealed a magnificent mahogany dining room table and china cupboard, but no Victor. The door on the left opened into a small living room dominated by a baby grand but otherwise empty.

He followed the hallway toward the back, coming to a swinging door at the end that he presumed led to the kitchen. “Victor?” he repeated, the floorboards creaking under his boots. The air here felt cooler still.

He pushed his way through.

The back door was open. Halfway across the threshold lay Victor, facedown, his legs covered with drifted snow. A half dozen logs lay scattered on the floor in front of him.

Mark swallowed once, walked in, and knelt by his head. The skin was ice-cold. He felt for a carotid pulse, knowing he wouldn’t find any.

Whenever Mark found himself alone with a dead body, the absolute silence of the corpse unnerved him the most. No soft sounds of air moving in and out of the lungs, no brush of clothing against the skin with each inhalation or expiration, no tiny cricks that tendons sometimes make when a person moves, not even a gurgle from the stomach. He instinctively slowed his own breathing, so as not to disturb that stillness, and the world around him seemed to go quiet as well. It was as if all that dead flesh, like a black hole, sucked the sounds of life from the room.

What had happened appeared obvious. An overweight, hypertensive, diabetic man had gone out to get wood in the snow, and the exertion had brought on a heart attack. Except he must have initially fallen outside, Mark thought, noticing recent scratches on Victor’s wrists. They were identical to the ones he himself had received the other night while running from his pursuer, his wrists plunging through the icy crust of the snow each time he slipped.

Maybe that outside fall had been a simple slip, or due to the initial symptoms of what killed him, and he’d been able to pick up the logs and continue to the back porch.

He looked around at the once-cozy room where Victor had prepared meals, mostly to dine alone. Brightly embroidered wall hangings offered homespun encouragement for the future, confidently predicting: MY PRINCE WILL COME; A KITCHEN IS THE HEARTH OF A FAMILY’S HOME; A COUPLE’S LOVE IS A FEAST FOR LIFE. Beside these were photos of a young man whom Victor had told him about. His first name was Brad, and he had died the year before Victor moved here. They’d been lovers for over a decade. Victor thought a period of time in the country would make it easier to get over his grief and move on. It never happened.

Mark snapped open his phone to call Dan. Only when he saw the blurry numbers did he realize his eyes were full of tears. He stayed kneeling, wiping them clear, whipsawed between sad and angry, not really understanding why. After all, he’d seen patients die before, even people who had called him friend.

He heard the floorboards creaking. “Did you find him?” Lucy asked from out in the corridor.

He tried to warn her back, but she stepped through the door.

“Oh, no!” Her hands flew to her mouth as she sank to her knees by his head. “The dear, dear man.” She reached out and ran her fingers along the side of Victor’s face, brushing the tip of his magnificent mustache.

Mark quickly turned away. Victor would never feel her simple gesture, just as in his last years he’d so rarely felt the caress of someone who loved him.

“Let’s wait in the car,” he said to Lucy. “I’m going to call Dan and treat this place as a crime scene, so don’t touch anything on the way out.”

“A crime scene?”

Mark nodded. If there was anything to Victor’s last message, his death had been damn convenient to someone.

“No forced entry, nothing broken, no suggestive marks on the body. Suspicious as hell, right?” Dan asked when Mark told him to treat the death as a possible homicide.

“I know it sounds crazy, Dan, but humor me. Too many timely illnesses have happened on this case.” Mark filled him in on what Victor had been up to and how Earl had to be admitted to NYCH.

As Dan listened, his scowl deepened, but in the end, he pulled out the yellow tape. “You realize I’m on thin ice here,” he muttered, cordoning off the driveway.

Within half an hour men and women in dark blue jumpsuits, SARATOGA SPRINGS P.D. written on the back, were crawling all over the house using Ziploc evidence bags and tweezers to collect every stray hair, thread, or broken nail they could find. A pretty blond woman, her regulation peaked cap worn backward, hunched over Victor’s computer and carefully covered the keys with a fine white powder. “Look at this, Chief,” she said, summoning Dan to her side. “Most of his prints have been partially smudged out.”

“Wiped?” Mark asked, leaning in to see.

Dan shook his head. “More like someone’s used it while wearing gloves.”

“Can I try and turn it on?”

The woman stood aside. “I’m all finished. Be my guest.”

Mark pushed the ON button, and the screen flickered to life. Against a background of tropical fish, it requested an access code. “Have you got someone who can hack into these things?”

Dan chuckled. “Yeah. They’re called kids.”

“Seriously.”

“There’s a white-collar crime unit in Albany. They’ve done a few favors for me from time to time.”