Michael Collings - The Slab

“There.”

The police found Brady only a few minutes later.

In spite of their fears, after what the Jantzen kid had cried out, he wasn’t dead. But then he wasn’t exactly alive either.

A short hospital stay would probably be enough for Kyle, already safely in the back of a County Hospital ambulance waiting for his father to arrive when the police entered the back bedroom at 1066 Oleander. It would take a longer stay-a much longer stay-to do the other boy any good.

He wasn’t hurt physically. Not much, anyway. A man’s mutilated body had toppled onto him and bruised his shoulder and his hip. But the carpet had cushioned most of the weight. If he was hurt much, it didn’t show. But when the police pulled the body away, he was staring straight ahead, as if he were examining on a microscopic level the shard of blood-encrusted glass still embedded six inches deep in the corpse’s throat, not three inches from the boy’s own throat but miraculously (it seemed then) not touching him.

He was still staring straight ahead half an hour later, an hour later. Days later.

Three weeks after Halloween night, the Wiltons put their house up for sale, and before Thanksgiving they had gone.

Kyle never saw Brady again.

It was easy enough for the authorities to identify the body. Ace McCall’s blood-soaked cowhide wallet was still buttoned securely inside his back pocket. Whatever had happened to him, it wasn’t a robbery. No one had disturbed the California driver’s license, the half dozen credit cards, or the five hundred dollars in cash tucked into the back flap.

The white Lincoln parked outside the house on Oleander carried additional identification in the form of a registration slip and a leather briefcase crammed with documents attesting to the identity of its owner.

It was far more difficult to determine precisely what had happened in the back bedroom of the house.

Officer Mark Riehmann’s first impression of the carnage in the back bedroom was simple: homicide. After calling for back-up on this one-a gnawing gut instinct honed by fifteen years with the County Sheriff Department told him that this case was going to be a bad one-he made sure that the Jantzen kid was going to be all right, then approached the house at the top of the hill.

He moved tentatively, slowly, alert to the sounds of sirens racing in response to his call. He was not quite to the sidewalk in front of the house when the first back-up car arrived. In spite of a sense of urgency amplified by the knowledge that there was still a kid in the house, perhaps trapped there with a homicidal maniac, he hesitated long enough to be joined by two other figures, shadowy in the darkness. He whispered instructions, then the three of them approached the house.

The front door gaped open. Other than that, there was no sign of life. Still, it took almost five minutes for them to penetrate the house and turn their flashlights onto the scene in the back bedroom.

McCall’s body lay sprawled across the floor, the feet still in the closet, the head angled toward the window opposite. The body was awash with blood, most of it crusted and brown, some still vividly scarlet and dripping. Beneath him lay another body. For an instant all three officers thought the boy must be dead, too. Then they realized that what they assumed to be a deathly pallor was actually smudged cosmetics and that the boy’s open eyes were not rigid with death but deep and dark and secret.

They pulled the body off the boy, and one of the other officers knelt to carry him outside. The boy shrieked once-long and loud and piercingly shrill. Then he lapsed into a silence so absolute that Riehmann wondered for a second time if he weren’t dead.

“Get him out of here,” Riehmann instructed softly. “Quick.” As soon as the other officer disappeared into the hall, Riehmann knelt beside McCall’s corpse. The face was distorted with pain and fury. Even after fifteen years witnessing death and destruction in all of their guises, Riehmann knew that this one was different. He trembled when his light played across the tight, drawn features

And the blood.

There couldn’t be a pint left in the guy, Riehmann thought, not with what’s spattered all over the walls and the carpet and the ceiling, not with the fact that the front of McCall’s clothing was stiff with it. Not given the fact that his chest and belly and groin and thighs were slashed and that a wickedly sharp, massive shiver of glass was still embedded in his throat.

Homicide, Riehmann decided almost immediately. And he was rarely wrong. But this time, as the evidence unraveled, he seemed to be. True, it looked impossible for it to have been suicide, for McCall to have inflicted some of the gaping wounds-at least impossible for any man in a healthy state of mind.

But the crumpled newspapers and the documents locked in the briefcase ultimately suggested that McCall might not have been quite sane. He could easily have been on the edge of desperation, seeing the company he had built on the verge of total collapse with himself the sole responsible agent for what eventually amounted to millions of dollars in alleged fraud. Beyond that, much of the money involved was linked to individuals and organizations whose financial dealings were at best questionable. It looked increasingly as if Ace McCall had swum too far beyond his depth, discovered that he was doomed, and instead of struggling to get back, simply took a deep breath and sank beneath the waves. Figuratively speaking, of course.

In addition, an examination of the room-especially the blood-splattered door jamb, the razor-sharp shards of glass, the small red and silver flashlight found beneath the Wilton boy-revealed three sets of finger prints…and only three. Brady Wilton’s. Kyle Jantzen’s. And Ace McCall’s.

Of course it was possible that the killer or killers might have protected themselves by wearing gloves. But as the days became weeks and the weeks turned into months, the County investigation team could not discover one shred of evidence that anyone else had been in that room for at least a month before McCall died.

Riehmann kept up with the case as much as he could. He read reports and followed up leads. But everything led to the same conclusion. There was no evidence that McCall had died at the hands of another person. And, given the at best ambiguous nature of his wounds, it was just possible that he did kill himself.

Just barely possible.

The house was barricaded until well past Thanksgiving, its front yard fenced off by a strip of yellow warning tape. The Lincoln remained on the front driveway. It grew dustier and dustier; an early November rainstorm transformed the grainy dust to grey-black muck, and by the time it was hauled away behind a Bingham Boulevard Shell towing truck, it no longer gleamed white. No one had bothered writing “wash me” on any of the windows so thickly caked with grime that the interior had long since become entirely obscured. Perhaps no one had dared. A large oil spot on the driveway marked where the car had been sitting.

By mid-December, the yellow tape had disappeared as well. The week after Christmas, a work crew appeared early one morning and silently disappeared into the bowels of the house. Ladders and tarps and rolls of carpeting and cans of paint and panes of glass disappeared into the house as well.

The neighbors on both sides of Oleander were curious, of course. After all, how often does one get to live right next to an honest-to-God murder house. But none of them ventured up to the front door. None rapped lightly on the wooden doorjamb where, for a long time, a bloody, smudged handprint had lingered untouched until one kid on the crew, a part-time helper from the High School, couldn’t stand it any longer and washed the whole doorway down. No one asked what was going on inside.