Abandon - Carla Neggers [74]
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.
Twenty-Six
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