The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [88]
I’ll give him a job, Wayne thought. I’ll find Hoover a job at the Colossus if he gets fired for this.
At the door to the apartment, Hoover knocked several times housekeeping style with the end of the key and then he unlocked the door and pushed it open. “Miss Chester is out of town on an engagement.” Wayne nodded and Hoover backed nervously down the hall, in the direction of the elevators, no doubt worried he’d be spotted and reported for letting a stranger into one of the apartments. “Anybody asks, I had nothing to do with this,” he said. “I got your name. Gonna know, you take anything.”
The apartment was clean for a guy’s place. Uncluttered. Lots of blacks and whites and reds and tans. Expensive numbered prints in frames. Glass and metal sculptures on shelves instead of books. A large plasma TV and a couch wide enough for a couple to stretch out on it end to end.
Amoyo was lying shirtless on his back in a nest of crusted blood and bone and brains and beige carpeting, a dry black hole in his forehead. Bloody tears in his shirt everywhere. Stab wounds.
Oh God. One photo of three people. Two of them dead, one of them missing.
Wayne found Amoyo’s phone and dialed 911, and as he described the scene to the dispatcher, he wondered how long he’d be tied up here with the cops sorting through this mess. Hours? All day? Into the night? He’d never been part of a homicide investigation.
The countdown of police response time provided Wayne a few moments alone with a fresh murder scene. This was the realm of the real detective. A real cop’s office and laboratory. Wayne folded his arms so he wouldn’t touch anything and knelt beside Amoyo’s head. He breathed hesitantly, but the corpse didn’t smell like anything much besides dry cologne. The hole in Amoyo’s head was small and it looked like it had been filled with tar. He noticed other wounds now, including a narrow bruise across his neck.
A bat? A forearm?
The observation excited him. The thrill of a real detective. Wayne suddenly felt like a fantasy baseball player taking batting practice at Chávez Ravine. He leaned forward, touching nothing, anxious to absorb as much as he could on his own before the cops kicked him out.
Amoyo’s palms had long cuts from the fingers to the wrists and in the carpet around his torso were markings in blood, too deliberate to be splatter. Wayne turned his head, seeing them as Amoyo would. There was something that looked like a lowercase y, and near it, an uppercase N. Around each letter were small dark ovals of blood. Six or seven smudges around the y and three or four around the N.
N for Nada? North? Y for what?
Wayne heard footsteps and hacking and the ding of an approaching elevator down the hall. He had only minutes before the police would come and shoo him away.
Yes, it came to him shortly. Y for yes. N for no.
He glanced again at the bruise on Amoyo’s neck and a story came to him at once. The attacker had stabbed Amoyo. Beaten him. Stepped or leaned on his larynx so he couldn’t scream.
But still, he had interrogated him.
The killer had written the letters in the white carpet with his victim’s blood and then David had pointed to them. Y for yes, N for no.
Wayne stood up and took a step backward. Widening his field of vision, he saw more letters at an arm’s radius from David’s shoulder. What could he have been telling his killer? What did he know?
These letters were harder to make out—all different sizes and some pressed together and smudged. But he didn’t find just letters. Wayne could make out words.
PLEASE said one. DONT said another. Wayne wondered if they were supposed to go together. Please. Don’t.
Sirens from a distance.
Amoyo had written something else.
CNIO8CO.
Wayne tried to imagine what that could be. A license plate? A computer password? As the sirens grew louder, he tried to translate