The Christopher Killer Read online

  Grunting, he slid himself out and slammed the car door behind him. While her father went to the back of the station wagon, Cameryn pulled down the visor and opened the clip-on mirror. She carefully smeared her upper lip with the oil, which smelled good but burned her skin, then pulled the gloves on, wiggling her fingers into the ends and snapping the wristbands as she stepped out of the car. She felt official. Ready. But her father stood in front of the door, waving his hands at Deputy Crowley, who had blocked his entrance. Cameryn rushed to join them.

  “This is important. Just give me a chance to explain!”

  Her father’s voice was curt. “Let me pass, Deputy.”

  She was closer now, and she couldn’t help but notice that Crowley was good-looking—she had to admit that. His eyebrows and lashes were darker than his hair, which had the effect of making his eyes seem electric. From where she stood it was hard to tell what color they were, either blue or green. From the deep tan of his skin she knew he spent a lot of time outdoors. Following her father’s lead, she smoothed her features with what she hoped looked like cool disinterest as she stepped next to her father.

  “But what I have to say is important, sir,” Deputy Crowley pressed.

  “Is it about the man in the tub?”

  “No. It’s about the other…matter.” For the briefest instant his eyes flashed at Cameryn. Green, she decided.

  “Not interested,” her father snapped. Waving his hand dismissively, he said, “If you want to make yourself useful, go get the manager and bring him back to the room so I can talk to him personally.” He began to walk away.

  “Sheriff Jacobs already talked to him.”

  “I want to talk to him myself. And get the gurney and body bag out of the back of the station wagon and bring them inside. Lock my car when you’re done.” Turning, he tossed the car keys, which Crowley caught in midair. “Come on, Cammie. We’ve got work to do.”

  She could feel the deputy’s eyes on her back as she ducked under the police tape, but the closer she got to the room the easier it was to push him from her mind. Ahead of her was her very first forensic case. She’d read theory after theory in her books, but this was reality and the difference made her almost dizzy. A puzzle etched in the remains of a human, ready for her to decipher, and she felt her hands begin to sweat inside the gloves.

  The first thing she noticed inside was the odor, faint over the peppermint but still there. It was sickly-sweet, like rotten meat doused in cologne, and her stomach clamped hard against it. She took a quick series of breaths, quickly switching to inhaling through her mouth instead of her nose. In front of her was a short, narrow hallway, then, to the left, the room itself.

  Patrick placed his hand on her shoulder and squeezed hard. “It’s a bit ripe in here.”

  “Do you ever get used to it?”

  He shook his head. “The stench always makes you want to toss your cookies. Occupational hazard.”

  She tried not to notice the flies that buzzed through the air in tiny squadrons. Dozens walked along a closed door directly on her left, which she supposed was the bathroom, the place where the body lay. Straight ahead was a window, and to the left of that was the motel room itself. As she entered she saw Sheriff John Jacobs by the bed, scratching notes on a small spiral notebook he held in his hand. She hadn’t seen him from the hallway.

  “Morning, Pat,” he said, nodding. “Oh, hello there, Cameryn.” His eyebrows shot up as he dipped his head, staring at her over his glasses. “What in the Sam Hill are you doing here?”

  “I’m working with my dad now,” she replied, still breathing through her mouth. “I’m his new assistant.”

  “Assistant? Really? Is that so?” The sheriff looked at her father skeptically. He was a short man, with gray, thinning hair, along with sharp features and a thin nose. Jacobs’s mouth twitched as he asked, “You think that’s a good idea, Pat? The man’s been in there awhile. It’ll be pretty rough on the girl.”

  Patrick crossed his arms over his ample chest and leaned back on his heels. That was his stubborn stance, Cameryn thought, grinning to herself. Jacobs didn’t have a chance. “My Cammie’s got a mind to go into forensics and she wants to see what’s what. She’s not like other girls—she’s twice as smart as most and half as squeamish as the rest.”

  “Yeah, well, take a look at the guy before you decide,” Jacobs countered.

  Without another word, Patrick walked to the bathroom. Cameryn heard the flies buzzing angrily as he yanked the door open and then, for a moment, all was still. Since Jacobs was pretending to read his notepad, Cameryn studied the pale, ghostly square on the wall where a picture must have been removed and waited for the verdict. When her father emerged from the bathroom, a wave of air, thick with stench, rolled into Cameryn’s mouth, and suddenly she could taste the man. She stifled her instinct to cover her face with her hands.

  “Okay, I admit it, he’s pretty far gone.” Patrick didn’t meet her gaze when he said this, which told her all that she needed to know. Her father had changed his mind—her pass into the coroner’s secret world had been rescinded.

  “Dad, don’t!” she protested. “I can do this.”

  “You can help me process the room itself,” he answered with false cheer.

  Jacobs scratched at the skin behind his ear. “Speaking of which, who’s paying her salary? I don’t remember voting on this. You can’t just up and hire somebody without it getting approved.”

  “Cameryn’s wages are coming out of my own pocket, which is more than I can say for that deputy of yours. The good citizens of Silverton are footing the bill for him, and I, for one, want my money back.”

  “All right, all right,” Jacobs answered. “No need to get testy. I was just asking.”

  “So, John,” Patrick asked, “what have you got?”

  It was clear the two of them had shut her out. Cameryn felt as though she were standing behind a piece of glass she couldn’t walk through. Hadn’t her father just said she was twice as smart as most girls? Hadn’t he said she could be his partner? None of that seemed to matter now. Frustrated, she hugged the wall and watched as Jacobs flipped the pages in his notebook.

  “Let’s get this thing done,” he said. “The wife’s got cinnamon rolls waiting.” He cleared his throat. As the sheriff began to read, his voice became dispassionate, as though he were reciting names from a phone book. “The manager opened the door about an hour ago ’cause Robertson—first name Larry—was supposed to check out yesterday and didn’t. Rullon said he followed his nose to the bathroom there.” Jacobs paused to point the end of his pen toward the hallway.

  “Who’s Rullon?” Cameryn broke in. If they wouldn’t let her see the body she could still get in the game.

  The sheriff gave her a look. “Rullon Sage. The manager. You know that old-timer who runs around wearing red suspenders? He’s the real skinny guy. Smokes a pipe.”

  “Oh, yeah, I know him,” she said, nodding. “He comes into the Grand sometimes. He’s a lousy tipper.”

  Jacobs gave her another look. “So, back to what I was saying. Rullon told me he poked his head inside the room and gave a holler, but no one answered. He opened the bathroom door. He said he hurried right back to his office and called us ’cause it was clear Larry didn’t need no doctor.”

  “I’m sure the smell told him that,” Patrick said. “I don’t know if Rullon’s ever going to be able to use that tub again.”

  “If it was me I’d rip the whole thing out and chuck it,” Jacobs agreed.

  The room was littered with old clothing and cigarette butts; three empty whiskey bottles lay scattered across the floor like bowling pins. As the men talked, Cameryn went over to the bed, which was crumpled and unmade. There was a smell here, too, but this one was of cigarettes mingled with stale urine. A thin layer of grime seemed to have settled over everything, dulling the surfaces with a gray film. Even the window seemed opaque.

  “I asked Rullon when was the last time he’d seen the guy,�
�� Jacobs was saying, “and he said four days ago—the day the man checked in.” His reading glasses had slipped down his nose, and he pushed them up with his index finger. “Four days is a mighty big window, Pat. It’s gonna be a challenge fixing time of death, let alone cause.”

  “Yeah, and from the looks of it I’m guessing he’s a drinker. But a bunch of empty whiskey bottles won’t tell enough of the story.” Sighing deeply, her father said, “We may be in for an autopsy.”

  Cameryn’s gaze went back to the bed. The cheap polyester cover had been pulled down halfway, and the pillow had a depression in its middle. Only one side of the bed was unmade, though—the other side was as smoothed and tucked as an unopened letter. For some reason the empty half of the bed made her feel a bit sad. Had loneliness driven this man to alcohol? What kind of life must he have had to end up rotting in a cheap motel? But then again, what good did it do to wonder about the reasons? she chided herself. People made choices and people died. It was her job to figure out the death, not the life.

  Her father and the sheriff were deep in a different conversation, this time about the budget and how Silverton would have to foot the bill for the autopsy. Once again she looked around. An old gym bag had been tossed on the floor. Squatting, she searched through it but found nothing save some dirt that had settled into the seams. Next, she turned her attention to a small lamp on the nightstand next to the bed. The bulb had been left on. Beneath the light she found a plastic cup, half-filled with water, which had been placed next to a pad of paper and an ashtray overflowing with the remains of crumpled cigarettes. In writing so wobbly she could barely decipher it, Cameryn made out the beginnings of what she guessed to be a phone number. It began with a string of numbers, but then the wobbly line faded out in a shepherd’s crook, the last digit incomplete.

  She put her hand onto the pad; even through her plastic glove the paper felt warm to the touch. That meant the light must have been on a long time—maybe days—even when the room had been lit by natural sunlight. Curious, she opened the nightstand drawer and searched inside. There was nothing in there except a tattered phone book and an open book of matches. On a hunch she pulled out the phone book—hadn’t he been writing down a number?—with the idea of checking the partial number to a liquor store. As if on cue the pages fell open in her hand to a place where a small baggie had been inserted between its leaves. “Hell-o,” she murmured to herself. When she held the crumpled baggie to the light she saw a dozen yellow hexagons, stamped with the number 80. There was a prescription inside the bag as well, dirty and dog-eared.

  “Hey, what you got there, Cammie?” her father asked.

  At the sound of her name, Cameryn felt her scalp jump. “Uh—I was just—I saw a partial number written on this pad here and I thought maybe our guy was going through the phone book before he died. I found this baggie inside. It’s okay that I picked it up, right?”

  “As long as you’ve got your gloves on. Like I told you, the coroner owns the effects of the deceased. The sheriff can’t touch anything,” he said, raising his eyebrows, “but we can.”

  “So what’s in the bag, Cameryn?” Jacobs asked.

  “There’s some loose pills and a prescription for…I think it says…‘Inderal.’” She smoothed the baggie between her fingers and read the scrolling print. “Yeah, it’s Inderal. It was prescribed to Lawrence Robertson. Wait, I think there’s more than one prescription inside.” She opened the bag and fanned three prescriptions in her hands like playing cards. “Looks like there’s one a month for three more months, all for Inderal.”

  Sheriff Jacobs pulled the end of his long nose. “Inderal? What the heck is that?”

  Her father seemed pleased. Walking over to Cameryn, he took the baggie from her hand. “It’s a drug used for esophageal varices.”

  “Tell me in English,” Sheriff Jacobs snapped.

  “It’s for enlarged veins in the esophagus. If they open up a person can bleed to death.” Squinting, Patrick held the baggie closer to the light. “Looks like Doc Kearney down in Durango wrote it for the deceased. Inderal’s a pill that’s prescribed when a patient’s a boozehound. I’d bet our Mr. Robertson had some serious liver damage to go along with the varices. So he was drinking while taking Inderal. Mmm, mmm, mmm, Cameryn may have found our answer. Nice work. Don’t know if I would have thought to look there.”

  Cameryn flushed with the compliment. It felt good to work with her father, as a team and almost as equals.

  “So what’s next?” Jacobs asked.

  “I’ll call the doc and see what he has to say. If he tells me Robertson was on his last legs we’ll just skip the autopsy and call it a day.” Then, to Cameryn, he asked, “By the way, where’s the camera?”

  Cameryn felt her eyes widen as she realized her mistake. Her job was to photograph the scene and she’d already forgotten her camera and disturbed the evidence. Was the case ruined? “I’m—I’m sorry, Dad,” she said. “I left it in the car.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, don’t look so panicked. This isn’t a homicide. Just go get it now and start shooting the bed and the drawer and all of that. And next time, pictures before you move things, okay?”

  “Sure,” she said, nodding. “Absolutely.”

  Sheriff Jacobs ambled over to Pat, who pulled at the next flimsy drawer, checking for more clues. Cameryn made her way to the hallway and was about to leave when she found herself stopping at the bathroom door. The flies had ceased their buzzing but not their crawling, which created a strange pattern, like a kaleidoscope of undulating black. She could not be seen from where she stood, and that fact gave her pause. The doorknob, dirty brass with a dent in its middle, seemed to stare at her like a single eye.

  Well, why not? she asked herself fiercely. Why shouldn’t she? She wanted to see the man who had slept in only half his bed and washed down pills with whiskey. She wanted to see a real case and apply her book knowledge, and there was no doubt she could handle the gruesome sight. The two men were patronizing her. As quickly as that, she settled it in her mind: She was going in. As she inched closer to the bathroom door, the flies sensed her. They launched from the door, encircling her head, landing in her hair. Batting them away, she turned the knob. When she pushed the bathroom door open, the drone of flies grew louder, and then, in earnest, she fought the urge to turn and run.

  In front of her an arm stretched out from the tub like a tree branch ending in gnarled fingers. The nails were dirty and thick, more like chips of wood than fingertips. A hundred flies or more walked delicately along the flesh of the exposed limb. The body looked bloated and grotesque, more surreal than human. Holding her breath, she moved until she could see his upper torso still propped in a seated position. His neck rested against the edge of the tub and his chin dropped open so that his bottom teeth showed. The eyes were open and sunken; more flies crawled over the vacant pupils that stared like bits of dusty glass. Robertson was a grizzled old man, pale and cold and unceremoniously dead, a man with dirty fingernails and underwater skin stretched so taut it looked like wax.

  Still holding her breath, she moved closer, repelled and drawn at the same time. Something on the man’s face was moving. His skin? He was dead and yet alive, and her mind connected sideways—movement equaled life. For an instant she could make no sense of her own perception. Leaning closer, she tried to understand, then jerked back in horror as she realized the source.

  The movement was from maggots. Tiny larvae wiggled out from beneath his eyelids like grains of crackling rice. They slid from his nose and in his mouth along his tongue, moved from the canals of his ears to migrate down his neck. Frozen, Cameryn stood transfixed until she suddenly realized her urgent need for air. With her hands over her mouth and nose she took a deep, gulping breath. Her peppermint oil, her finger, nothing could stem the sickly sweet scent of rotting flesh that filled her nose, her mouth, her very insides. She was breathing in particles of Larry Robertson. Her stomach twisted over on itself like a coil, and she knew t
hen that she would throw up.

  Gagging, she raced through the bathroom door and out of the motel room and away from the sight and smell of death. Her legs pumped hard as she sprinted around the back of the motel to where the trash cans were propped. She leaned over until she was doubled in two; a second later she threw up into the garbage can, retching from the deepest part of her, glad her father wasn’t watching, glad he hadn’t seen her fail. She puked until she was dry, coughing so hard her eyes teared and her stomach ached. Even with her eyes closed she could still see the maggots and their flickering movements. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and stood, her hands trembling, her throat on fire.

  Something touched her lightly on the shoulder. Whirling around, she stared straight into the eyes of Deputy Crowley.

  Chapter Three

  THROUGH THE BLUR SHE COULD see him, and she noticed with a start that his eyes were a strange color, neither green nor blue but somewhere in between, like the water in the high mountain lakes.

  “Here,” he told her, pressing tissues into her hand. “Take these. Nothing’s as bad as the smell of death, except maybe maggots. I just about lost it when I saw him, too.”

  Cameryn took the fistful of Kleenex and wiped her mouth hard. What could be worse than to be caught puking her guts out, especially in front of a guy her father hated? Embarrassment shot through her as she realized some vomit had landed on her shirt, right on her breast pocket. She tried to wipe it, but only made the smear worse.

  “I’d offer to help, but you might slap me,” the deputy said. He smiled a slow smile.

  Was he laughing at her? After all her talk of wanting to be a forensic pathologist, she was exposed now as the fraud she was. No doubt he’d tell everyone in town that Cameryn Mahoney couldn’t take it. Balling up the tissue, she threw it into the garbage can with as much force as she could. “I gotta go,” she told him. “My dad’s waiting.”

  “Hey, Cameryn, don’t look so mad. I just saw your pop—he was in the middle of telling Jacobs what a great job you did finding those pills in a phone book. He said he’d take you on every case from now on.”