Murder Theory Read online

  There’s a shelf of books, mostly fantasy novels and a few role-playing games. I point them out to Duffy. “Did he have any friends?”

  “Not that I’m aware of.”

  I walk over and take a look at the games. Some of them are new. I hold up the latest edition of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. With it are several filled-out character sheets. “You check the local comics shop or game store?”

  She shakes her head. “Nope.”

  “They might know him. Not that it makes a difference now. But he might have had a few friends there.”

  I get the impression that Benjamin wasn’t antisocial—well, except for the whole murdering hookers thing—he was simply an introvert. You don’t role-play if you hate people. You play these games if you don’t know how to interact with others and are looking for a way to connect. The rules and routines of RPGs make it easy for even the most socially awkward person to spend a few hours in the company of other people without worrying about what to say.

  When I was dealing with the loss of my father, I’d go play D&D over at an older kid’s house. There was a small group of us that would game on Sunday afternoons. I never spent much time with them socially because of the age gap, but when we gamed, I could lose myself in an adventure and not stress out about how I was going to make it through life without Dad there to help me out.

  Without those gaming sessions, I probably would have stayed in my room all the time. I never told my mother or the psychologist she had me see about my D&D habit. I’m sure they would have thought it was deviant behavior, tantamount to Satan worship.

  I actually think schools should encourage role-playing games. It helps kids with limited social groups find something in common with others and learn how to interact. I don’t have the data to back that up, but that’s what it did for me. And maybe it did the same for Benjamin. For a time, anyway . . .

  I put the games back and follow Duffy to the bathroom. This also looks cleaner than it should. The forensics department probably searched the drains for evidence.

  There are dirty shoe prints on the tile, and the hamper is overflowing with sweat-stained clothes. Thomas pokes his nose into the room and stares at us for a moment before going on about urgent dog responsibilities.

  Bam! Duffy and I both flinch at a loud sound coming from downstairs. We rush to the stairs, where the dog is standing at the top step.

  “Fucking thing!” yells Robert.

  We hurry down the steps to see Robert banging a wrench against a heating unit on the wall.

  “Goddamn thing doesn’t do shit,” he growls.

  He sees us watching, and his hand tightens around the wrench, his fingers going pale. After a tense moment, he relaxes, letting the wrench clatter to the ground near a toolbox, and sits back down in a recliner.

  “I can take a look,” I offer.

  “Don’t bother.” He starts to rub his forehead.

  “Migraines?” I ask, fishing through his toolbox.

  He stares at me with a look that could kill. “You a doctor? I said, don’t bother.”

  Technically . . .

  “Sorry. Sometimes headaches can be caused by dehydration.” I stand, leaving the toolbox alone.

  “Thanks for the tip,” he replies insincerely. “You done here?”

  “You been to visit your mother?” asks Duffy.

  “I’ve been busy,” he replies.

  “Clearly.”

  Robert tenses up. “Those cunt nurses said I had to come during visiting hours. Fucking bitches.” He says the words as he stares right at Duffy.

  She doesn’t let it faze her. “Well, she’d love to see you. Maybe you can find a way for Thomas to visit her, too.”

  “Yeah, whatever.” He starts to sort through a stack of books, feigning interest in them.

  Thomas is watching us from the top of the stairs. I think Duffy’s contemplating taking the poor dog with us. I’m not sure Robert would care.

  “You good?” Duffy asks me.

  “Thank you, Mr. Pale,” I say to Robert.

  “Mmm. Okay.”

  We let ourselves out and walk until we’re beneath the one functioning streetlight and out of earshot of the house.

  “He’s nice,” I say sarcastically.

  “Actually, he wasn’t that much of an asshole when we first talked to him. He was the calmer, more mature one. Of course, that was before his brother was charged with murder and his mom ended up in the hospital.”

  “And no forensics tied him to the victims?”

  Duffy gives me a look. “No. And, like I said, we have hard evidence he was out of town when it happened.”

  I nod, thinking. “I guess he’s just stressed.” Actually, I’m even more suspicious. First his brother turns serial killer and now Robert is acting like . . . a psychopath.

  “Well, let me know if you need anything else. I have my own troubled kids to go home to.”

  “Thank you,” I reply as I shake her hand. “I appreciate your help.”

  “Good luck with your project.” She gets in her car and leaves me on the empty street.

  I get into my rental and start it up. In the rearview mirror, I can see Robert watching me from the living room window.

  I tell people it’s not a gut instinct per se—it’s a neurological response triggered by one or more stimuli that are either unconscious or barely at our sensory threshold. But, man, does my gut tell me something weird is going on.

  Robert Pale makes me nervous.

  I turn the corner and double back to the other side of the block.

  I’m not done here.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  RUST

  Robert Pale is an angry man. He hasn’t been accused of anything, but neither was his brother until he decided to slash open his supervisor. Carl Dunhill wasn’t known as an angry man, either, until his fishing buddies started to wash ashore. Daniel Marcus was a quiet, nonconfrontational forensic specialist until he murdered his coworkers.

  Robert Pale’s behavior felt like more than that of a man upset at being hassled by the police. If I had to put it into precise words, I would say he was acting like he had something to hide.

  Still, Detective Duffy and I were able to peek into all the rooms. While a teenage runaway could be shoved into a closet that we didn’t search, Pale didn’t seem too concerned about where we looked.

  Logically speaking, if he didn’t have someone shoved into the couch under him, and he wasn’t worried about us searching the house, then either he wasn’t up to something or he wasn’t particularly concerned that we’d discover what he was hiding.

  A few things got me thinking. When he was at the door, he was wearing a tank top, yet he got upset at the heater for not being all that hot. Why didn’t he have on a sweater?

  There was also the dirt on the floor. The walkway from the street to the house was concrete. You wouldn’t track in dirt unless you’d been walking somewhere else.

  I get out of my car and walk up to the house that sits directly in back of the Pale home. It’s a run-down structure with a foreclosure sign. A large sheet of plywood has been nailed to the front door.

  I walk around the side of the house, stepping through a metal gate that comes to my waist. Sheets of plywood and garbage cans line the side of the house. The backyard is an overgrown jungle of weeds. A rusted swing set sits derelict in the corner, waiting for ghost children to come play.

  Light is visible from the kitchen of the Pale house. A boulder is propping open the rear screen door. A small gate separates the two properties, maybe put there to allow neighbors to easily exchange lawn mowers and cups of sugar.

  I think of poor Thomas trapped inside a home with an uncaring owner while his human mother is probably on her last legs in the hospital.

  The dog seemed to keep his distance from his owner. He liked to follow us around, but when Robert was raging at the heater, Thomas stayed at the top of the stairs.

  I retrace the sequence of events:

  W
e showed up and Duffy pounded on the door. We waited a minute or more for Robert to answer. When he arrived, he seemed confused as to why we were there, even though Duffy told him through the door.

  Why didn’t he hear her?

  Maybe because he was too far away?

  The Pales’ backyard is covered with overgrown weeds, but flagstones lead from the concrete deck to the fence where I’m lurking.

  Just to the side of the kitchen door there’s a garbage can.

  It’s an odd place for one if they’re taking their trash to the street.

  I reach down to unlatch the gate. Moving it only an inch makes a loud squeak. I stop, afraid Robert will burst through the back door.

  Minutes go by and nothing happens. I move the gate more slowly this time and slide my body through.

  I’m not sure if this is trespassing, because Mrs. Pale gave us permission to search the premises. Either way, my curiosity and concern are too strong to stop.

  I creep over to the trash can and carefully lift the lid, afraid that I’m about to come nose first with Thomas’s yard droppings. Instead, the can is empty—or mostly empty.

  There’s a rag at the bottom. I peer closer, but it’s too dark to see what it is. I decide to use just my thumb and forefinger to raise it out of the can and into the light of the porch.

  I hold up a dark flannel shirt for inspection.

  The pattern is hard to make out, but something glistens in the light. At first, I think it’s water from the bottom of the can; then I notice a dark drop fall from the frayed edges at the bottom.

  Blood.

  Robert answered the door in a tank top . . . He was wearing this right before and threw it into the trash. That’s why he was cold. And why it took so long for him to let us in.

  I lower the shirt back inside and return the lid to the top of the can as quietly as I can. Still, the metal-scraping-metal screech sounds loud to my ears. I wince when I hear the sound of Thomas’s dog collar as he comes running to the back of the house to inspect the source of the noise.

  Damn it.

  You’re a good dog, Thomas. Too good.

  I wait for him to start barking and call attention to my presence, but he doesn’t. I can hear him sniffing at the door, but he just puts his nose there and waits, I assume.

  Good boy.

  I turn to the postage-stamp backyard. I didn’t notice any dead hookers as I walked across the flagstones.

  Dead hookers . . .

  Damn it, Theo. You just used a dehumanizing punch line in your own train of thought. Were any of the young women I dug up in Montana punch lines? When I see their faces in the middle of the night, do I want to laugh? Do I belittle them for the horrible things that happened to them before I found them?

  Words have meaning. While I’ll argue until I’m blue for my right to use whatever words I want to, that doesn’t mean I have to desensitize myself.

  I sigh and scan the grass again. I still don’t see any bodies. A body is a neutral concept. Impersonal, but not judgmental.

  I’m a scientist—neutral is good. Neutral is where I want to be.

  So, it doesn’t look like Robert picked up his brother’s hobby.

  Or did he?

  What assumptions am I making? What am I forgetting? When we knocked on the door, we heard a metal squeak—like a gate closing. Like the gate I just slipped through. The gate leading to the abandoned house behind the Pale home.

  I look to the abandoned house’s dark rear porch. A sheet of plywood is next to the back door, not over it. Someone removed the barrier.

  Damn.

  What have you been up to, Robert?

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  DUSK

  There was a haunted house in my hometown outside Austin. Or at least the other kids in the neighborhood tried to convince me the house was haunted. The middle-school playground buzzed with stories about the Ox House or the Barrow Place. The specifics were fuzzy.

  The broad strokes were that the large, single-story ranch home with the half-acre lot used to belong to a group of Satan worshippers who murdered children and fed them to their ox god—when they weren’t in the middle of a Dungeons and Dragons campaign.

  Kids talked about investigating the place all the time. Well, Rodney Chuff, Frank Donovan, Emilio Paz, and I finally agreed to inspect the house, which had had a FOR SALE sign on it for as long as anyone could remember.

  The night we were going to do the deed, I remember pedaling my Mongoose BMX bike to the house in the fading light of dusk, speculating on all sorts of horrific sights we’d see—but knowing deep down that ghosts weren’t real.

  That was my first personal paradox: I knew ghosts weren’t real, but I was scared.

  What am I scared of? I asked myself as I came to a stop on my bike and saw the creepy house—a rock-and-cedar fortress that looked like a southwestern tomb. The sun had almost set, and I remember thinking, If Dracula lived in Texas, this is where he’d be.

  I put my bike in a stand of trees and walked around the house. The sole member of my group to arrive, I figured the others had chickened out. All the schoolyard talk was only that. To heck with them. I was going to see some ghosts, or not.

  The back porch had been collecting tumbleweeds, but the yard had been cut, probably because of some management deal with whoever controlled the property.

  I found a dog door on a side entrance and was able to push the inside cover upward. It might have kept raccoons out, but it wasn’t eleven-year-old–proof.

  I slid through the hole and onto the linoleum floor. Orange light from the fading sun cast an otherworldly glow around the house. I was as nervous as I’d ever been and decided this was what a house on the edge of hell must look like. Then a different part of my brain took over and I imagined that this was what it would look like on Mars or a planet that orbited a red sun.

  What if ghosts were alien visitors?

  I took out my blue plastic flashlight with its weak beam and probed the nooks and crannies of the empty house. There were no ghosts. No aliens. Just an empty house.

  I spent an hour roaming the barren rooms, imagining Martian hieroglyphs and strange sarcophagi containing extraterrestrial mummies.

  When I climbed back through the dog door, night had fallen. I knew something about myself as I dusted off my pants on the back patio. My curiosity was more powerful than my fear.

  The next day at school, I didn’t even bother telling the others I’d been inside the house. Wandering the rooms with my light, exploring that alien tomb, had been my special moment. If I told them, it wouldn’t be the same. They’d have destroyed the sanctity of it with laughter or literally tried to destroy it with vandalism.

  Standing behind the Pale house, I know I should call Duffy and tell her we need to look at the derelict home behind the Pales’, but I don’t. I’m afraid of what I’m about to find but, perversely, I’m excited about finding it on my own.

  This is dangerous.

  I take a glance back at the Pale home, then climb up the steps to the wooden porch of the other house. The wood around the lock has been scraped away with a crowbar or some other tool. When I push the door, it slides open into a dark interior.

  I leave my penlight off until I’m inside the home. I’m afraid that Robert might see the glow and become suspicious. After I step past the threshold, I close the door and find myself in complete darkness.

  I don’t turn on the light just yet. I focus on my senses.

  The wind is blowing around the house, and the wood is making creaking noises. Somewhere water drips and animals scurry through crawl spaces.

  As my eyes adjust, I can make out the faint light coming from the edges of the boards blocking the windows. Most of the house is dark pools of nothing, but I have a sense of the boundaries of the space.

  I step farther into the kitchen and spot the outline of a door, just like the one that led to the Pales’ basement.

  I turn the knob and pull the door open. A musty scent greets my n
ostrils. For some reason, I still don’t turn on my light.

  I walk down the basement steps, taking each slowly, afraid that I’ll land on emptiness and fall into a bottomless void or trip and break my neck.

  As I make my way to the bottom of the steps, the hair on the back of my neck begins to rise. This is that nongut instinct telling me something.

  I’m not alone.

  My skin flushes as my fear response goes into full effect. I flip on the light and pan it across the basement.

  Boxes obstruct my view, but I see something move out of the corner of my eye.

  “Hello?” I call out, suddenly realizing that I can’t be sure Robert’s still back in his house. He could be down here.

  I move toward a wall to put my back against it and sweep the light around, trying to get a better glimpse of what I saw.

  I remind myself that the advantage of a flashlight is that whatever I’m aiming it at is blinded.

  “Hello?”

  I spot a leg behind a stack of boxes. A black shoe and blue trousers.

  I move closer, and the rest of the body becomes visible. It’s a man leaning against the wall. He’s an older black man in a United States Post Office uniform. His hands are bound, and his letter bag is a few feet away, its contents spread across the floor.

  He’s moaning.

  I step to the man and kneel at his side. “Can you hear me?”

  Groan.

  I use my light to check his pupils. They dilate. Good. But the bruises on his head don’t look so good. Blood is trickling out from his shirt under his jacket.

  My first take is that he was beaten with something blunt and then stabbed with something sharp. Maybe a wrench? Like the one Robert was assaulting his heater with?

  I glance around and spot a screwdriver sitting in a small pool of blood.

  That would explain why he didn’t want me attempting to fix the heater. Asking for a screwdriver could have led to an awkward silence.

  I check the name on the uniform. Clay.

  “Mr. Clay, my name is Theo. I’m going to open your shirt and have a look. Okay?”

  Groan.

  I rip open the shirt. His white undershirt is mottled with bloodstains. I don’t like the one by his liver. It’s wetter than the rest. I raise the shirt and see a trickle of blood pouring out.