by Adira August
“One thing,” Merisi said. “Why won’t we find him?”
“They live in the mirrors. We don’t know how to get in, but they know how to get out.”
“They?” Merisi asked.
“Demons. They watchin’ us.”
ABE “WINK” WINKELMANN and Hunter Dane walked together to the end of the tented accessway.
“She’ll be out in a minute. You clear on this?”
Wink looked around. “You want me to ride heard on the guys inside so your tech can process the back porch. Why me?”
“You’re experienced and I know you. A lot of guys do. This is complicated and you get it. Even when we were in the Academy you were interested in forensics.”
“True. I’m surprised you remember.”
Hunter laughed. “You lectured us every time you got a couple beers in you. We used to call you ’professor’. You still wanting to work in the lab?”
Wink nodded. “Yeah. Taking the sergeant’s test. Hoping some rank will give me a chance to get out of uniform. How about you? You taking the lieutenant's test? Making it permanent?”
“Yeah, I have the application in my car. No choice, really. Captain is insisting.”
“What do you mean?”
“VanDevere called me in. Told me to take it.”
“No, what do you mean the application’s in your car? It’s three, they close at four-thirty.”
Hunter gave him a blank look.
“Jesus, Dane. Today’s the deadline—first Monday in October to apply. The test is first Monday in November. You got about ninety minutes to get signed up.”
VanDevere.
“Merisi!” Hunter yelled over the lawn. Merisi ran over.
“Take over. This is Wink, he’ll take over for Twee. She’ll be at least an hour in that utility porch. Do not leave her alone at any time. I have something I have to do. When Peat gets back, ask him to take over perimeter. We’ll go in as soon as I get back.”
“Okay.” Merisi seemed surprised, but didn’t ask. He was sure Hunter wouldn’t leave this scene unless he had no choice.
“Keep the office advised,” Hunter called, hurrying toward his car.
Merisi threw him a salute. Hunter swerved to a shallower part of the cut and popped up on the other side.
“What the hell was that?” Merisi asked Wink.
“Politics.”
CAM WAS ON SPEAKER. “Stop by the office on the way-”
“-I don’t have time,” Hunt interrupted.
“When did you decide I was stupid?” Cam went on without waiting for an answer. “The application’s downloadable, I’m filling it out now. I’ll print it out and meet you in front.”
“Sorry. Could you bring your laptop?” Hunt held his breath. He really wanted some time with Cam.
“Yeah. That’d be good.”
Cam sounded as relieved as Hunter felt. “Be there in twenty.”
When Hunt pulled up in front of 440 Dunton Court, he lowered the passenger window so Cam could hand in the application.
Instead, Cam came around the front and opened Hunter’s door. “You’re in my seat.”
Cam never treated Hunt as anything but his respected boss when they were at work. Surprised, Hunter just sat there.
“Get out or jump the console. You’re in a hurry, remember?”
He jumped the console. This consisted of less jumping and more shoving a leg over and awkwardly slithering the rest of his body across the slick plastic top to join that leg on the other side.
“Very graceful.” Cam handed him the multi page application and snapped himself into the driver’s seat. “Check that for accuracy. I’ll drop you off in front and wait for you in the alley.”
Their destination was two blocks and an urban park away. Cam pulled into a loading zone in front. It was ten after four.
“If you stay with the car you can wait here,” Hunter told him. “I’ll only be a few minutes.”
Inside, Hunt rode the elevator up to the Commission offices. The woman at the desk took his application and looked at the clock.
“Just under the wire, Sergeant. VanDevere called you?” She flipped through the pages, checking to see it was filled out correctly and signed.
“Why?”
She time-stamped the document. “Called at four to see if you’d been in. Guess he’s rooting for you.”
If Hunter knew anything with certainty, it was that VanDevere was not in his corner. “I’ll be sure to thank him.”
On the way down in the elevator, Hunter thought about how he’d spent his life doing everything on his own. Fighting every personal and professional battle alone.
He thought of Cam completing his form, thinking of what he could do for Hunter before he’d even been asked.
It occurred to him that it was nice to have a partner. A someone always on his side. Who he could count on. Who did things for him without him asking because he’d never ask. Who loved him.
“Good thing I closed on our townhouse today…”
Cam needed control, parameters. He needed a life he could anticipate. Schedule. He needed to give everything.
… anything for you ...
Maybe it would be okay to relax, finally. Not worry about where to live or who made the most money. To let someone else. To ask, sometimes. To sink gratefully into everything Cam wanted and offered because Hunter Dane couldn’t think of one thing in the world better than Camden Snow.
HUNTER CAME OUT with a stamped receipt he folded in half and locked in the console.
Making the block, Cam headed up Broadway. He slowed as they approached the library. “That’s your favorite hot dog cart on the corner, right?”
“Yeah.”
“You haven’t eaten since breakfast?”
“No.”
Cam pulled over and Hunter jumped out. “You want anything?”
“Nah. I like my arteries.”
Hunt was back in three minutes with two chili dogs and a bottle of water.
“Water?”
“And no cheese sauce. It’s a health dog,” Hunter grinned, taking half a dog in one bite.
Cam laughed. “I’ll drop you by my car. The laptop and I will be at the new place, I have furniture coming.” He glanced at Hunt. “Furniture’s rented. When the case is over, we’ll figure out what we want.”
Hunter started to say he didn’t care but new insight told him while Cam would never show it, it would somehow hurt him. So he agreed.
“I don’t know how to do that, though. I mean, it should like match and be a style or something?”
“I know how to do it. You and I just have to decide what we like. Separate chairs, yours and mine? Or a big long couch like at the A-frame. What kind of desk you want in your office. Like that.”
“I have an office?” Hunter swigged half the water.
“Office, meditation chamber … you can stick a card table in there, if you want. It’s a room. It’s yours.” Cam turned onto Dunton Court.
“Oh. I never had an extra room before.”
Cam smiled at the road ahead.
“Listen,” Hunt said, wadding up napkins and putting them in the trash bag he kept behind the passenger seat. “I’m sorry you got roped into today. Thing is, they want to make the Unit permanent. I’ll see about getting more bodies.”
Cam stopped in the parking lot across from the office.
“We need redundancies,” Hunt went on. “It’s too convenient with you down the hall, too easy to call you. It won’t happen again.”
Startled by Cam’s flush of emotion, Hunt jumped out. He took his time walking around the back of the Bronco to the driver’s door, wondering what the fuck had happened that day.
Cam got out. “Thanks.”
“Sure. Um, one other thing so I don’t forget.”
Cam reached back in for his laptop. “Yeah?”
Hunter felt oddly … shy. It was a rare feeling for him. “Well. Should we, I mean, do you want—are we supposed to look at rings or
something?”
Cam became very still. “If we both want that.”
“Yeah, that’d be good.”
Cam colored lightly, a sign of pleasure. Hunter had the feeling he’d be on his back in the street if Cam gave in to impulse.
Hunter leaned over and kissed him lightly on the mouth. “Go make me a home, okay?”
THEY DIDN’T FIND HIM.
Twee found miniscule droplets of dried wax on the kitchen door frame and door. She swabbed for traces of saliva.
Under a layer of dried leaves, she found threads and fuzz stuck between the floor boards. She cut a strip out of the floor where two boards joined and found blood traces that didn’t need chemical enhancement and special glasses to see.
When she finally used the Leuco Crystal Violet on the chipped white-painted surfaces, she found the walls and ceiling spattered with blood that had been inexpertly cleaned. It had soaked into the weathered boards.
She found hair from at least three people. One gray.
“You find him; I’ll convict him, Boss,” she’d said cheerfully when Hunter returned.
Twee found everything. But they didn’t find him.
By the time Hunt got back, a lot of the crowd had gotten bored with waiting for something to happen and gone home. The media had deadlines and only one local and a stringer stayed close.
The cops who were finished in the accessway he posted around the perimeter. In the fading light, he made sure all flashlights worked. Nothing and no one would get out of that house undetected.
The electricity worked, as Candace kept the furnace on a low setting to prevent weather damage to the pipes and window frames. The toilets were drained, but she kept the water on for the sprinklers.
With the sun sliding behind the peaks of the Front Range, Hunt, Merisi and Peat entered the kitchen through the utility porch. Merisi had the camera. Hunter banished Twee to safety behind the police line.
Once inside, the door locked and chained, Peat cracked the pantry door and retrieved the extra set of keys still hanging there, so no one could get them and escape without breaking a window. He didn’t try the pantry light or even look. He knew exactly where they hung by feel.
Hunter swung the narrow door open, himself. He tugged a chain attached to a bare incandescent bulb and was surprised when it glowed to life.
He was more surprised by how strong the sewage smell was and wondered if the cellar was just below.
“So it’s still pretty much a broom closet,” he said to Peat, who was across the room leaning against the sink.
He nodded. “Small, I know. But Ev liked the idea of a proper pantry.”
A mop, broom and dustpan hung from nails pounded into a board along the side. The uppermost shelf held a large bucket and an old wooden apple crate full of cleaning products, rags and scrub brushes. The top of the bucket almost touched the ceiling.
The other shelves held empty canning jars and supplies, including a large pot with a wire basket insert to lower and raise canning jars. There was a square block of sealing wax and another apple crate of long-handled ladles.
Hunter noted that the floor inside the closet was as clean as the kitchen floor, except for more rodent droppings. Merisi got pics and collected a few samples before they turned off the light and shut the door.
The cellar door was immediately to the left of the pantry door; only a few inches of frame strips separated them. But Hunter ignored it.
His plan was to work the upper floor first. Whoever was in the house, he’d smelled them in the attic space.
He led the men along the hardwood-floored hall to the living room, murky in the fading light. At the foot of the dark stairway to the second floor, he switched on his flashlight.
“Son of a bitch,” he breathed.
Dust.
The powerful beam showed the thick wood banister, the carpet runner and the exposed wood at the sides all appeared to be a uniform shade of gray. The heavy layer of dust was undisturbed. It had been years since anyone used the stairs.
Hunter played his beam along the living room floor. The path they’d taken was easily discernible. The layer of dust had gone unnoticed in the dim light.
Merisi, furthest back, shone his light down the hall they’d just come through. “Looks like there’s less of it as you go toward the kitchen.”
His voice seemed very loud in the silence. They’d all noticed the linoleum in the kitchen was clean. Cleaned. Someone kept it clean. Hunter looked back up the stairs.
“Think Miss Havisham's up there, hangin’ out in her wedding dress?” Peat asked, breaking the tension.
“The old biddy could at least vacuum once every couple years,” Hunt said. Peat chuckled. “Merisi, get a couple shots of the stairway before we go up.”
“Who’s Miss Havisham?”
The older men laughed. Peat gave Merisi a brief rundown of Dickens’ story of the bride jilted at the altar who spends her life in her moldering wedding dress, with the wedding feast rotting on the table.
“Musta had hella rats,” Merisi mused, putting the camera away. “Okay, Boss.”
They mounted the stairs to an eerily Dickensian second floor, every room left just as it had been on the day Mrs. Hortt’s body was found.
Orange remnants of fingerprint powder from the investigation into Evelyn Hortt’s death became visible through the dust under their strong flashlight beams. They’d discovered none of the lights worked.
“Breaker box is in the cellar,” Peat said. “Want me to take a look?”
“Let’s just get on with it.” Hunter didn’t want to interrupt the pattern of the search.
But other than the curled black husk of a large spider in the bathtub, they found no signs of life. No access to the attic space. The bathroom of the century-old house had no vent.
Hunter unscrewed the covers on all the furnace ducts and the cold air return. He lay on his stomach on the filthy floors and used his flashlight, poking and prodding. But the ductwork was solid.
Finally, they examined the one access panel Peat had told them about in the master bedroom closet, painted over and obviously never opened. Hunter found a dressing table chair in what must have been Candace’s bedroom. He carefully kicked the old shoes aside and set it in the closet.
Using his buck knife, he dug into the paint along the seam where the panel rested on the frame. Merisi and Peat kept flashlights trained on the panel. When he’d chipped and dug away a strip clear of paint along the seam, Hunter pushed up with the palms of his hands. It didn’t move.
He pounded with the side of his fist. The angle was awkward limiting the power behind the blows.
Merisi stepped up beside him, only able to get one foot on the chair, bracing the other against the closet wall.
Together they hammered the narrow panel. With a screech of dry wood on dry wood, the panel flew up. They heard a muffled clatter as it fell next to the 2x12 ceiling joist. A junction box was attached to the side of one of the boards, the wires neatly tacked along the wood.
“Well, they sure built the shit out of it,” Merisi said. He stepped down, massaging his hand.
All they saw was an empty black rectangle. Hunt pulled out a measuring tape he’d gotten from Twee’s crime scene kit.
“Seven by fourteen,” he said. Merisi made a note.
Two things on the job made Hunter Dane nervous—searching basements and attics. Going down basement stairs, anyone below could see you and attack you before you could get a visual of what you were descending into.
Going up a ladder-like stair or sticking your head up through an access panel, your skull was vulnerable to being slammed by a boot toe, bludgeon or bullet before you could see if anyone was there.
“Merisi, I think I saw a hand mirror in the bedroom where I got the chair. Look on the dressing table.”
Hunt and Peat followed him with their lights, the beams cleanly defined in the fog of dust they’d kicked up hanging in the air. They kept the doorway lighted until Merisi r
eturned, grinning, carrying small hand mirror with a pink and gold plastic case.
“Careful, Boss. You don’t know what kind of demons might live in this thing.”
“All of them, I imagine,” Hunter said. He held the mirror up over the joists and shone his light into the space.
Then he looked into the oval surface of the mirror.
Attic. Insulation. Shanks of roofing nails. Wires. Shadows.
Hunter shed his leather jacket and shoulder rig. He managed to get one arm and his head into the space. Standing on tiptoe, his eyes just cleared the top of the joists.
He couldn’t see either of the gable vents. Studying the angle of the roof, he realized the vents must be on a line perpendicular to his length of roof. The space was shaped like a plus-sign, and he was at the bottom of one arm. The only way to explore it, was to get into it.
He took a last look. It was silent, not a hint of wind or creak of a settling board. The space smelled of dry wood and dust.
And faintly of sewage.
He handed Merisi his flashlight and struggled to find a way to get his body through the opening. Not possible, even if it hadn’t been too narrow to admit his chest, it was at least three inches shorter than his shoulder width.
“Let me try, I’m smaller.”
Hunter jumped down and Merisi took a turn. Five minutes later, sweaty and dusty, with a tear in a shoulder seam of his shirt, he gave up.
“There’s no way into the attic from the second floor,” Hunter affirmed to Peat.
Peat nodded and did not say ‘I told you so.’
WITH THE BENEFIT of lighting, they soon finished the search of the first floor. It was a relief to retreat from the ever-present dust cloud to the kitchen, again. The cellar was all that was left.
Hunter talked to Torvald and Hansen, the dog handlers outside. Both dogs were sentry and apprehension trained.
“Ace is also explosive trained,” Hansen told him. Hunter asked about the Malinois.
“Tuff was a cadaver dog for Alpine rescue,” Torvald explained. “His handler didn’t know what she was doing and Tuff was uncontrollable. I got him free. DPD doesn’t use cadaver dogs, but he’s perfect for S and A.” The cop grinned and ruffed the dog’s chest hair. “You like catching bad guys, dontcha, Tuff?”
