Dead Man Running

by Steve Hamilton

  Livermore stayed in his vehicle for a few seconds, watching the man walk around the house. A cold wind picked up and the man turned away from it, hunched over and clutching at his coat. There were two inches of new snow on the ground.

  When he got out of the vehicle, Livermore took a moment to reset himself. Then he approached the man and gave him a smile.

  “You must be the inspector,” he said.

  The man was forty or fifty pounds overweight. He wore thick glasses, and his coat was tattered and stained with a decade’s worth of coffee spills and sawdust.

  “I am,” the man said, taking off his glove for one moment to shake Livermore’s hand. “Finally feels like February, eh?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I just came from Arizona.”

  “Lucky you,” the inspector said. “You should have stayed there.”

  “I think I’d already overstayed my welcome.”

  The inspector smiled and nodded and looked up at the roof of the house. “I got started with the exterior. Doesn’t look like the place gets used much these days.”

  “I only come back here from time to time,” Livermore said. “Special occasions.”

  “Whose name is this place in, anyway?” the inspector said, looking at his sheet. “I was looking at the records and—”

  “That wasn’t necessary.” This man wasn’t here to ask questions like this. Somewhere in the town hall there was a piece of paper with his mother’s maiden name on it, a name that had never been corrected by the barely competent small-town clerk who sent out the tax bills. Livermore paid the bills and never corrected the error, because he knew it gave this place an important layer of protection.

  “I understand,” the inspector said, “but if you’re going to sell it . . .”

  “I’m not selling. I just wanted to have a thorough inspection done. So please continue. You started with the exterior . . .”

  The inspector nodded, back on track, back on familiar ground. “I’ve already covered some of the basics here. The grading, drainage away from the house, landscaping, walkway . . .”

  “You have a list.”

  “Yes, of course.” The inspector showed him the dozen pages on his clipboard. “No tree branches or crawling vines touching the house, no standing water, the downspouts direct the water in the right direction, the deck around back doesn’t appear to have any termite damage . . .”

  “So everything looks good.”

  “Just getting started,” he said. “Paint looks decent. No cracks or peeling. But how old are those shingles?”

  “At least thirty years.”

  “See, that might be an issue,” the inspector said. “They look like they might need replacing soon.”

  “Sounds expensive.”

  The inspector shrugged, then flipped to the next page.

  “Ridge lines straight and level . . . No bowing . . . Windows and doorframes square . . .”

  He kept walking around the house, asking himself the questions and putting a tick on his paper, depending on whichever answer he seemed to settle on.

  Livermore watched him carefully. He wanted to learn how this man walked around a house. How he flipped through his pages. Every nuance of every single movement.

  “Drip caps on the windows,” he said, turning and shaking his head. “That might be another issue. Some of these older homes . . .”

  He kept moving down his list. Gutters, chimney, soffits, fascia. Livermore stopped him when he started talking about the building code for attic venting.

  “You gotta have a one-to-one-hundred-fifty ratio,” the inspector said, clearly one of those men who can talk for hours about the one thing in this world they know about. “What they call the net free ventilation area to the total area vented. Unless you’ve got the right kind of vapor barrier, in which case you can go to a one-to-three-hundred.”

  An arcane detail, Livermore thought. Perfect.

  Before they went inside, Livermore fired up the generator.

  “You’re not hooked up to the grid?” the inspector asked.

  “Afraid not.”

  The inspector shook his head again, making another mark on his page.

  When they were finally inside, Livermore watched the inspector start in the attic, checking for stains on the underside of the roof and the depth of the insulation. Then they moved through each of the rooms, starting upstairs. Ceilings, floors, walls, windows. Lights and electrical outlets. They came downstairs and spent several minutes in the kitchen.

  “You need GFCI on any outlet within six feet of the sink,” the inspector said, explaining that it stood for ground-fault circuit interrupter, and then taking out his tape measure to verify the outlet was five and a half feet away. He made another check mark on his sheet.

  GFCI, Livermore said to himself. Another excellent detail.

  The inspector checked all of the plumbing in the kitchen and the downstairs bathroom. He tested the smoke detectors, then he lit a match and tested the draw in the fireplace, and recommended a carbon monoxide detector even though the local ordinances didn’t require one.

  “You know your way around a house,” Livermore said. “Where did you get your training?”

  “It’s a set of courses given by ASHI. The American Society of Home Inspectors.”

  “How many years have you been on the job?”

  “Twenty, twenty-one . . .”

  “Do you work for the county or the state?”

  “I work for the county,” he said. “They do have a statewide bureau. That’s a different job.”

  Livermore nodded. Still absorbing every word. Every gesture.

  “If I mess up bad enough, the state guy will be here to have my ass in a sling. Those guys are real pricks, too. Every single one of them.”

  A state inspector, Livermore thought. Bad news for everyone.

  “The basement is last,” the inspector said. “Gotta warn you, that’s usually where we find the most problems.”

  “What kind of problems?”

  “Moisture, usually. The water table’s fairly high here. I already noticed your basement sits pretty low. You ever have any flooding?”

  “Not that I can remember.”

  “We’ll see,” the inspector said. “If you’ve had water, I’ll be able to tell.”

  Livermore stopped him. “Are you suggesting I’m lying to you now?”

  “No, no,” the man said, putting up one hand. “I’m just saying, this house has been here a long time. Longer than you and I, probably.”

  “I understand,” Livermore said, giving him another smile to put him at ease. “And how about dead bodies? Do you have an entry on your list for that?”

  “Depends on how many,” the inspector said, giving him a wink.

  “How about five?”

  “Five dead bodies,” the inspector said, pretending to write this down on his clipboard. “See, that’s even worse than the moisture.”

  Livermore kept smiling as the inspector waited at the door to the basement. After a few long seconds, the man scratched the back of his head and cleared his throat.

  “So can we take a look in the basement now?” he finally said.

  “No,” Livermore said as his smile disappeared. “I think this inspection has just ended.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  I DROVE THROUGH the rest of the night, on what I hoped would be the final leg of this journey. To the place where this monster had come from.

  Columbus, Ohio.

  I didn’t know what I’d find when I got there. I didn’t know if he would be waiting for me again, or what he would have planned for me if he was. But the sun was up by the time I got there, the light filtered through the falling snow, after six hours of hard driving across Illinois and Indiana.

  I had to try to remember the address of his child
hood home from the files I had seen. The name of the street was in that file I’d seen in Agent Larkin’s office. I had to bring it back, because I was on my own now, with nobody to help me.

  I could see the name. A Canadian province.

  Ontario.

  That was it. Ontario Street.

  I pulled over at the next gas station and filled up, went inside and bought a map of Columbus. When I saw the reaction from the man at the counter as he looked at me, I realized I was still covered in dried blood, both from the woman in the hotel and from Agent Larkin, aside from already looking like a man who hadn’t had a real night’s sleep in several days. I went into the bathroom to clean myself up as well as I could, stood there and looked at my own face in the mirror for a long moment. It was the face of a man who had already seen too much.

  Find your second wind, I told myself. Or the third wind or the fourth wind or whatever the hell this is by now.

  Find something fast, because this isn’t over yet.

  I went back out and put on the winter coat I’d brought with me from Michigan. I sat in the car studying the map until I found Ontario Street. I took a breath, put the car in gear, and headed out onto the road.

  When I got downtown, I hooked north, found Ontario Street just east of the expressway. It ran south to north across several blocks, with little one-story houses on small lots packed tight on either side, the street itself crumbling from the four seasons of hard weather. A real working-class neighborhood, in contrast to the penthouse suite in Phoenix.

  I figured I’d eventually have to get out and start asking people where the old Livermore house was, until I kept going and finally saw one of the bigger houses in the neighborhood. Two stories high, standing above the little ranch homes on either side of it, with old wooden siding covered with peeling gray paint. A metal FOR SALE sign was stuck in the middle of the small front yard. The news about Martin T. Livermore had obviously already reached Columbus, and several people with rocks and spray cans remembered he had once lived here, because several of the windows were broken and the house had been tagged with graffiti. I could make out the word MURDERER in bright orange paint, just above the front door. It would have taken the whole day to figure out the rest of it, the messages scrawled on this house by the people who were drawn to it, people who felt the need to leave their mark on it, like some primitive totem that would keep the evil from spreading. I’d seen it before, on the houses owned by murderers in Detroit. First you tag the house, then you break in and vandalize it.

  Then, at least in Detroit, you burn it down.

  I parked my car on the street and got out. I saw an old man walking down the sidewalk with a little dog on a leash. He had his coat wrapped up tight around him as he walked into the cold wind.

  “Excuse me,” I said to him, nodding toward the house. “How long has this place been empty?”

  “Mrs. Livermore’s been gone, what, two years now,” the old man said. “Place is such a wreck, they can’t give it away. Then when the news broke about her son . . .”

  “Did you know him?”

  “Haven’t seen him since he was a kid,” the man said, shaking his head.

  I thanked him and let him get back to his dog-walking. He went a few yards before he turned to me one more time. “I tell ya,” he said, “I knew that Martin was a strange one. Even back then.”

  He didn’t wait for anything else from me. He kept going down the street, leaving me to stand there alone. And to figure out what the hell to do next.

  You drew a goddamned arrow pointing to your hometown, I said to the wind. So here I am.

  I was about to go to the front door, but then I remembered what Agent Madison had said about the agents already processing this place, and what Agent Larkin had said about calling ahead to Columbus, in case he came back here. They had to be watching, so I stayed on the sidewalk, looking up at the house like just another curious bystander. Then I got back in my car and drove down the street. I clocked the sedan parked half a block down, the man behind the wheel looking at a newspaper, doing a professional job of not looking back at me.

  I kept going, circling the block and coming to the house that was directly behind the Livermores’. I parked on that street, giving all of the cars a quick scan. I didn’t see anybody else doing surveillance, so I went down the driveway and hopped over the back fence, onto the Livermores’ property.

  There was a detached garage, in even worse shape than the house. I looked through the window. There were no cars inside, just ratty old lawn furniture and tools and a lawn mower.

  I crossed the yard to the back door, leaving my footprints in the newly fallen snow. There was a sign posted on the door, warning that any trespassing would be aggressively prosecuted. It was signed by the Columbus Division of Police and the FBI. When I peeked through the window in the door, I saw a kitchen with mid-century appliances and a tile floor with a road map of cracks running in every direction. I tried the doorknob. It didn’t turn. I took a quick look around, knew I was hidden from the man parked out front, saw nothing else but empty backyards on either side of me. I hit the lowest glass panel with the heel of my hand, then reached inside, careful not to cut myself on the broken glass, and turned the knob from the inside.

  Then I stepped into the childhood home of Martin T. Livermore.

  There was a stale smell of mothballs and cigarette smoke, misery and insanity and God knows what else. I flipped on the light switch for a moment. A single bare bulb, hanging from an open fixture, cast a greenish light on the kitchen. Every cabinet was open and empty.

  I turned off the light. Thirty seconds in this place, and I already wanted to be back outside, breathing the cold, fresh air. But I kept going.

  I went into the living room, saw my own reflection in the mirror above the fireplace. There was a couch that should have been dragged out to the curb years ago, a coffee table with a half dozen scars along one edge, places where cigarettes had been left to burn. An old console television. The curtains were drawn shut, keeping everything in near darkness. I didn’t want to turn on any more lights, not if they could be seen from the front of the house, but I did go close to the fireplace mantel and look at the framed photographs that were stacked on the floor, left here by whoever had been given the task of cleaning this place out. Probably throwing everything else away, but when you come to something like this, a half dozen photographs from someone else’s life, it’s the one thing you can’t bring yourself to toss in the Dumpster.

  The first was a black-and-white wedding picture. Mr. and Mrs. Livermore. A small, timid-looking woman in a white gown, a man twice her size in an Army dress uniform. One look at the unsmiling face of this man, a man now dead and buried, and I was already getting a small glimpse into the life that Martin T. Livermore had lived here in this house. An only child, with an Army father who probably domineered his wife and disciplined his son severely . . .

  No, I told myself. Don’t even start down that road. None of this turns a man into a serial killer. You can look for a reason for the rest of your life, and it will never be enough.

  There was another photograph of the two parents with a young child in a baby carriage. The man still wasn’t smiling. Then one more photograph of Martin as a three-year-old, wearing a little Army uniform, looking up at the camera and squinting in the sun.

  And then nothing after that. No photographs from his teenage years. Or his adulthood. Maybe someone had taken those photographs. Or maybe Livermore’s mother was trying to stop time, trying to remember her son only as a toddler, and nothing beyond that.

  She died before he was ever arrested, I thought. But had she known that her son was a monster?

  How could she not know?

  I kept walking through the house. A bathroom with an old clawfoot tub, a master bedroom, another table scarred with cigarette burns. More closed curtains. The darkness and the silence, it was unnerving
.

  Show me why you brought me here. There has to be something else . . .

  I went up the stairs, hearing them creak with each step. Whoever had cleaned out the first floor had come up these same stairs, and for whatever reason had given up on the job, leaving everything exactly as it had been on the day Livermore’s mother had died. There was a sewing room with baby clothes still spread out on a table, then a baby’s nursery that looked like something preserved in a museum. The room next to that was apparently Martin’s. It was half the size of the nursery. Meaning what, I don’t know. His mother had been either waiting for Martin’s brother or sister, who never came, or hell . . . I didn’t even want to think about it anymore. I kept the light off, but there was enough light to see the bed, neatly made up with a patchwork quilt. The desk and the dresser. The shelf hanging on the wall, with a collection of plastic models. Everything still the way it was. Cars, airplanes . . . Livermore’s young mind already thinking like an engineer. And then the body of a man supported by a stand, his skin transparent so that all of his organs were visible. Next to that the body of a woman, with the same transparent skin.

  A lot of kids had these, I knew, but here, in this room, these bodies with the clear plastic skin looked obscene.

  I opened up the drawers to the dresser, found nothing but old clothes. In the desk drawer there was nothing but pens and paper clips and everything else you’d expect to find. In the closet, more clothes hanging, and leaning against one wall was a large telescope.

  This room was almost as sterile and impersonal as his apartment in Phoenix. It wasn’t until I’d gone out and found that metal shed he had rented . . . That was where I had seen the real Livermore . . .

  So where’s the real Livermore in this house?

  The FBI had already been here. I knew that. They’d gone through every room, seen everything that I’d seen. But they didn’t expect to find anything.

  I did.

  I knew there was something else.

  When I went back out into the hallway, I saw the attic access door above my head. A rope hung from one end, with a red wooden ball on the end. I grabbed the ball and pulled down, hearing the whole thing screech like a wounded animal as the stairs were extended down to the floor.