They didn’t argue with me. Maybe they’d caught the odour too, even if they couldn’t identify it. Living in a climate like Florida’s, how can you fail to recognise the smell of death for what it is?
“Is it – is it him?” Trey’s hushed voice by my shoulder sounded a little wavery.
I glanced back at him, took in the pale but determined face and didn’t repeat my last order.
“Yes, I think so,” I said. “You up to this?”
He nodded once and I wasn’t going to ask him again. Together we took the few short steps along the hallway and opened the door to Henry’s lair.
The man of the house was sitting in the chair where we’d last seen him, amid a sea of wreckage and destruction.
And blood.
Henry’s massive torso had been tied into position with nylon rope and his wrists had been handcuffed to the metal arms of the chair, then double-secured with silver duct tape around his forearms. They must have needed the two methods of holding him down while they methodically broke every one of his fingers.
They’d gagged him while they’d done it, wrapping more duct tape around his face, half covering one ear. It was tight enough to distort Henry’s bulging cheeks and make his jaw sag, like his whole head was being squeezed in the middle. The dirty dishcloth they’d forced into his mouth was just visible beneath the lower corner of the tape, poking out like a lizard tongue.
His head was slumped forwards so his chins rested on his chest. His eyes were closed, but I didn’t bother to check for a pulse. After the men who’d tortured him had finished extracting whatever he had to give them, they’d put a single bullet through the centre of his forehead. They’d held the barrel close enough for the explosive discharge to tattoo an imprint into his flesh around the small neat hole. Henry would, without a doubt, have known exactly what was coming to him.
It hadn’t been a small calibre gun they’d used, either. The impact had lifted off the back of his skull, radically redecorating the window and far wall of the room in the process. The round had kept going, scattering the slats of the venetian blind and taking out the small centre pane of glass, then travelling on to God knows where in the trees beyond.
Behind me I heard a slithering bump and I turned to find Trey had concertina’d slowly down the door jamb. He was still clutching desperately at the woodwork even after his skinny rump had hit the floor.
I opened my mouth to say something but realised there wasn’t much I could say that was going to help in a situation like this. I stepped carefully further into the room, trying to keep my feet out of the blood. The flinty taste of it was sharp on the back of my tongue as I breathed.
Not excitement. Not greed.
Pain.
But who had done this to him? And were they still waiting around to do the same to us?
With an acute awareness of time passing, I eyed what was left of Henry’s prized computer array. Every piece of it had been trashed and I didn’t know nearly enough about them to work out if anything could be salvaged from the ruins. But I was damned if I was going to come this far and leave with nothing. I turned back to Trey. He hadn’t moved a muscle.
“Trey,” I said, loudly. “Would any of this gear still work?”
He shook his head a little as if to clear it, like a boxer who’s just taken a good strong combination to the jaw and is doing his best, against all expectation, to stay in the fight.
“Wha-what?”
“Henry’s computers,” I said, slow and clear. “Would any of them still work enough for us to find out who he was in contact with?”
“I dunno,” Trey said, unable to take his eyes off the corpse. It was the hands, I noticed, more than the head that bothered him. It seemed such a deliberately sadistic act to take the hands of a man who lived by the dexterity of his fingers.
I moved in front of the boy, blocking the vision. “Trey,” I said again, bending over him. “We don’t have much time. Think about it.”
It took him a moment to refocus on me, like an old camera struggling to follow the action. “We might get something off of the hard drive, I guess,” he said at last.
“Great,” I said, giving him an encouraging smile. “Where do I find it and what does it look like?”
“Them,” he said. He cleared his throat. “He was using three separate systems. They’ll each have a hard drive, and he could have a back-up unit somewhere as well.”
“Three plus a back-up?” I repeated. I glanced at my watch. This was all taking much too long. “OK, where are they likely to be?”
Trey shook his head again but just when I was about to snap at him he dragged himself to his feet and wiped his nose across the back of his hand. “Last time we were here I kinda noticed that he only had one machine connected to the Net,” he said.
I shrugged. “Meaning?”
“Less chance of picking up a virus and if you do you don’t, like, lose your whole setup, like you would if they were all networked together.” He nodded towards one of the tower units on the far side of the room, carefully avoiding what lay between him and it. “That’s the only one plugged into a phone jack.”
“How difficult is it to take the hard drive out of it?”
“A coupla minutes if I had a screwdriver.”
“Here.” I pulled my Swiss Army knife out of my pocket and threw it across to him. “Get on with it.”
Trey didn’t want to come any further into the room than he had done already and he certainly didn’t want to touch the computer he’d indicated. It had been behind Henry at the moment he’d been killed and its outer casing had taken on a colour and texture not usually available in office equipment catalogues.
He took a quick peek at what was left of the back of Henry’s head just once while he worked. That was enough, even for a fifteen-year-old kid who lives on a diet of thrill rides and horror flicks. After that he kept his back slightly turned and his chin tucked down.
As soon as the stained outer casing was removed, his hands seemed to steady and he fumbled less. The hard drive he’d mentioned was about the same size as a double-album CD case. It wasn’t long before he stood up with it in his hand.
I grabbed a towel from the kitchen and quickly wiped over the surfaces I thought we’d touched. Better for the police not to find our prints at another murder scene, if we could help it. I smiled bracingly again. “OK?” I said. “Then let’s go.”
We hurried back down the hallway as far as the outer screen door. I picked my bag off the floor and Trey shoved the hard drive into it.
Scott had swung the Dodge round and was sitting with the motor turning over, as requested. He saw us appear and started to wave, just as a man in a dark suit stepped out from behind the shrubbery of the house opposite.
I elbowed Trey back into the hallway and brought the SIG up in front of me, almost as one move. In the truck, Scott, Aimee and Xander hadn’t noticed what was going on behind them and when they saw the gun come out their expressions froze.
“Get down!” I shouted.
The man in the suit reacted to the warning much faster than the kids. I didn’t see him pull a gun but one had suddenly appeared in his hand. He kept low, crabbing sideways so that he had the cover of a rusting Chevrolet. I put one round into the front end of it, shattering a headlight, just to keep his head down.
As I did so, another two figures appeared round the corners of the houses on either side of Henry’s, closing in fast. This was getting silly.
“Get back into the house!” I yelled to the kids.
Xander and Aimee jumped straight out of the pickup bed onto the scrubby front lawn, hitting the ground already running. Scott should have just hutched across the front seat of the Dodge and left via the passenger door, the one nearest to the house, but panic stole from his logic and left it weak.
He opened the driver’s door and got straight out onto the road instead. As he sprinted round the front of the
