here, or to know that this would be the lady of the house – Dan Leach's wife.
He had used a small screwdriver with a compartment in the removable head for several other shafts – Phillips-head, awl, and so on-to break in through this kitchen door, and now he slipped the tool away in his hip pocket and quietly closed the door. The kitchen smelled like sweet garbage. Grofield stepped over her legs, and went on through the doorway opposite to look over the rest of the house.
It was a small and neat house near Enid, Oklahoma, with a vegetable garden in the back, a farm- equipment dealer in a concrete block building for the nearest neighbor, and a straight flat two-lane concrete state highway out front. Grofield had phoned Leach here two or three times, but had never actually seen the place before. He was surprised now at how modest and small it was, and supposed that reflected Mrs. Leach's viewpoint on life, rather than Dan's. He'd had the impression Dan, when flush, liked to party, but now it seemed his wife had been a different type entirely.
Well, neither of them would do any more partying. Or cleaning. The house was almost painfully clean, so neat and orderly that the thin layer of dust that had settled since the woman's death became the place's most prominent feature, simply because it was so obviously an interloper.
Kitchen, living room, bedroom, bath. A crawl space for an attic, reached by a trap door in the bedroom ceiling and not high enough for a man to stand up straight in. A basement only barely big enough for the utilities it contained.
It was clear what had happened. Myers had come here since Grofield had seen him, knowing that Dan Leach's wife, through her brother, had been Dan's route to find him, and not wanting Grofield to be able to use the same route.
If he found the wife's brother, would Myers have been there first, too?
Grofield, in his half-dozen years working with professional thieves, had met a number of social misfit types, but he had never before met anyone so ready to kill, or so quick to assume that murder was the best answer to any problem. How many people had Myers murdered in his life and how had he managed to avoid the law so far?
And what was the brother's name? Dan had known Myers through his wife's brother. Even assuming the brother was still alive, what was his name, and how would Grofield now go about finding him?
Grofield searched the house. He found photographs of Dan and a woman who was more than likely the woman now dead in the kitchen. He found a few photographs of Dan and the woman with another man, and some with the woman and the other man without Dan, and supposed he was looking at the face of the brother. But the face wouldn't get him very far without the name.
Didn't any of these people write to each other? He searched dresser drawers and boxes on closet shelves, to no effect. A bookshelf mounted on the bedroom wall contained about thirty books, all Reader's Digest condensed volumes; he shook them out one at a time, and in the process found Dan's emergency fund, ten hundred dollar bills, five of them fluttering down from each of two books. But no names and no addresses. Grofield stuffed the thousand dollars in his wallet and left the bedroom.
The only phone in the house was in the living room, standing on the Enid directory on the end table beyond the sofa. But there was nothing written in or on the directory, and nothing but poker chips and playing cards were stored in the end table. There was no personal notebook with addresses and phone numbers anywhere around.
After a while, Grofield had to admit to himself that he was wasting his time, the house had been stripped. A woman who maintained a home like this one, small and neat and orderly, would surely have kept addresses and phone numbers neatly in a pad somewhere handy to the phone. More than that, she would surely have a Christmas card list somewhere in the house, and Grofield guessed she'd been the type who'd keep whatever letters from friends and relatives she'd ever received. That they were all gone, without a trace of search, suggested that Myers had made the woman gather up letters and address books and the like herself before he'd killed her.
Which meant it had to be done a different way; another trail would have to be found. But what about this house, and the body? Grofield's own presence here couldn't be entirely erased, so that would have to be taken care of. And, for the good of everybody Dan had worked with in the last few years, it would be best to cover up the fact of the murder itself, if he could. It was always dangerous when the police got interested in the family of a man in this business, whatever their reasons. A murder investigation here, spreading out as it would from Dan's wife to a search for Dan himself and on to a study of his former associates, could cause difficulties up and down the line.
He had come in here in the middle of the afternoon, having learned a long time ago that it's always safest to break into private homes in the daytime, accidental witnesses tending to believe that things done openly in the middle of the day are of necessity legal. He now had about two hours of daylight left.
To get started, he had to go back to the kitchen. He hated the fact of the woman lying there, face down in the lake of dried blood, and avoided looking at her as much as he could. He could only open the cellar door part way, because of her hand; the truth was, he could have pushed her arm out of the way and opened the door wider, but he preferred to use the narrow opening.
The cellar was like the interior of a submarine made of stone – small and narrow and low ceilinged and crowded with greasy machinery. Also shelves up over the sink, containing a variety of bottles and boxes and cans. Grofield went through them and found half a dozen labels that claimed the contents were flammable – turpentine, paint remover, spot remover. He carried them all upstairs, leaving the door to the kitchen open after he'd slipped through. Putting the rest of the cans on the kitchen table, he carried the rectangular quart can of turpentine with him as he went through the rest of the house, opening all the windows and being sure the doors were open between rooms. He then left a dribbled trail of turpentine from a pool in the middle of the bed down and across the bedroom floor and through the living room on a wide arc and on into the kitchen. Now the swing door had to stay open, too.
He tossed the empty turpentine can down the cellar stairs, then opened a can of paint remover and poured that all over the body. Kerosene, spot remover, everything was poured out and spread around, and the containers thrown down the cellar stairs.
The original sweet nauseating smell was gone from the kitchen now, blanketed by the sharper odors of all the things he'd spilled. Avoiding looking directly at the body as much as he could – sometimes it seemed very large, sometimes very small – Grofield pushed the wooden kitchen chairs around it, and then backed away to the exit door. He opened it, looked out carefully at the next back yard, the low wire fence, the field beyond. There seemed to be no one in sight. He nodded to himself, turned away, and went over to the stove, which was gas, of the pilotless type that needs to be lit by matches. A container of wooden matches decorated with pictures of Switzerland was hanging on the wall. Grofield took this down, held on to one match, and scattered the rest of the matches around on the floor. He turned on one of the gas burners atop the stove without lighting it, and walked
