I put my ear to the door, listened for any sign of movement. Hearing nothing, I inspected the doorframe. It didn’t look like my credit card would do the job this time. Maybe I could pose as some long lost cousin of Hans Gustofson’s. Claim Amanda was the daughter he’d never met, persuade the super to let us inside.
“What’s that?” Amanda asked suddenly, pointing to a deep indentation below the dead bolt. I looked closer. Someone had broken into Hans Gustofson’s apartment, and judging by the depth and relatively small number of scrapes, they’d done it quickly. Perhaps while he was at home. The lock looked too damaged to close.
“Henry,” Amanda said, “we should call the cops.”
“We will,” I said. “But I need to see what’s in there.”
My heart pounded as I backed up against the wall opposite the door, crouching in a three-point stance. The muscles in my legs tensed. I blocked out the pain, focused.
“Henry…”
I took three quick breaths, then launched myself at the door.
My shoulder slammed into the metal, and instead of the thick crunch and pain I expected, the door buckled inward and I fell to the ground in a heap. I was inside Hans Gustofson’s apartment.
The foul odor immediately clogged my nostrils and I had to put my shirt over my nose. Staggering to my feet, I felt a sticky substance on my palms. Then I noticed my palm print in a puddle of what I immediately knew was dried blood.
Oh, Jesus…
Nausea washed over me as I surveyed the foyer. The apartment was lit only by the haunting glare of moonlight shining through an unseen window. To the left of the foyer was a short hallway. I stepped into the apartment. The entire place was littered with debris. Not garbage, but debris. Broken glass. Shredded cotton. Electrical equipment shattered. Mail strewn about.
“Henry…” I heard Amanda whisper behind me. “Oh, God, Henry, look.”
On the wall by the front door was a large matte of blood about head height. Like an abstract painting, blood had dripped down the beige wallpaper and dried in ghastly thick lines. A crowbar lay on the floor, the hooked end chipped and caked with dried blood. The same weapon the intruder had used to break in had also been used to maim someone, perhaps fatally. Something terrible had happened here…
Blood spatters dotted the hallway, marking a gruesome path through the foyer down the hall and into the main apartment. I said a silent prayer.
“We should leave,” Amanda said softly. “We should call the police.”
“No.” My voice was more forceful than I intended. “We can’t leave. Not yet.”
Holding my breath, I followed the blood droplets like a trail of crimson crumbs. Entering the living room, I pieced the scene together, the gruesome events that had taken place.
Someone had broken into Hans Gustofson’s apartment, while he was home. He’d confronted the intruder at the door, where he’d received a vicious, possibly fatal, blow to the head. Then the apartment was ransacked. Tables overturned, books strewn about, mattresses torn apart. Camera equipment broken and rendered useless. Photo albums torn through and discarded. It was impossible to tell if the thief had found what he was looking for. Everything looked like a standard break-in, except…
One thing didn’t make sense. The blood drops…they led back into the apartment. The assault had taken place by the door, but it looked as though the victim had crawled back inside. There was a telephone in the kitchen, but it was clean, untouched, less than ten feet away. The victim was alive, but hadn’t attempted to call for help. Why?
I looked around. The living room was covered in prints and framed photographs, mostly of nude women in soft light, very artsy and subtly shaded. Beautiful. In these photographs I glimpsed a hint of the magic that had once carried Hans Gustofson to the forefront of the art world.
I tiptoed through the carnage, feeling my way in the dim lighting, and came to a hallway with a T- intersection. Both paths led to closed doors. The blood trail curved to the left, stopping at a closed door.
I stared hard at it. The blood droplets seemed to end there. I swallowed, my heart doing a drumroll.
“Henry?” Amanda had entered the living room. “Oh, my God, Henry, what is all this?”
“I’m over here,” I called out. “I don’t know yet.”
I held my breath, reached out and gripped the doorknob. The metal was cold and I jerked my hand away. I could hear running water. I rapped my knuckles on the bathroom door. No answer.
“Hello?” No response. Just the flowing water. Blood pounded in my temples as I took a deep breath.
Again I grasped the doorknob, this time turning it. The door was locked from the inside. I cursed under my breath. I had to get in there.
I went to the door on the right. The knob turned easily, and I entered what appeared to be Hans Gustofson’s bedroom. Photos were scattered everywhere. His desk was torn apart. A cork posterboard had been removed from the wall, pushpins scattered like multicolored sprinkles over the red carpet. The bed covers were thrown about, the mattress ripped apart like a drunken medical examiner had taken his frustration out on a cadaver. Files had been emptied out of a small bureau and dumped on the floor in a heap. Other than that, the room was empty.
I slid open a closet to find clothes dumped all over the floor, pants with their pockets turned inside out. I grabbed a wire hanger and bent the metal against my shoe until I’d straightened it into a makeshift spear. Back to the locked door, I eased the metal spike into the small hole on the outside of the knob. I jimmied it around, felt it catch. Pushed lightly, then felt a pop as the lock disengaged. I looked back at Amanda.
“Henry,” she said. “Please…”
The knob turned. But when I pushed, I felt resistance from inside. Something was blocking the door.
There was just enough room to peek my head in. Craning my neck, I peered through the tiny slat.
When I saw what the obstacle was, it took all I had not to vomit.
A shoe was propped against the door. The shoe was connected to a leg. The leg was connected to a man, fully clothed, his head covered in matted blood, sitting atop the toilet. It was Hans Gustofson, and he was very dead.
There was a large gash by his right temple, and his skull looked deformed, almost misshapen, like a lump of clay hit with a baseball bat.
The blood spatter by the front door. Hans had been brained there, his head smacking off the wall. But it hadn’t killed him. At least not right away. Somehow he’d managed to perch himself on the toilet. Very Elvis of him.
I held my breath, feeling my stomach churn, and gently moved his leg, now captured by the prison of rigor mortis, out of the way. His body shifted.
I stopped pushing. Made sure he stayed balanced on his death throne.
Then without warning, Gustofson’s body slipped off the toilet and went crashing to the ground. His maimed head smacked wetly off the tiling. I bit my fist to stop from screaming as his dead eyes stared at me from the floor, his body horribly contorted.
I closed my eyes, stepped back, felt faint.
I’d seen a body once before, visiting the medical examiner’s office back in Bend for a story I was writing. I’d felt like throwing up then, too. The ME, a surprisingly young and attractive woman named Grace, had laughed.
Don’t think of it as a person, she’d said. All it is is a husk, like a snail shell. The soul is gone.
That helped a little. But not much.
I gently opened the door. Easy, Henry. He’s just a shell. Like a steak with eyes.
I looked over the prone body. Gustofson had been an amateur bodybuilder as well as photographer, always snapped at high society events with tree-trunk arms wrapped around the supermodel of the moment. I could tell from the acne scars on his cheeks and thinning hair that he’d recently been resorting to chemical enhancers. Very Barry Bonds of him. Hans Gustofson was once one of the foremost chroniclers of the human experience and now here he was, dead in his bathroom. And for what?
I looked at the gaping wound by his temple. The death blow. Pushing the horror of the situation away, I focused on the facts. Tried to distance myself.
Strangely, the medicine cabinet was untouched. The only part of the house that didn’t look like it had been ransacked. It could only mean that either the killer had found what he was looking for, or the item was too big to fit inside such a small space. But the question remained: Why would a gravely wounded man come here to die?
“Oh, Jesus fucking Christ.” Amanda was standing outside the bathroom, her hand covering her mouth and
