When she followed them over, she spent time adjusting to the new house in the new area she had been too depressed to take an interest in choosing. She would wake in the morning, wondering why she was there, but never able to figure out where she would really like to be. But she knew she wanted to avoid the outside world. And that meant embracing the four walls.
Her boss, Chloe da Silva, had allowed her to work from home, but had made it clear that it was only a temporary arrangement – Anna was too good an interior designer to lose on the big jobs. That was fine at the start, but as the months went by, Anna felt a rising insecurity that any day she would be fired and the only thing keeping her sane would be taken away. She liked styling shoots from home, choosing products from catalogues or jpegs or from the packages that were sent nearly every day to the house. It was unorthodox, but it worked. She hoped.
She dragged herself up off the sofa and was about to go into her makeshift office when the phone rang. She heard the harsh clatter of being punched off speaker phone in Chloe’s office.
‘It’s me again.’
Anna held her breath.
‘I’m sorry to land this on you, but, Anna, I really am under serious pressure here. There’s a major shoot at W Union Square tomorrow morning and Leah has let me down big time. Anyway, the shoot is bedrooms – models in hotels slash extravagant homes, sleeping off all that hard work they do – walking and um, staring. A lot of our major advertisers are involved and, here’s what I’m hoping you’ll go for: the photographer is Marc Lunel. You can work with someone who doesn’t pronounce Moet wrong. Come on. Please. Please. Please.’
Anna paused, watching the couple on television directing two men into the house with a red leather sofa. ‘Only if I get the main credit,’ she said finally.
‘You’ll do it?’ said Chloe.
Anna’s heart was beating rapidly, but not out of excitement. ‘Yes.’
‘God, if I’d known it was going to be that easy, I would have called Marc months ago.’ Her laugh was shrill. Anna was silent.
Chloe jumped in. ‘Oh, listen to me being so insensitive. Of course you needed all that time-’
‘Please,’ said Anna. ‘Email me the details.’
‘Of course. Done. Darling, thank you. Thank you so much.’
Joe leaned into the mirror in the men’s room, snipping away the nasal hair that had spent three hours soaking up the smell of death. He never figured out if it was a practical or a psychological routine or both. He didn’t like seeing his face up close, seeing the new lines around his eyes, the extra grey hairs at the side of his head; more things that were out of his control. He went to his locker and grabbed a bottle of tea-tree shower gel that Anna had given him. He got undressed and threw his suit into a plastic bag.
‘The smell of that crap,’ said Danny walking in. ‘I think I’ll go back to the autopsy.’
‘Screw you,’ said Joe. ‘I’d rather smell-’
‘Like weird-ass tea-’
‘Like – clean, than how you go out with your cheap foaming shit that doesn’t cover up nothing.’
‘If a woman can’t handle the smell of death from a man-’
‘She can’t go out with a deadbeat.’
‘Shit,’ said Danny, closing his locker door. ‘I’m all out of shower gel. Give me some of that crap.’
Joe went back to his desk and checked his email. Danny walked over a few minutes later, smelling the back of his hand and frowning.
‘Get over the fucking shower gel,’ said Joe.
‘Let me pull that file,’ said Danny. ‘The one I told you about – Aneto.’
Joe made space on his desk, laying a stack of files on the floor beside him. Danny came back and opened William Aneto’s file in front of him. Aneto was thirty-one, slightly built, handsome, with collar-length black hair. Joe looked at his head shot and saw a TV actor’s face; the four-line max guy, two or three steps back from the main action. His role in a Spanish language soap opera was the friend of the brother of the leading man. He was killed almost a year earlier, his body discovered in his Upper West Side apartment by a female friend. The case had quickly gone cold. As a victim, William fell into the high-risk category, promiscuous on the gay scene, known for disappearing at the end of a night with a stranger. Danny and Martinez had interviewed hundreds of Aneto’s friends, acquaintances and lovers and had gotten nowhere. His murder was down as a hook-up gone bad.
Joe pulled out the next photos and laid them in rows on the table in front of him. Danny stood beside him. Like Ethan Lowry, the body was found in the hallway. But behind William Aneto, hair smears of blood curved across the grey tiled floor like tracks through red paint from a dried brush.
‘Yeah. It’s all coming back to me,’ said Danny. ‘Most of the action happened in the kitchen. He was killed there and then dragged to the front door to be finished off. Wait ‘til you see the kitchen. Hand prints, foot prints, all over the floor, up the wall – kindergarten art class. You know – if all the paint was red. And the children were Damian.’
Joe studied the photos of the kitchen. He pointed to the bloodied corner of a granite counter top. ‘So I’m the perp, standing here behind the vic, bashing his face off this.’ Blood was spattered onto the wall, the counter, the floor, misted across the granite.
Danny nodded. ‘Yup.’
They looked at a wide shot of the hallway – the crumpled corpse, the spatter of a gunshot wound, the pooled blood under his head.
William Aneto’s face was more damaged than Ethan Lowry’s, destroyed by injuries that left the entire surface pulped and bloodied. His right eye socket was completely impacted from one of the blows, obliterating the entry wound from the bullet that, based on the autopsy results, followed a similar trajectory to Lowry’s.
‘Yeah. It’s a no-brainer,’ said Danny.
‘The caliber was too low,’ said Joe.
‘Funny guy. Shit, the phone – look,’ said Danny, pointing to the tiny silver cell phone beside Aneto’s body. ‘I forgot about that.’
Like Ethan Lowry, it looked like William Aneto could have made a call just before he died. Joe flipped through the file to a statement from a Mrs Aneto.
‘Yeah,’ said Danny. ‘His mother said the call was just to say goodnight.’
‘Maybe you should talk to Mrs Aneto again.’
‘She no likey me,’ said Danny, making a face. ‘Maybe Martinez could warm her up again.’
‘Yeah, that’s one I won’t be tagging along for.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Maybe you should ask Martinez,’ said Joe.
‘What the hell’s that supposed to mean?’
‘See how he looks at me? I’m a homewrecker. He had eleven good months with you, I show up, you take me back, the guy’s life is over.’
Danny shook his head.
‘He gets that glint in his eye when you’re around,’ said Joe.
‘Screw you. What you are seeing is professional admiration.’
‘Come on. Let’s go talk to Rufo.’
‘Gentlemen,’ said Rufo when they walked in.
‘We got a link,’ said Joe. ‘Between Ethan Lowry and William Aneto.’
Rufo frowned. ‘The guy I’ve been getting all these calls about this week?’
Danny nodded. ‘Yeah. The year-anniversary-still-no-answers thing.’
‘Interesting timing,’ said Rufo. ‘Tell me more.’
‘Both happened at home, no sign of forced entry, similar facial injuries, similar twenty-two caliber gunshot wound, phone found beside both of them, bodies left in the hallway behind the door.’
Rufo nodded. ‘That’s good enough for me.’
Shaun Lucchesi lay on his bed staring at the ceiling. The stereo blasted the same lyrics over and over: left behind/left behind/left behind. It had been almost a year since his girlfriend, Katie Lawson, was murdered. They had met on the first day in school when he arrived in Ireland and they had been inseparable until she died. What made things worse was that Shaun had started out as the prime suspect, convicted by most of the small village
