A noise in the living room behind him interrupted John’s thoughts. He turned his head to see the female officer guiding the young woman in the bathrobe toward the sofa. John wondered why she was not in a hurry to follow the ambulance to the hospital to be with who he assumed was the young man’s boyfriend. She seemed distraught to the level that it seemed to be that kind of relationship, but John got the feeling that there was someone more to it. He could not pin down what it was, and watching the young woman closely for several additional moments did not help to provide him with an answer.
The radio on the sergeant’s belt crackled with a burst of codes and updates that went too fast for John to follow. He had been paying attention from the beginning, he was certain that he could have pieced them together. The sergeant reached up and silenced the radio in mid-report, following the remainder of it privately. He listened intently, nodding almost imperceptibly, his expression slowly becoming even more of a mask than it seemed to John that it normally was.
His hand dropped slowly from his earpiece and he turned back toward the doorway. He glanced for only a moment at John, but there something like steel in it that sent a chill down John’s spine. The sergeant moved back toward the living room, apparently not caring whether John followed him or not. John assumed that he should.
The sergeant stopped at the doorway. The female officer, still seated on the couch with sniffling young woman, looked up, studying the sergeant’s expression. The sergeant shook his head slightly, silently, but sending a clear message to his partner.
The female officer’s mouth formed a tight, grim line. She turned back to the young woman, but, before she could speak, the young woman broke into a renewed bout of sobbing. The sergeant watched her for only a moment before he half-turned toward John.
“Come with me,” he said. His tone contained no doubt that he expected to be obeyed.
John followed the sergeant through the living room and back toward the kitchen. They entered it fully this time. The sergeant paused when he stood in what was approximately its center. He turned his head slowly, examining each item and surface in the room.
John tried to follow the direction of the sergeant’s gaze as it swept across the room. It was, as his brief glimpse had told him, neat and tidy, with all of the small appliances and containers of large cooking utensils all tucked into what seemed to be their designated places. The surfaces appeared to have been recently cleaned, but the air lacked that sharp antiseptic tang of someone overly fastidious about it. John could see that seemed unusual or strangely out of place in a normal kitchen.
The sergeant took two short steps forward, taking a better look inside the sink.
Looking for signs of body parts shoved down the garbage disposal?
John had heard stories of such things being done, but he typically dismissed them as grisly urban legends. It was not that he could not envision some psychopath doing it, but it seemed like an awful lot of work.
While he was pondering that, the sergeant stepped back again. For a moment, John thought he might start going through each of the cabinets. Looking for what, though, John could not imagine. He realized, then, that he had no real idea what was going on. Someone, presumably the young woman in the other room, had called 9-1-1. Something had happened evidentially to whoever had been rushed out on the stretcher—something involving large amounts of blood and other, more unpleasant, body fluids.
Some kind of accident? He slipped in the shower? Alcohol poisoning? . . . The Plague?
Nothing from what he could piece together from the sergeant’s radio call gave him a clue. If the sergeant knew—and John guessed that he probably did—he was not talking about it.
Finally, John surrendered to his curiosity.
What’s he going to do? Arrest me for asking? I am a registered security guard and I do have a right to be here. It’s on my published patrol schedule.
“Officer . . . sir?” he managed to get out, trying not to cringe for how his voice quavered. “What are we looking for?”
At first, he thought the sergeant either had not heard him, or was choosing to ignore him. Then, the officer turned slowly to face him. The sergeant’s eyes fixed on his, seeming to bore into him.
“Poisoned.”
John tried not the flinch. Something in the sergeant’s gaze made John wonder if the officer thought that he might somehow be involved. John knew that he was not, other than through the coincidence of happening to be present on yet another site where a death had occurred when the sergeant also happened to be present.
John glanced toward the archway, in the direction of the living room.
The girl?
The sergeant shook his head, evidently reading his expression.
“She didn’t do it,” he declared confidently, although his voice never rose.
John stared at him, wondering how he could be so certain. It was clear, though, that he was.
“An accident?” John murmured aloud, not feeling convinced enough to ask the question outright.
“Perhaps,” the sergeant replied, surveying the kitchen again. John could tell that he did not believe it.
If not the girl, then who? And why?
They both turned at the sound of someone else entering the room. Even before he saw her, John knew that it had to be the female officer from the sound of her boots on the linoleum. The young woman had been dressed in slippers.
“What did you find out?” the sergeant asked her, looking past her into the living room.
“Not much,” the female officer said, pulling out her tablet.
Josh could see now that her name tag read “Sabello”. From the color of her hair and complexion, he could be certain sure whether its origin was Italian or, possibly, Spanish.
“They had a party,” she reported, as if this was an expected fact. “Lots of drinking,” she went on. “And apparently some marijuana, but I haven’t checked the apartment for any yet.”
She glanced up at the sergeant, checking to see how he would respond to that. He merely nodded slightly, but John thought he saw the line of his mouth tighten just a little. The female officer must have noticed it too, he decided, because she hesitated slightly before continuing.
“She said they all ate pretty much the same things.” She consulted her list. “Chips, popcorn, cheese dip . . . and the alcohol.”
“Did she say what he had been drinking?”
Sabello looked down at her notes again. “Just rum and Coke, she said.” Looking up, her eyes surveyed the kitchen. “She said empties were still in the kitchen.”
Josh looked around, but failed to locate any empty bottles. His eyes then turned toward the cabinet under the sink.
Probably there, he decided. It was the most common place for people to store garbage and recyclables out of sight if they did not want them out in the open.
“She wasn’t sure if anyone else had any of the rum or not,” Sabello went on. “She said she wasn’t the one making the drinks.”
The sergeant nodded.
“Did she say anything else?”
Sabello flipped through her notes, pausing a moment later. “When I asked her if she had noticed anything unusual, she did say that they had received a package earlier today.” She checked her notes again. “Brownies. She said the box is still here in the kitchen: dark brown, with gold lettering.”
John surveyed the kitchen again, his eyes settling on a short rectangular box resting on the counter next to the refrigerator. The sergeant moved toward it, but did not touch it.
“Have the lab check it out.”
“Yes, sir,” the female officer responded promptly.
“Where’s the box it came in.”
Sabello checked her notes again. “She said she’d already thrown it out—in the community dumpster.”
“Find out which one.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Anything else?”
The female officer scanned through her notes one more time before answering. “No, sir,” she finally replied. “Nothing else relevant.”
Her last comment earned her a curious look from the sergeant. To John’s surprise, he said nothing. Instead, he took another look around the kitchen.
“Bag the box and empties for the lab,” he told her. “I want to talk to her.”
The female nodded. “Yes, sir.”
She seemed uneasy about the sergeant questioning the young woman. John thought her understood why. The older officer did not have much going for him in the way of people skills or a bedside manner.
“Stay with me,” he told John, startling him slightly by addressing him.
John did not get a chance to respond before the sergeant back toward the living room. Josh followed him quickly. Once they were through the archway, the female officer moved a little faster, apparently wanting to reach for young woman first, before the sergeant started in on her. John respected that; he might have done the same thing.
“Rachel,” the female officer said softly, seating herself next to the young woman. “I know I already took your report, but the sergeant has a few questions for you.”
Rachel lifted her head and looked up the sergeant. Her eyes red and swollen, Rose-colored splotches dotted her cheeks. Her reddish-tinted hair hung in long snarls across her shoulders. John wondered if she was pretty under better conditions.
“Sure,” she replied. Her voice sounded breathless and hoarse.
The sergeant glanced over at Sabello, who waited grimly.
“Officer Sabello told me that you already threw out the box the brownies came in,” the sergeant stated, watching the young woman’s face.
Rachel nodded. “Out in the dumpster.”
“Do you remember where the package came from?”
The young woman stared up at him, giving the matter a great deal more thought than John felt was necessary, even under the circumstances.
“No,” she answered finally. Her voice sounded weak and tired. “We never figured it out.”
Sabello exchanged a surprised and concerned look with the sergeant.
“Which dumpster?” she prompted the young woman, seeing the renewed importance of locating it now.
Rachel’s eyes flicked toward the front door. “The closest one,” she said. “To the right.”
John saw another look pass between the two police officers. He could tell that it would fall to Sabello to dig through the garbage to locate the box.
“Was there anything else in the box?”
Rachel seemed confused by the question for a moment. After a moment, she seemed to remember something.
“Yeah,” she said, brightening slightly. “There was. A bag—kind of a like a small gym bag,” she explained. Her expression took on a look of puzzlement. “It was a kind of weird. The box with the brownies came inside it.”
Even as she said it, John felt an invisible hand tighten around his stomach. He saw a similar reaction on the sergeant’s face.
“Where’s the bag now?” the sergeant asked, almost urgently.
“In the bedroom,” Rachel said, her eyes turning toward the bedroom door. “I was going to use for the gym.”
“Where there anything else in the bag?” the sergeant asked.
“I don’t think so,” Rachel said, sounding tired again. She slumped slightly. “I didn’t look.”
The sergeant’s lips formed a grim line. “Did you see it?”
It took a moment before John realized that the sergeant was addressing him. John stared back at him for several long moments before nodding dumbly.
“Bring it,” the sergeant ordered him.
John remained frozen in place, and then broke into a run, clearing the short distance from the sofa to the bedroom in well under three seconds.
Behind him, he heard the sergeant ask the young woman, “Are you sure you don’t remember where it came from?”
“No,” she replied quietly. “I mean, we couldn’t read the label. It was all scraped up.”
“We need to find that box,” the sergeant said, presumably to Sabello.
If the female officer said anything, John did not hear her response as he entered the bedroom.
It took him a moment to reorient himself. He turned on one heel, trying to remember where he had seen that stack of workout clothes. His eyes located it quickly, a few feet from the bed, piled next to what was certainly at least a second-hand dresser. He strode over and reached for it, stopping suddenly when his fingers were only a hairsbreadth from the handle.
“Idiot”, he murmured, straightening to survey the room for something he could use for makeshift gloves.
His eyes paused on a pair of socks crumpled and laying on the floor just a short distance from the workout clothes. It was possible that there might be a pair of latex cleaning gloves in the bathroom, he realized, but the thought of having to going in there to search for them made the back of his throat burn.
The socks’ll do, he decided, and picked them up.
As he slid them over his hands, he tried not to think about the condition of the feet that had occupied them before. The notion, while unpleasant, was several orders of magnitude preferable to facing what he would encounter in the small bathroom.
John gripped the handles carefully, holding the bag away from his body. It felt empty. Nonetheless, he tried very hard not to think of snakes as he carried the bag gingerly into the living room.
Everyone looked in his direction when he reentered the living room. John stopped, waiting, several feet away from where everyone was either situated near the sofa.
“Is that the one?” the sergeant asked Rachel.
She nodded and then looked away from the bag.
“Over there,” the sergeant ordered John, pointing to the far corner of the room.
John looked and then went over to where the sergeant had indicated, still dangling the bag as far away from his body as he could manage. He could see the sergeant’s reasoning. There was large empty space between that corner and any of the furniture in the room. Should there be any kind of reptile contained within the bag, they would theoretically have enough time to react before they were in immediate danger from it.
Slowly and carefully, John lowered the bag onto the carpet. Releasing his hold on it, he stepped cautiously back, breathing a soft sigh of relief when nothing in its shape shifted of its own accord. He waited there, and then turned his head to face the sergeant and Sabello. The sergeant and Sabello exchanged a long look and whispered something between them that John could not hear. Sabello nodded, looking grave, and rose from the sofa. Her hand, John noticed, now rested on her weapon.
The sergeant strode toward John, and then kept going, heading for the bag. “Let’s do this,” he said as he passed, not bothering to wait for a response.
John watched the sergeant’s back as the officer approached the bag.
He can’t be serious!
He suspected, though, that the sergeant was always serious—at least while on duty. John wondered whether he was one of those officers who never truly went off duty.
The sergeant crouched before the bag. John stood two hesitant steps forward and then waited. He felt woefully underequipped to deal with this situation. Not his taser, pepper spray, or baton would be of much use, he suspected, against a venomous snake.
Unless I just want to piss it off . . .
That, to him, did not seem like the wisest goal.
He started to step back further, but then froze as the sergeant began to slowly open the bag. Somewhere, he had read that snakes were more likely to strike a moving target than one that remained completely still.
Or, he considered unhappily, that might just be one of those stupid things they say in the movies.
John tensed as the sergeant reached toward his waist. He relaxed slightly when he saw the officer draw his flashlight instead of his weapon. The sergeant had opened a small gap in the top of the bag. It was, John guessed, maybe three or four inches wide. The older officer lifted the flashlight and aimed its beam inside the bag. John held perfectly still, feeling the tension from the top of his shoulders all the way down his back.
Nothing leapt from the bag.
The sergeant reached down and opened the zippers the rest of the way. He then thrust his free hand into the bag. John held his breath until the sergeant’s hand rose, clear of the bag. Clutched within it was not a writhing length of poisonous serpent, but perhaps a half dozen sheets of regular white paper. Something seemed to be printed on them, but John was too far away to make out any of the text.
Still, the chill he had experienced earlier ran once more through his body.
Just like the other bags . . .
He had not made the connection until that very moment. All of the bags at the other scenes had also contained several sheets of paper. The sergeant was reading these. His expression turned hard. His eyes seemed to grow dark with rage.
“Sergeant?”
Sabello’s voice brought John back. He glanced at the female officer, seeing her look of puzzled concern, and then back at the sergeant.
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