Page 106 of 56 Days
I’m about ready to projectile vomit,Lee thinks,so I’d rather just skip to the bit where we leave thisstench-fest.
But she says, “Go on.”
“Where’s the blood? Can you see any? Apart from our little smudge there on the wall.”
Lee hasn’t been looking. She’s been pretending that the entire area to the right of Tom is pixelated, that she can’t see what’s there, that she can’t see the discoloration, the bloated face, the skin slipping and—
She swallows hard and breathes in deep, trying to capture every last molecule of the VapoRub’s remaining menthol scent.
“Why don’t you just tell me whether or not there is,” she says, “and I’ll believe you?”
“There’s no blood, Lee. And even the smallest, shallowest wound to the scalp bleeds profusely. The scalp ischock-fullof blood vessels. And yet, no blood, except for our impact on the wall there. None on the floor—”
“How can you tell? There’s that... sludgy stuff.”
“That’s not blood and that came after. It’s like there’s a halo of cleanliness all around the head and upper part of the body. But therewasblood, with a scalp laceration like that. So, where did it go?”
Lee tries to think, but almost immediately her thoughts are back on the smell, and how it’s so incredibly overpowering that she could have shoved an open jar of Vicks up each nostril and she’d still be smelling the damn thing. She canfeelit. It’s not just hanging in the air, it’s clinging to it. And everything else as well. The second she gets home tonight she’s burning everything she’s wearing. She’ll have to wash—
“Water,” she says. “The blood got washed away.”
“Yes!” Tom seems excessively pleased about this. “Because...?”
“The shower was on.”
“I think”—Tom indulges in a dramatic pause here—“he might have died by drowning.”
Lee looks down at the body, immediately regrets it, looks away again.
“Hewhatnow?”
“Death by drowning doesn’t require submersion, you see. There just needs to be enough liquid to inhale, to get into the lungs. So, hypothetically, if our friend here had taken a tranquilizer and then got back out of bed, stumbled in here—perhaps he needed to use the toilet—and fell through the shower door, and he landed as he is now with his mouth and nose on the tile—and right, I may add, in the little depression formed by the drain where water would tend to pool—and the shower was on... Well, he might have been a little stunned by the blow to the head, or the Rohypnol was kicking in, or both, and he falls unconscious in that position, which of course means he keeps breathing, and he drowns in a couple of inches of water in his own shower.” Tom pauses. “This is why I truly will never understand why people go skydiving andbungee-jumpingand all that malarkey. It’s soeasyto die. Why try to make it happen?”
“Why was the shower on in the first place?”
“Good question. He could’ve simply hit the lever during the fall or in his attempts to get back up from it. Those things”—he points at the shower handle—“all it takes is a little force and the water would start to flow. He could’ve beenplanningto have a shower and just misjudged how quickly the tranquilizer would kick in. But that’s not yourmillion-dollarquestion, Lee.”
She raises her eyebrows. “It isn’t?”
“Themillion-dollarquestion is: Who turned the wateroff?”
Her stomach sinks.
“We might have a problem with that,” she says.
“Oh? How so?”
“There’s a woman here who’s been annoying the hell out of us since lockdown began. Noise complaints, ratting on her neighbors, etc. When she rang this morning, the station thought it was more of the same. They sent out two new recruits. One of them said he turned off the tap, that it was dripping.”
Tom nods a couple of times, considering this. “I can’t rule out that he didn’t turn off the water himself, in the last throws of consciousness. But either way, I doubt there was anything of evidentiary value on the lever anyway.”
“What makes you say that?”
Tom clasps his hands together and rests them on his stomach. Lee likes the guy, but she wishes he’d tone down the Golden Age–detective routine.
“The whole place is wiped clean,” he says, “according to yourscenes-of-crime fellas. Every single surface wiped down throughout the apartment. Thorough job. They haven’t found a single print. So that’s yourrealriddle. Why would someone wipe down an apartment after an accident? And why on earth didn’t they call for help?”
23 Days Ago
