for. He was the hottest new commodity to hit the photojournalism world. Now he was barely thirty and everyone seemed to consider him a has-been. Well, he’d show them all.
“I’m actually pretty busy, Mrs. Fowler. I’m working.” He kept his voice pleasant, crossed his arms to stifle his irritation and waited, hoping she could see his impatience through her trifocals.
“I was checking on Mrs. Stanislov,” she repeated, waving a skeletal arm toward the door at the end of the hall. “She’s been under the weather all week. There’s that flu bug going around, you know.”
If she was expecting some show of sympathy, they’d be here all night. That was above and beyond his ass-kissing ability, cheap apartment or not. He shifted his weight and waited. His mind wandered back to the print he had left on the kitchen counter. Over thirty exposures to finally capture that one image, that one—
“Mr. Garrison?”
Her small pinched face reminded him of the wrinkled kiwi fruit in the back of his fridge.
“Yes, Mrs. Fowler? I really must get back to my work.”
She stared at him with eyes magnified three times their size. Her thin lips pursed, wrinkling her skin beyond what he thought possible. Spoiled kiwi. He reminded himself to throw them out.
“I wondered if it might be important. That you might want to know.”
“What are you talking about?” His politeness had but one level, and she was pushing it past its limits.
This time she backed away, and he knew his tone must have frightened her. She simply pointed at the package he hadn’t noticed sitting next to his door. Before he stooped to pick it up, Mrs. Fowler’s tiny bird feet shuffled down the stairs.
“Thank you, Mrs. Fowler,” he called after her, smiling when he realized he sounded like Jack Nicholson in The Shining. Not that she would notice. The old bat probably hadn’t even heard him.
The package was lightweight and wrapped in ordinary brown paper. Ben flipped it around. Nothing rattled, and there were no labels, only his name scrawled in black marker. Sometimes the photo lab down the street delivered supplies for him, but he couldn’t remember ordering any.
He set it on the kitchen counter, grabbed a paring knife and started cutting the wrap. When he opened the lid of the box, he noticed the packing material’s strange texture—it looked like brown packing peanuts. He didn’t give it a second thought and stuck his hand into the box, feeling for what was buried inside.
The packing material began to move.
Or was it the exhaustion and too many fumes playing tricks on him?
In seconds the brown peanuts came to life. Shit! The entire contents started crawling out over the sides of the box. Several scurried up his arm. Ben swatted and slapped at them, knocking the box off the counter and releasing hundreds of cockroaches, racing and skittering across his living room floor.
CHAPTER 26
“Anything found that could have been used as a ligature? And what about handcuffs?” Maggie showed Tully and Racine the girl’s wrists, but looked to Tully for answers. The bruises and marks on the wrists were undeniably made by handcuffs. She watched Tully’s face, pretending to wait for the answer but really trying to see if he was okay.
This time Tully didn’t glance at Racine, but Maggie did, and she could tell the detective wanted to answer, but stopped herself. Tully started pulling out his eyeglasses and pieces of paper from somewhere beneath the gown, tangling his hands in the process. Typical Tully, Maggie noted. He put the glasses on and began sorting through his slips of paper, an odd assortment that included some sort of pamphlet, a folded envelope, the back of a store receipt and a cocktail napkin.
“No handcuffs,” he finally answered, and continued to search his scraps of paper.
She wished he would relax. Tully was usually the laid-back one. She was the quick-tempered, hotheaded one, the loose cannon. He was the steady, let’s-think-before-we-leap type. It unnerved her how uptight he seemed to be. Something was wrong. Something more than his discomfort with witnessing an autopsy.
“You know, Tully,” she said, “they make these really cool contraptions with sheets of paper all tacked together. They’re called notebooks, and you can even get them small enough to fit into your pocket.”
Tully frowned at her over his glasses and went back to his notes.
“Very funny. My system works just fine.”
“Of course, it does. As long as you don’t blow your nose.”
Racine laughed.
“Humpf.” Stan Wenhoff didn’t have time for a sense of humor.