Stray Fears - Gregory Ashe Page 0,56

like a rubber ducky. A closet, its door open, dozens of pairs of winter gloves clothespinned to hangers.

In the last room, David Bass lay on a futon. He had been sliced open: three huge gashes that ran diagonally from shoulder to hip. The smell of ruptured bowels made me gag. Elien poked his head past me, winced, and hurried away.

I lingered a moment, trying to figure it out.

David Bass hadn’t killed himself. The hashok had murdered him.

ELIEN (13)

I stood in the small office in David’s trailer. The Cheshire cat was staring at me.

In the hallway behind me, Dag’s footsteps moved closer.

“We need to go.”

I nodded.

“Right now, Elien.”

I nodded again. And then I disconnected the laptop, wrapped up the power supply’s cables, and grabbed both.

“What are you doing?” Dag asked. “Put that back.”

I shouldered past him into the hall and made my way to the room with the banker’s boxes. With my elbow, I popped the lid off the closest one; it was only half full.

“Hold this,” I said, passing the laptop to Dag.

“Absolutely not,” he said as he took it. “Elien, David is dead.”

“I’m not stupid. I know he’s dead.”

“We need to leave, and then we need to make an anonymous call to the sheriff’s department, and then we need to figure out what the hell is going on.”

“What’s going on,” I said as I rummaged through the documents, “is the hashok killed David.”

“We don’t know that.”

I looked over my shoulder at him, and Dag’s eyes cut away.

“Let’s take this box too,” I said. “It looks like every piece of mail he’s gotten in the last month.”

“Absolutely not,” Dag said again.

I put the lid back on the box and picked it up. “Ok. Just one more thing.”

Standing in the doorway, Dag set his jaw. “Elien, we cannot take this stuff. This is going to be a crime scene.”

“Do you think the hashok left fingerprints? And they’re going to run them through a database and then find his driver’s license and get his home address?”

“We’re leaving fingerprints, do you understand? We’re taking things. If we get caught, we won’t just get in trouble for disturbing a crime scene. They’ll have an unsolvable murder, and they’ll have two people with a weird connection to the victim. Even if they don’t want to believe we did this, it’ll look so strange they won’t have a choice.”

“So far,” I said, I’ve only touched the laptop and the cords and this box. I haven’t left fingerprints anywhere else.”

Dag was taking deep breaths.

“Have you?” I asked.

“The door. We’ll wipe it down when we leave.”

“So let’s take this stuff and go. After I check one more thing.”

“Why?”

“Because, Dag, the hashok murdered him. It wasn’t willing to wait for the cycle of violence to catch up with him. It needed him out of the way. And I want to know why. If we’re going to stop this thing, we need to understand it.”

For a moment, those dark eyes were very steady on me.

“Please,” I said.

“This is a bad idea,” he said.

“Then it’s my bad idea. You can go. I know this is crossing over into your professional life; I don’t want to make you choose.”

With a snort, Dag shook his head and stepped back from the doorway. “It invaded my personal life the minute Mason pulled a gun on you. Now we’re just watching the shit fly. Let’s go before someone sees us.”

“One more thing,” I said, turning back to where David lay.

“What?”

“His hands.”

When I got to the bedroom at the end of the mobile home, I set the banker’s box on the ground. I inched closer to David. His skin was waxy; blood soaked the carpet around him, and the room smelled like shit. I leaned over as close as I dared, and then I used the hem of my t-shirt to tug the winter gloves off one by one. His hands looked shockingly small without them, the skin pale and smooth. Using the gloves, I rotated his hands palm up. Neither showed any sign of a wound or mark.

“Feet,” Dag whispered.

I lucked out because David was wearing house slippers without socks; I knocked them off using the back of my hand and studied his feet. Then I shook my head and crept back toward the hallway.

“Anything?” Dag asked.

“He didn’t own a toenail clipper, apparently. Nothing that looked like a thorn in his foot or hand. No scars.”

Dag grunted. “I guess that makes sense; the hashok wouldn’t kill him if he was an evil henchman.”

“Let’s find a