in the kitchen, a broken saucer on top. The faucet dripped into the center of an iron-stain circle. There was a single clouded water glass on the counter.
There was movement, a shape that turned out to be a cat darting away. Jimmy shined his red light on the window over the sink. There was a cracked-out pane, a tear in the screen.
In the living room, he crossed to the front window, looked out where he had looked in that afternoon. The blue light of the TV across the way was gone now. He turned, took in the room. On the wall by the front door was a picture of Jack and Elaine on a sailboat tied up out front. On the coffee table were Reader’s Digests, five or six of them spread out in a semicircle like a hand of cards. There was a Life. A chevron-shaped ceramic ashtray matched the lamps. All of it was covered with dust. The living room was unchanged from the newspaper photo taken the morning after the killings. All that was missing was the black-haired cop who’d stood beside the “fireplace” pointing at something that had nothing to do with the carnage upstairs. The wind drawn down the canal came up again. A bougainvillea scratched against the glass, like something wanting in.
There was a small bedroom downstairs. A boy’s room.
Jimmy went upstairs. On the walls down the hall were pictures of the family, pictures of Jean, a baby propped onto a silk pillow, a very little girl with a balloon, a four-year-old and her mother on the steps out front, Elaine in a light-colored sundress with a full skirt, a cigarette between her fingers. There was one picture of Jean’s brother, a sulking twelve-year-old in a suit that matched his dad’s.
He shined the light into the bathroom: pink and green tile, a pedestal sink, dirty, a dimmed mirror. The plastic shower curtain was hard, cracked, brown. There was water in the toilet, which was iron-stained, too.
The door to the bedroom on the front of the house was closed. Jimmy tried the knob. It was unlocked. He stepped in.
It was full dark, shades pulled down over the windows. He swept the room with his light. There was the round bed, the black lacquered “Oriental” bedside table, the funny, overstyled clock radio. Somebody had cleaned the room and pulled the door closed and walked away. Jimmy knelt where Bill Danko fell. He unclipped the red filter from the penlight, scanned the white carpet for some trace of the bloodstain. Clean. He looked over at the floor-to-ceiling silver curtains where, the theory went, the killer had waited.
Jimmy stepped closer, reached out. The cloth had lost all of its life, turned to powder. His fingers went right through it. He touched the shade on the window. It rolled up, clattering and flapping like a window shade in a cartoon. He pulled it back down into place.
He came out, leaving the bedroom door open behind him.
At the other end of the hallway, a door stood open, a third bedroom. Jimmy hesitated. There was something bad still in the air in the house, riding in the molecules. He knew he was built to deal with the past, to walk though rooms most people couldn’t bear, but this was creeping him out and he didn’t know why.
At the end of the hall he clipped the red filter onto the light again and shined it at his feet, at the frayed carpet, worn in a path in the center. The dim red circle of light crossed the jamb, into the back bedroom. There was clutter just inside the doorway, stacks of magazines, folded grocery bags, a couple of empty flat cans.
Cat food.
He stepped in. There was quick movement somewhere, something the same color as the room.
Where was the wash from the streetlights in the alley?
Jimmy stepped to the bay windows that faced the back. There were heavy drapes, closed together, and lowered shades behind the drapes. He ran his fingers along the edge of the shade, felt something. He shined the red light: the shades were taped tight against the window with duct tape, blocking any light from outside.
Or maybe it was the other way around.
Jimmy was trying to make sense of it when a woman coughed and, in the same moment, a black-and-white TV flashed on.
He jumped half out of his skin, fell back against the windows.
The woman—she had stringy gray hair cut straight across the bangs and wore a faded