The Killing Room (Richard Montanari) - By Richard Montanari Page 0,28

brew of spoiled fish and rotting lemons, with a backstory of wet coffee grounds, but soon he detected the unmistakable top note of used kitty litter.

There was nothing quite like that blend of pine-flavored clay and cat shit to open the sinuses, he thought. In fact, he had gotten so good – had acquired quite the nose, as oenophiles say – that he could instantly tell the difference between clumping and conventional litter at the very first whiff.

Not that the subject would come up that often in his small circle of friends dining at Le Bec Fin or Striped Bass.

In between the fish and the kitty he smelled banana peel, vinegar, something that had to be months-old tomato sauce, and it occurred to him – not for the first time by any means – that a good deal of his ability to read people was based on his aptitude in reading their garbage.

People are their garbage.

Tonight he had rubbed a little Vicks VapoRub under his nostrils so the smells were not that bad, all things considered. Standing in an alcove behind an upscale rowhouse in Society Hill, he knew he had to get in and out quickly. Dry heaving in the middle of Delancey Street was not part of the plan.

As always, he sifted through the paper products first. Paper was his grail. First up was a wad of catalogs stuck together by God knows what: Restoration Hardware, Crate & Barrel, Pottery Barn, L. L. Bean, Land’s End. All the usual yuppie suspects. He gently peeled them apart. You never knew what people were going to use as bookmarks inside books or catalogs. He once found a very intimate letter inside a copy of Field & Stream, a missive left there – unsent and undelivered – by a married middle-aged man, addressed to a young girl who worked as a waitress at this man’s neighborhood Denny’s.

This night he found nothing inside the magazines. He checked the address labels. All the same, all belonging to the homeowner. No information or direction was to be gleaned in a dissimilar address.

Next was a similarly clumped stack of magazines: Mac World, Architectural Digest, Tropical Fish Monthly.

Mac user and fish aficionado, Shane thought, registering the two bits of data in his finely compartmentalized brain.

An afishianado.

Pay attention, Shane.

He riffled through these mags. Nada. The only loose material the periodicals contained were those blow-in cards the magazines annoyed you with to get you to subscribe. Shane had never used a blow-in card, based solely on principle.

The next paper products were a series of opened #10 and corresponding #6 return envelopes. These were mostly those not-so-cleverly disguised pitches for reduced credit-card APR rates that arrived in envelopes with no return address, designed to sucker the recipient into thinking it was some sort of invoice or bill.

IMPORTANT ACCOUNT INFORMATION ENCLOSED! barked an announcement on the front of the envelope. Shane found almost all of these torn neatly in half, although some people, after perhaps the fourth or fifth ruse, took the time to tear them into confetti-sized pieces.

Beneath the paper layer were smaller plastic trash bags. These were from the bathroom, kitchen, home office. As gross as most of this was, the smaller bags used in the bathroom posed other problems. Shane had once sliced a finger on a double-edge razor. Since that incident he always carried a small bottle of antibacterial foam in his pocket.

The small bags in front of him now were from the kitchen, packed with crushed Diet Coke cans, cardboard coffee containers bearing the Starbucks logo, as well as a number of meal-sized Styrofoam containers. Inside these containers were nothing more than half-eaten sandwiches and salads, along a small pile of cigarette butts. He noted that half the butts had lipstick on the filters.

Mac. Tropical fish.

A girlfriend? Lover? Prostitute?

He looked at his watch. He still had time.

The last of the trash was a pile of crumpled bags from the Whole Foods on South Street, and a pair of large potato chip bags. The last bag he picked up had contents that rattled. There was something plastic inside. Shane eased open the top, and saw them.

Jackpot.

There, at the bottom of the empty super-size bag of Lay’s Potato Chips, were four empty pill vials.

Heart racing, Shane carefully picked out the vials, shaking each one to make certain they were empty. They were.

‘And what have we here?’ he quietly asked the night.

He angled the first vial’s label into the beam of his pen flashlight. The prescription was for