Too Close to Home

“I hear ya,” Barry said, like he and my son were suddenly best friends. I couldn’t pinpoint exactly why, but that gave me an uncomfortable feeling.

The conversation died out as we neared the Langley house. I felt that I was seeing the place for the first time. There wasn’t anything structurally different about it from a week or a month ago, aside from the decorative yellow police tape surrounding it, but now it had this ominous presence. I wondered, momentarily, what would happen to the house, now that the Langleys were all dead. Relatives would have to come in, sell the place. I’d hate to be the real estate agent brought in to find a buyer for a house where three people had been slain.

We were coming up to the back of the house, but Barry said, “We’ll be going in around the front. Still a bit of a mess around the back door there.”

My son was very quiet. But then, “They’re, like, they aren’t still there, are they?”

Barry smiled. “No. The bodies have been removed, Derek.”

Derek nodded quickly, as if to suggest he knew that, he was just kidding, as if anyone was in the mood for jokes.

We came around the front of the house, where there was a patrol car in addition to Barry’s unmarked cruiser, an officer parked behind the wheel. Barry sidled over, talked to the cop through the open window, said we were all going in for a tour. Barry hardly had to ask the guy for permission, but he was being extremely polite today.

“Okay,” he said, leading the way to the front door. “Let’s go in.”

As we entered the house he said, “Don’t touch anything.” He held the door for us. “In fact, you might want to put your hands in your pockets just to be sure.”

We complied. Derek went in ahead of me, and once the three of us were just inside the door, we all stopped, like we were on some sort of historic house tour and Barry was our guide.

It didn’t take long for us to realize we weren’t on that kind of tour.

The carpet immediately in front of us, and at the base of the stairs, was nearly black with blood. And even though the bodies of the Langleys had been removed, the stench in the house took our breath away. A hand came out of my pocket and went instinctively to my mouth.

“Yeah, sorry about that,” Barry said as I slipped my hand back into my pocket.

I took a look at Derek to see how he was coping. Trying to breathe through his mouth, eyes darting around. I could make out his fists clenching in the front pockets of his jean shorts.

“Right here,” Barry said, pointing to the blood closest to us, “is where Albert Langley died, where his body was found. We think he went to the door, that one or more persons had knocked on it and he was shot very shortly after opening the door. And then over here,” he said, guiding us around the blood and over toward the stairs, “was where Donna Langley’s body was discovered.” There seemed as much blood there as by the front door. “She must have come downstairs when she heard the commotion, and that’s where it happened.”

“Dear God,” I said, and took another look at my son, who was stone-faced. Hesitantly, I said, “And Adam?”

“Down the end of the hall here, at the bottom of a half flight of stairs, by the back door.”

Before we could proceed any further into the house, Barry wanted us to slip on some booties in a bid not to contaminate the crime scene any further. He pulled three pairs of them from his pocket, and we all took a moment to get them on. This, of course, necessitated taking our hands out of our pockets, and Derek and I leaned against each other, taking turns, to slip them over our shoes. They were crinkly, a bit like paper, but much stronger.

Once that was done, Barry motioned for us to follow him along the hallway, which we both walked down as though we were tightrope walkers, hands back in our pockets, careful not to let our shoulders brush the walls. I noticed light-colored powder on many surfaces within the house. On doorknobs, stair railings, the corners of walls.

Barry, who’d been watching me, said, “Fingerprinting.”

“Of course,” I said.

To Derek he said, “We’ll be wanting to get a set of your prints.”

“Huh?” said Derek.

“Not to worry,” Barry said. “We already know you’ve been over. But if the killer, or killers, left any prints behind, we have to be able to weed out the ones that don’t matter.”

“Right,” said Derek.

We’d reached the end of the hall, where the steps came up from the back door. We looked down onto a third puddle of dried blood. I felt myself getting woozy.

“Derek,” Barry said, “have you noticed anything? Something that seems out of place? Something missing? Something that’s there that wasn’t there before?”

I’d been inside this house several times over the years, and to my eye everything looked in order, aside from the obvious signs. The place had not been ransacked. Cushions hadn’t been tossed. It didn’t look, for example, as though someone had been searching for drugs after murdering the occupants.

Unless, of course, they knew exactly where to look for whatever it was they’d come to get.