Too Close to Home

“I just. . I don’t notice anything,” Derek said.

“Let’s do a slow walk-through,” Barry said, directing us to turn around and head back down the hallway. “We’ll start in the kitchen.”

It was a relief to go in there. So long as you didn’t actually breathe, there wasn’t anything to tip you to what had transpired on the other side of the wall. Donna, who’d had more than her share of quirks, was also something of a neat freak, and the kitchen showed it. Nothing out of place, no dishes in the sink, everything in perfect order in the fridge, which Barry opened by pulling on the side of the door itself, and not the handle, which had also been dusted for fingerprints.

“Mrs. Langley was here, packing stuff for the trip,” Derek said. “She was feeling kind of woozy.”

“Right,” Barry said. “That’s what Langley’s secretary said was the reason they’d come back. The cooler with the food in it, some other groceries, they were all still in the SUV, they hadn’t had a chance to bring it back in yet before they were killed. So nothing here, nothing looks out of the ordinary?”

“No.”

“Okay, let’s head upstairs.”

Stepping over Donna Langley’s blood at the bottom of the stairs was like trying to straddle a puddle at the edge of a curb after a rainstorm. Thankfully, once we were up the carpeted stairs, there were no more blood pools.

“Again,” Barry said, “try not to touch anything.” We’d kept our hands in our pockets, except for when we navigated the blood and needed our arms to maintain our balance.

“Okay,” said Barry, easing himself into the first door on the left. “This is Adam’s room, but you probably already know that, right, Derek?”

Derek nodded.

“Just have a look, see if you notice anything out of place, out of the ordinary.”

I figured Barry Duckworth, who had kids of his own, realized the fact that this room looked as though it had been tossed was not necessarily evidence that some bad guy or bad guys had been here searching for something. It was a teenage boy’s room, and at a glance, it could have been Derek’s. There were heaps of clothes on the floor here and there, the bed was unmade, magazines about computers and skateboarding and girls littered the top of his desk. Posters adorned the walls, including one that was drawn in the style of a World War II recruiting ad, showing a smiling soldier holding up a mug of coffee and saying, “How about a cup of shut the fuck up?”

Also like Derek’s room, there were computer parts everywhere. Three monitors, half a dozen keyboards, countless wires and cables, boxes from computer games, an old-generation Nintendo system shoved under a desk, three computer towers.

Barry sighed. “I don’t know how you’d tell, exactly, whether something was missing from here, but what do you think?”

Derek studied the room from where he stood, didn’t say anything for about half a minute, then, “It looks fine.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah.”

Barry moved us back into the hall. The next room was a guest bedroom and looked as pristine as a hotel suite, not much to spot in there. We all poked our heads into the bathroom, and it looked as though Donna had left it ready should company drop by.

Well, somebody dropped by.

All that was left on this floor was the master bedroom. “I don’t know whether you’ve ever seen this room or not,” Barry said to Derek, “but go ahead and have a look.”

I was relieved he hadn’t said the same thing to me. I looked in over Derek’s shoulder, and the bedroom looked pretty much the same as it had the only other time I had seen it, except maybe for the fingerprint dust all over the dresser.

“Nothing,” Derek said.

“Okay, that’s okay,” Barry said. “If you don’t see something, that probably means that there’s nothing much to see. So we’ve got just one thing left to check out.”

“What?” Derek said, surprised.

“The basement.”

“Oh,” he said. “You think anyone was in the basement?”

“Well, we need to check out everything,” he said.

And so we went back down the stairs, over the puddle of Donna Langley’s blood, then down the hall, and down the half flight of stairs to the landing at the back door, where Adam Langley had died. Barry maneuvered himself around the bloodstains and went down the last few steps into the basement, but Derek, who had been behind him, stood breathless on the last step before the landing.

“You okay?” I asked him. Maybe Ellen had been right. This was too much to put our son through. Barry shouldn’t have made him do this. And so far, dragging our boy through this hadn’t provided any new insights.

“I can just. . I can just picture him there,” Derek said.

“I know,” I said.

“If he could have just gotten out the door. If only he’d run a little faster,” Derek said.

Barry poked his head around the wall. “What do you mean, Derek?”

“Just that, if he’d been quicker, he might have gotten away.”

“He was shot in the back of the head,” Barry said, “so he was probably already running, trying to get out, but it’s hard to outrun a bullet.”