On the long slow walk back to Oscar’s house, Hannibal realized he could smell his own sweat from running in his black suit, which had picked up quite a bit of dirt while he rolled along the street. There was a nasty scuff on the toe of his left shoe. He opened the top button of his white shirt and pulled his tie away from his throat an inch or two. He had almost reached his destination before he could clearly see Joan sitting on the steps leading up to the porch. As she came within sight he slid his glasses back into place.
“Did you catch him?” Joan asked, getting to her feet. She smoothed her skirt as if she were just rising from a board meeting.
“Afraid not,” Hannibal said. “He managed to reach his car and take off. So did you go in?”
“Are you kidding? There might be a dead body in there.” Joan jerked her thumb toward the door and moved out of Hannibal’s path.
Clearly, bodies were his business. He pushed the door open slowly with a gloved hand and took one step inside. The dining room light played over the stark ghastly scene displayed like a waxwork in the living room. Hannibal stepped carefully around the edge of the room to reach the corner living room torchere.
“You might want to stay on the porch, Miss.”
More light didn’t make it any more pleasant. Oscar Peters lay on his back, his head turned to his left. He still wore his glasses but behind them, his eyes were empty. His cheek was stuck to the floor by the large pool of blood. A couple of quarts had leaked out across the hardwood floor there, actually pumped out through his jugular vein. Oscar might have been staring over at Dean’s footprint in the red pool. His face was frozen in shock. Well, yes, getting murdered is often a surprise.
Hannibal crouched beside the body, trying to hold a mental photograph of this last view of Oscar Peters. His facial expression was the result of the stab wound, one deep thrust to the solar plexus with the flat of the blade held horizontally. Too thick for a kitchen knife. Hannibal could picture the killer putting a hand behind Oscar’s neck, or perhaps an arm around his shoulders, holding him still while he pushed his camp knife or hunting blade up into Oscar’s middle.
“Oh dear God.” That sound from behind Hannibal meant that Joan had decided to come in after all. Well, now she knew why he wanted her to stay on the porch. Hannibal looked toward Oscar’s pale face. The slash wound across his throat was deeper and from the pool of blood, must have been deeper still on Oscar’s left side. Hannibal again saw the killer in his mind, stepping behind Oscar, sinking his blade into the left side of Oscar’s throat through the big vein, then yanking it to the right and dropping him. No, not dropping him. He would have landed face down then. The killer must have stepped back and lowered Oscar to the floor.
Finally Hannibal lifted Oscar’s cold arm and tried to bend it up a little. Judging by the stiffness, Oscar was at least two hours dead. Then Hannibal stood, recalling his brief tenure as a homicide detective in New York City. He remembered seeing lots more damage done to men. This was, in fact, the kind of neat work so often done by professionals and the mentally unstable.
“Now, Miss Kitteridge,” Hannibal said without looking at her. “Now I think it’s time to call the police.”
Hannibal was pleased to see he had judged Joan correctly. Most people are frozen into shock by the sight of a dead body but she gritted her teeth, nodded her head, and reached into her purse for her phone. She did turn her back to the death, and step back out to sit on the porch while dialing. That was fine by Hannibal. He intended to stay in the house for a few more minutes.
Guilt was creeping in around the edges of his heart. While he quickly toured the house’s first floor he was driven by more than a need to avoid Dean being charged with murder. For now he wouldn’t think of that. He would look for some clue to who would want this little man dead.
Hannibal found nothing of a personal nature on the ground floor, if you discounted the knickknacks and kitchen utensils, so carefully matched and coordinated as to betray an obsessive attention to detail. Even Cindy didn’t have salt and pepper shakers that matched the napkin holder, the toothpick holder, the canister set, and even the breadbox for God’s sake. In Hannibal’s mind, this guy was turning out to be a combined cliche. Everything he saw was what he would expect to find in the home of a young gay computer geek.
Upstairs was almost as infuriating. It was Hannibal’s experience that you learned about a person from the nature of the mess they left. Nothing is as individual as the type of disorder we each leave behind. But Oscar Peters left none. Empty garbage cans. A totally orderly bathroom that did, at least, reveal enough in the products he kept to confirm his lifestyle. Quite a variety, in fact, of scents, oils and lubricants. Hannibal could only imagine how they came into play during contact between two male bodies. Closing the medicine cabinet he found himself staring into his own shaded eyes.
“But that’s no reason to let a man die,” he told himself aloud.
The other source of information Hannibal usually counted on was the clutter of paper most of us accumulate. A careful search yielded little there. Photo albums, address books, store receipts all told a person’s story. But Oscar lived a nearly paperless existence. Hannibal assumed all such records were in his personal computer in digital form, and he would not have nearly enough time to find them.
The only papers in Oscar’s bedroom lay neatly in a folder in his side table. Most of its contents consisted of a series of airline ticket stubs. Canada, Australia, Japan, and Russia all in the last year. The man got around.
The rest were personal letters, each folded and stored in the envelope it arrived in. The envelopes bore a return address in Heidelberg, Germany. Hannibal recognized the street because he had spent time not far from it. He opened and read the most recent letter, which turned out to be from Oscar’s mother. Oscar’s parents, Foster and Ruth Peters, had decided to remain in Germany when Foster retired from the Army. In her letter, Ruth was trying to convince her son to visit them and patch up his differences with his father. Their disagreement apparently stemmed from Oscar’s disapproval of his father’s job as a Military Policeman.
The guilt twisted Hannibal’s stomach harder. His own father had been an MP. When he was killed in Vietnam, Hannibal’s mother raised him there in her native Berlin. Sergeant Jones may even have served with Foster Peters.
Then Hannibal’s brow knit and he returned quickly to the airline ticket stubs. Not one to Germany. London was the closest he got. All over the world, but not one visit to his parents. He had been kept away by a feud that, according to his mother, started when he was in high school, almost fifteen years ago. And now, she would have to be told her Oscar died without reconciling with his father. Just as Hannibal’s father died, a continent away, with no warning, no final hug, no good-bye.
The stairs seemed so much longer on the way down. Cool fresh air washed his face when he opened the door, and Joan turned to him. Her expression was both hopeful and expectant. He had nothing to offer her except an address he had written on his note pad.
“Oscar’s parents. You’ll want to notify them.”
“Yes, of course,” Joan said, accepting the slip of paper as if it was much heavier than it appeared. Then they both turned to face the street and stood side by side in the gathering silence. After a few moments the silence became as heavy as that slip of paper. Joan wrapped her arms around her designer jacket.
“It’s getting cold.”
“Yes, probably two hours old,” Hannibal said before he realized his mind was not on the same track as Joan’s. “Sorry, I guess that sounded pretty callous.”
“No,” Joan said with half a laugh. “I can’t think of anything else either.”
Actually Hannibal couldn’t get the cupric smell of Oscar’s blood out of his mind, but he didn’t feel the need to share that with this woman who knew the deceased in business and, as Oscar told it, socially as well. “I suppose you’ve been thinking about who would want him dead.”