How’d they find out? How’d they get on to him? He’d been so careful. New phones all the time, different Western Union accounts, always covering his tracks. Todd figured, given that they weren’t in uniform, they were detectives. Not good. Not good at all.
“Mr. Cox, open the door, please.” The woman cop this time. She sounded like a ballbuster. Deep voice, commanding.
Where the hell could he go? The trailer’s back door was on the same side as the front door, so he couldn’t sneak away. So he went to the door, took a breath, tried to look like he didn’t give a fuck about anything in the world, and opened it. When he did, he was able to see a dark panel van parked next to his ten-year-old Hyundai.
They flashed their badges.
“Detective Kendra Collins,” the woman said.
The man said, “Detective Rhys Mills.”
“So, like, what’s up?” Todd said.
“We’d like to come in and talk to you,” Mills said.
“What about?”
“We can talk about that when we get inside.”
Todd nervously shifted his weight from one foot to the other.
“You got a warrant?” he asked.
Kendra Collins frowned. “Why would we need a warrant, Mr. Cox? Have you been doing something you shouldn’t?”
“No, shit, no, nothing like that,” he said hurriedly, forcing a grin. “I just thought that’s what you’re supposed to say when the cops want to come into your house.”
Todd backed away from the door, allowing them room to step in. They each gave the trailer a disapproving look as they crossed the threshold and found themselves standing in the kitchen area. There was a small living room, if you could call it that, to one side, and a narrow hallway leading to two bedrooms and a bathroom on the other. The sink was filled with dishes, and the counter was buried in beer cans and empty takeout containers.
Todd said, “Look, I don’t know why you’re here, but I’m clean, like, if you’re looking for drugs or anything, I haven’t been doing anything. I don’t do that stuff. Seriously.”
Rhys Mills surveyed the mess in the sink. “You’re Todd Cox? Twenty-one years old? Born in New Haven, September tenth, 2001?”
“Yeah, one day before all the shit went down.”
Kendra, standing behind him, asked, “Your mother is Madeline Cox?”
“That’s right,” he said, turning to look at her, his back to Detective Mills. “This got something to do with her?”
Kendra took out her phone, opened up the photo app, and said, “There’s something I’d like you to have a look at.”
She extended her arm, holding the phone low so Todd had to bend over to look at it.
“I can’t really see—”
“Look closer,” she said.
Todd tried to focus, leaned in. That was when Rhys came up behind him and jammed the needle into his neck.
“What the—” Todd turned abruptly, slapping his neck as though he’d just been stung by a bee. But Rhys was quick, and had not only completed the injection but withdrawn the syringe before Todd could swat him.
Almost immediately, Todd became unsteady on his feet. “Jeshush... wha the fu was...”
He looked quizzically at Rhys, who stood there, smiling grimly. “Sorry about this, Mr. Cox.”
Kendra, “Back in a sec, Rhys.”
She exited the trailer.
“Where’s your pardner go...” Todd said, throwing a hand up against the wall to steady himself.
“It shouldn’t take long, and you shouldn’t feel any pain,” Rhys said, a hint of sympathy in his voice. “It’ll all be over soon.” He’d taken some rubber gloves from his pocket and was pulling them on, snapping them when he had them up to his wrist.
Todd began a slow slide down the wall. When his butt touched the trailer floor he rested his head against the wall, watching the room spin.
The trailer door opened and Kendra, who had also donned gloves, came in with two large canvas bags. She dropped them to the floor, unzipped the first one, and took out something shiny and black that had been folded several times. She unzipped it and opened it wide.
A body bag.
“Best to get him stuffed in here before he shits his pants,” she said. “I don’t want to have to clean up any more than necessary.”
Rhys nodded in agreement.
Todd wasn’t dead yet, but he didn’t have enough life left in him to be at all cooperative when it came to getting into the bag. Rhys got his hands under Todd’s arms and dragged him on top of the bag, worked the sides up and around him, and then started to zip it up, starting at the dying man’s feet.
He paused before closing the bag over Todd’s face and looked into the dying man’s unfocused eyes, his dazed expression.
“This is always the interesting part,” he said. “The moment of passing.”
He zipped the bag shut. From inside, one muffled word from Todd: “Dark.”
“How much longer?” Kendra asked Rhys.
He shrugged. “Minute, tops.”
There was some minor rustling inside the bag for a few seconds, then nothing. Kendra watched the stillness for a moment, then opened the second bag and started taking out cans of Drano, scrubbing brushes, spray bottles of bleach, cleaning cloths, paper towels, garbage bags.
Rhys said, “Bathroom’s all yours.”
Kendra frowned. “Come on.”
Rhys shook his head adamantly. “You know I can’t handle that. If the bathroom’s only half as bad as this kitchen, it’s going to be like a latrine behind enemy lines.”
God, Kendra thought, Rhys could be such a germaphobe. He could kill a guy, but ask him to clean a toilet and he looked like he was going to lose his lunch.
She said, “What d’ya think this guy was into? He was scared shitless we were real cops.”
Mills looked at the phone sitting on the laptop. “Burner. Drugs, maybe.” He paused. “Doesn’t matter.”
Kendra said, “Be a lot easier if we could just torch the place like the last one.”
“If there wasn’t a goddamn fire station on the other side of those trees, I’d say yeah. But they’d be here in seconds. Place’d never have a chance to burn.”
They were methodical. Kendra, giving in to her partner’s squeamishness, found her way to the back of the trailer and attacked the bathroom. She cleaned out the sink and shower, then poured Drano into the drains, ensuring that anything in the traps would be dissolved. This was followed by a thorough cleaning of every surface with the spray bottles of bleach. Toilet, walls of the shower, even inside drawers and cupboards.
Into a garbage bag she tossed Todd’s hairbrush, razor, toothbrush, partially used bars of soap, every toiletry item he might have used. She didn’t just empty the small trash container. She bagged the container, too. Plus towels, washcloths.
“How’s it going up there?” she called out.
Down the hall, from the kitchen, Rhys said, “Gettin’ there.”
Kendra, needing a break, traveled the narrow hallway to where it opened onto the kitchen. The countertops were clear and clean, the empty stainless steel sink glistened, and the front of the fridge didn’t have a single, visible smudged fingerprint.
She whistled. “This place almost looks good enough to move into, if it weren’t a fucking trailer.”
It took the better part of four hours. The last thing they did was go back out to the van for a high-powered vacuum to give the place one last, good going-over. Gathered by the door were the body bag and ten stuffed garbage bags that included, among other things, all the clothing from Todd’s bedroom closet and drawers, the laptop, the bills, some list of seniors’ facilities found in a cutlery drawer, all the cutlery itself, trash from under the sink, the half-eaten slice of pizza.