Mind + Body by Aaron Dunlap (free books to read TXT) 📖

Before long the stinging had completely faded from my eyes, without the help of milk, even. There was still a distant ringing in my ears, but it wasn’t too bad.

Amy had apparently had the presence of mind to duck when she saw what she thought was a grenade fall to the ground, so the only hit she took was to her ears.

Both of us stayed put on Comstock’s couch. I looked out the window at the tree-filtered moonlight. I didn’t know if those were actual woods behind the house, or just a patch of trees. That guy, Shamus O’Flashbang, could have fled away under the cover of the trees, or he could just be hiding out there waiting for another chance to strike. For perhaps the fifth time I realized I had his gun in my hand, and felt better about my odds for a moment.

Still, I found my phone and dialed Rubino’s number and told him that I had to reschedule our meeting, and that Comstock was dead and the guy who killed him was about to kill me when this girl I know stabbed him with my knife and he jumped out the window under cover of flashbang. Rubino had me repeat the sentence a few times as if I were speaking too quickly or reading a physics equation, then said he would be over with a crime scene crew.

While we waited patiently in the unlit living room of a dead guy, I asked out loud, “What was that?”

“What was what?” Amy replied, leaning against the arm of the couch and looking uncomfortable.

“That. You grabbed my knife and stabbed the guy,” I said, as I searched for somewhere prudent to set the gun down.

“Oh, that. You’re welcome.”

“You don’t think it was a little, I don’t know, dangerous?”

“And grabbing a gun with your hand isn’t?”

“That’s different, I’m…”

“A guy?”

“Capable. But you’re…”

“A girl?”

“Not.”

“Not?”

“You know what I mean,” I said, setting the gun on the floor.

“Yeah, there’s something wrong with your brain and when you’re in danger you turn into Batman. That doesn’t mean I can’t help out.”

“By stabbing someone?”

“What were you going to do?”

“I don’t know. Ask him questions.”

“So I should have done nothing?”

“I don’t know. I don’t like my danger spilling over onto others.”

“It’s spilled. I’m covered in it. I was there in Lorton, I was there at your house. I’m in this too.”

“I wish you weren’t.”

“I wish none of this was happening, but here it is. I stabbed a guy and our principal is lying dead by the front door.”

“My principal.”

“No, I was assigned to him too. I just never saw him because I was never sent to him.”

“Because you waited until now to start stabbing people.”

“Something to tell my grandkids, I guess.”

I didn’t say so, but I wasn’t sure if I was going to live that long.

Special Agents Bremer and Rubino soon showed up, along with their “crime scene crew” which, I found, was practically a small army. FBI forensic agents milled around the house, some uniformed police officers showed up to watch the outside of the house, and some detectives came and mostly stood around and waited for somebody to tell them what to do. It seemed on their end like another jurisdictional pissing match. Once again, the FBI calls dibs on a crime that the cops would love nothing better but to occupy themselves with. Once again, I was in the middle of said crime.

We two youngsters stayed in the living room mostly, and after ten minutes or so Bremer and Rubino came over to again go over what had happened.

I explained how we’d come over to talk with Comstock, how we’d found the door slightly open and his body blocking it. I explained how we walked through the kitchen and around to the living room, talking out loud about Dingan and all that, when Angus McHitman stepped from the shadows and confronted me about my involvement with Dingan’s death.

“He referred to Dingan by name?” Bremer asked, looking a bit tired.

“Yeah,” I said. “He said he thought that the police had killed him, not me.”

“He seemed interested in him? Like he knew him, and this was personal?”

“Yeah, like they were friends or partners or… partners.”

Bremer made a slight face. “Nothing we know about Dingan indicates that he worked with others,” he said.

“Well this guy didn’t seem too happy about Dingan being dead. He gave up his position just to confront me about it.”

“He might have been planning to kill you two anyway,” Rubino said.

“That’s nice to know,” Amy said with a nod.

“He wouldn’t have expected us,” I said. “We hadn’t made plans to come here, it was last minute.”

“Did you talk about it over the phone?” Bremer asked.

I thought for a moment, and then said, “No, we talked about it in person. Do you think my phone is tapped?”

Bremer and Rubino both shrugged. I decided I needed a new phone, and a new account.

“We’ll be able to figure more out once forensics determines a time of death,” Rubino said.

“How?” I asked.

“If Comstock was killed just before you arrived, maybe you caught the killer in the middle of his escape,” Bremer started, “or if he died hours ago, maybe he was waiting for you; or waiting for someone. Or maybe he was looking around the house for something.”

I nodded, about to reply when two uniforms came through the back sliding glass doors. They each had flashlights and were switching them off and slipping crime-scene booties over their shoes.

“We’ve finished checking the perimeter,” one of them said to Bremer or Rubino. “We found a trail of blood leading into the woods, but it ends a hundred feet or so in, he may have patched himself up. We could bring in K-9 and continue a foot search, or call in some choppers from State.”

Both FBI men seemed to consider it. I said, “Couldn’t hurt,” feeling good about contributing, and then Bremer said, “It’s been over half an hour. If he’s a pro, he should have disappeared by now. You can try the dogs but a chopper would be a waste of time. This isn’t a manhunt.”

The two cops nodded and went about their business. Over by the fireplace, some forensics people poked at the drops of blood on the floor with cotton swabs. One of them dropped my knife into a plastic evidence bag.

“Ah,” I said, loudly, “Do you have to take that?”

Everybody in the room stopped and looked at me, decided to whom I was talking, and all but the forensics people went back to work.

“It has his blood on it,” the woman holding the bag said.

“There’s blood all over the place,” I said.

“What, is it your knife?”

“I… maybe,” I said, not sure if I should have admitted it or not. I just didn’t want my knife to get taken and absorbed into the system. The woman, on her knees, shook her head and tossed the bag across the room over to Rubino. He held the bag up, looked at my knife through the clear plastic, and then handed it over to me, saying, “Happy birthday.”

I took the bag, looked at the knife through it, and decided to wait until I could clean the blood off before taking it out.

“So, why isn’t this a manhunt?” Amy asked.

Bremer and Rubino turned toward her, then looked at me and saw that my expression matched hers.

“Some guy gets drunk and shoots his wife,” Bremer started, annoyed, “you have a manhunt. Someone breaks out of prison by shanking a guard and scaling a fence, you have a manhunt. Both of those people are scared, sloppy, untrained, and predictable. If this guy is a real hitter, and everything here suggests that he is, he spends hours each day planning how to evade a manhunt. Someone like this, you have to track down with your brain, not a posse of badges with bloodhounds.”

Over by the door, examiners in blue FBI jackets finished fluttering around Comstock’s body and loaded him inside a fresh body bag and onto a stretcher. Forensic examiners came out of the kitchen loaded with evidence bags full of various items. One of the medical examiners, a middle-aged woman about as tall as my belt, came over to our little circle and snapped off her latex gloves.

“Cause of death?” Bremer asked, looking down at her.

“Unsure at the moment,” the woman replied.

“Time of death?” Bremer asked.

“Also unsure,” she said, hesitant.

Bremer lowered his head slightly to look at her from the top of his eyes.

“The problem is, all external indicators say he died no more than an hour ago. But, just looking at the body, it looks like three to four hours. His body is in mid-stage rigor mortis, which takes three or so hours to even begin; but the musculature is locked into the position it was in at the moment of death,” she held up her arms and took the posture of your average undead zombie as she said it. “Usually the body will relax into a more natural posture before going stiff. This body looks to have experienced cadaveric spasm, or instant rigor. It happens when the body is in extreme muscular distress at the time of death and becomes locked into the posture held in the final moments. We see it often in cases of drowning, where someone will be thrashing their limbs or gripping their hands around seaweed or a rope. Nothing indicates he was drowned and then brought here, however.”

“Is there anything else that can cause it?” Rubino asked.

She scratched her cheek and looked thoughtful for a moment. “Anything that causes massive skeletal-muscular distress, prior to death. Certain nerve agents like VX will do that, and glycine-antagonist poisons such as strychnine can do it.”

“Are either of those injected?” I asked, thinking of the Austrian man supposedly injected with a poison.

The examiner seemed to notice me for the first time, but hid any shock or confusion well. “They can