She stepped through the doorway and, after a lengthy debate, closed the door behind her. Overhead motion-activated lights flickered on automatically. The house was jarringly cold, and she asked the house the temperature. Fifty-eight degrees. Zhi had always run hot, but even he would turn into a popsicle in here. And her original wouldn’t have lasted five minutes.
Rubbing her hands on her bare arms for warmth, she went down the hall to the living room. It was empty, and the wall-to-wall carpet was new. The smell of disinfectant and fresh paint hung heavy in the air. Under normal circumstances, she’d have guessed that someone was getting ready to sell, but this felt like something else. This house had been scrubbed down to the foundation. Whatever trace of her original Con had hoped to find was long gone. Had that been the point?
In the kitchen, she found a pallet of bottled water. The plastic had been torn back, and a dozen bottles were missing. A partially eaten carton of Szechuan beef sat in the refrigerator, relatively fresh from the smell of it. On the counter was a stack of mail. Con leafed through it, but it was all junk mail addressed unhelpfully to occupant. Upstairs, there were three bedrooms. The first two were as spotlessly empty as the downstairs. In the third, she found a twin-size mattress on the floor, pushed against the wall. A spindly reading lamp rested on a makeshift table of books—a new biography of Mark Zuckerberg, a history of the Gilded Age thicker than her calf, and a dog-eared copy of The Fountainhead. Because it was the only sign, other than bottled water and cold Chinese, that anyone had been here, she treated it the way an archaeologist might an ancient ruin. She stripped the bedding in case anything was trapped between sheets and blanket. Flipping the mattress, she felt around the baseboards. Nothing. She thumbed through the pages of the books, hoping to find—what? A handwritten confession in the margins? Sure, why not? But no, the books were as unmarked as the house.
Frustrated, she squatted on the edge of the mattress, trying to make any sense out of it. Somehow she doubted her original had been shacking up in an empty townhome catching up on her reading for six months. More likely all the furniture had been removed before the house had been cleaned and painted. She reminded herself that her original hadn’t died at the farmhouse. Was she sitting in the middle of her own crime scene?
Unnerved, she went back downstairs to the kitchen and called Darius Clarke. It went to voice mail after one ring. That was fine with her. She left him a message suggesting he pay a visit to Young Americans Music and talk to Stephie Martz. She also gave him the address of the town house and described what she’d found, and not found, there. Then as an afterthought, she said that if she didn’t hear back from him, she’d take the story to the media. Hopefully that would convince him that she was serious.
But what was happening here? In frustration, she went through all the drawers and cabinets a second time. Next steps were running short. She supposed she could find out who owned the house—that would be a place to start. And there was the gardener across the street. She could ask him if he’d seen anything. If that didn’t work out, she’d just start knocking on the neighbors’ doors until she found someone who had. And if none of that worked, she could just wait here for someone to come back for their Ayn Rand. She leaned against the kitchen counter and looked down the hall toward the front entrance.
There was a door off to the side that she’d missed.
How the hell had she done that? With all the adrenaline, she’d apparently been too zeroed in on someone jumping out at her to notice anything important like, say, a whole extra door. That was reassuring.
The door opened into a single-car garage, a concrete slab empty apart from a small trash bag and four dark-blue bags laid out in a row against the back wall. Each bag was about six feet long and made of durable plastic. It was disconcerting to know what a thing was without ever having seen one in real life. But from a lifetime of movies and television, she knew immediately that the four mishappen lumps were body bags, and that none were empty. The only questions were who was inside and whether she had the nerve to look. Well, she knew the answer to the second one already.
Kneeling, she unzipped the first bag. Slowly and only far enough to turn down the flap so she could see the face. She didn’t recognize the man, but he looked oddly peaceful. Curiosity getting the better of her, she unzipped the bag the rest of the way. He’d been stripped naked and scrubbed with bleach. Other than being dead, she couldn’t see anything wrong with him. And the smell of decay wasn’t making her gag the way it had at the farmhouse. He’d died recently. That was why the thermostat was set so low. The house was a literal meat locker.