Total pages in book: 81
Estimated words: 77344 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 387(@200wpm)___ 309(@250wpm)___ 258(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 77344 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 387(@200wpm)___ 309(@250wpm)___ 258(@300wpm)
“What… oh, God,” Max said, trying to rush forward.
I grabbed her, pushing her back behind me as I carefully stepped around the space, making sure we were alone.
“Should we do CPR?” Max asked when we moved back into the living room.
“Wouldn’t do any good,” I said, looking at Henry with something akin to grief growing in me. If not for me, this guy wouldn’t be dead. He’d likely be playing his little shooter games on his gaming console, not strangled to death by… someone. “He’s dead. Was likely dead before we even got out of the hotel parking lot.”
“Don’t,” Max said when my hand immediately moved out, wanting to press his eyelids closed. “Here,” she added, rummaging around in the bag she had strapped at the center of her chest and coming back with… a tube of glue? “Give me your hands,” she demanded.
I did, watching as she held each of my hands in turn and covered my fingertips with the glue. “Okay, there. Now you can touch anything you want,” she told me as she carefully coated each of her fingers as well.
“Just carry that shit around, do you?”
“You never know when you might need to obscure your fingerprints,” Max reasoned as I reached out to slide Henry’s lids closed, saying a silent prayer, with no small bit of regret, before looking around.
“We looking for clues?” she asked, reaching to pull her hood up over her head. “What? Don’t want to leave any hair DNA at a murder scene,” she explained.
There would be time at another point to be really impressed by her ingenuity. But there was no telling if neighbors heard a struggle and called the cops; we were short on time.
So I moved through the apartment, looking for my wallet, for the diamonds, for any sign of what the fuck had happened with this job that had been so perfectly fucking planned.
The two times I’d been inside this apartment, I’d never set foot outside of the common area that served as Henry’s office more so than a living or dining space.
Unlike Zeno’s place, Henry liked things neat. Almost to an extreme degree. He had a collection of those cars you can build stacked on shelves around the room, each one of them completely free of dust. The condiments in the fridge were even organized in alphabetical order, with all of the labels facing out.
His bedroom was similar.
“He has fourteen pairs of… everything,” Max observed. “Socks, underwear, pajamas, clothes, everything. All identical. Had,” she corrected, eyes going sad.
“Yeah, he was a creature of habit,” I agreed. It had taken a lot of convincing to get him agree to work on the diamond heist. The only reason he’d done it was because he had some ‘cutting edge’ project he was working on that he needed funding for.
“So, where’s his roommate?” Max asked, snapping me out of my dark thoughts.
Turning, I found her standing in the doorway to the other bedroom.
“I… have no idea,” I said, suddenly realizing there was a lot about Henry I didn’t know.
I followed Max into the next bedroom, nearly tripping over a pair of kicked-off shoes in the process.
“Whoever his roommate is, he’s a slob. And that’s coming from someone who isn’t exactly a neat freak,” Max said, kicking a half-full box of cheddar cheese crackers out of her way. “See anything weird here?” she asked.
“The lack of cockroaches in this mess?” I said. “What are you seeing?”
“What’s missing,” she said.
“What is missing?”
“Laptop, phone, TV, charging cords, half the clothes in the closet… it’s like he took everything that he really needed and just left the mess. Why?”
“Lazy?”
“Maybe,” she agreed. “Or maybe he was trying to make it seem like he wasn’t cutting and running.”
“We need to figure out who the fuck the roommate is. Was. Whatever.”
I flipped through all of the carefully organized paperwork in the common area, and Henry’s rooms, but everything from the rent to all of the utilities was in Henry’s name.
“Anything in here?” I asked, circling back to Max in the other guy’s sty of a room.
“Nothing personal, no. He took his whole identity with him. Not a single piece of mail.”
“Fuck,” I growled, exhaling hard.
“We need to get moving,” Max said. “The superglue will wear off. Neighbors might hear us moving around. It’s not good.”
She was clearly more practiced in the art of sneaking in and out of places. So as much as I wanted to hang around and go over this place with a fine-tooth comb, I had to trust her instincts and expertise.
So we both made our way back out into the common room, where Max stopped, staring at Henry’s body.
“Come on,” I said, my voice softer as I wrapped an arm around her lower back and led her back out of the apartment after checking that no one was in the hall.