56 Days by Catherine Ryan Howard

Today

“Just try not to think about it,” Tom says, his voice muffled by his mask and the papery layer of forensic coveralls over Lee’s ears. “Take shallow breaths. Focus on the scene. We won’t be in there long. You ready?”

Lee nods.

“Then let’s go.”

Tom turns and steps over the threshold of apartment one, and she follows him.

A series of metal step-plates have been placed in the hall; they move carefully from one to the other, as if navigating stones set across a fast-moving river.

Voices and rustling noises from the living room tell Lee that the scenes-of-crime officers are still at work in the other rooms. Just as they reach the bathroom, the next open doorway—the smaller of the two bedrooms—flares with a bright camera flash.

“After you,” Tom says, waving a hand. “Step into the far corner for me, to your right.”

When she enters the bathroom, she sees their reflections in the mirrored wall above the sink: two earthbound astronauts in ill-fitting spacesuits, their true selves only visible for the two inches of skin between the top of their face masks and the hood of the coveralls.

There’s no danger of catching anything while walking a crime scene, that’s for sure.

She goes to the step-plate Tom has directed her to and then carefully rotates on the spot, shuffling her covered feet until she’s facing the body.

It’s in the same position as it was on her previous visit, but the surfaces around it—tiled wall, sink, mirror, what remains of the glass—are now dirty with smudges of black fingerprint dust. A portable scene-light has been erected in the opposite corner to where Lee stands, on a diagonal from the body, its harsh white bulbs pointed down at it. Someone has collected the safety glass pebbles.

Tom takes up a position a couple of feet away, closer to the deceased. Between them, the portable light and the bathroom fittings, there is no room left for anyone else to enter the room without disturbing the body or the area immediately around it.

It’s also starting to feel like some kind of terrible sauna where not only do you have to wear your own clothes, but layers of them. Lee feels a warm bead of sweat slide down her spine and settle in the small of her back.

“You okay?” Tom asks.

“Yes. No.” She waves a gloved hand. “Let’s just get this over with.”

He turns toward the body. “All preliminary at this stage, as you know. Caucasian male, late twenties, about six foot. Dead, at my best guess for now, for round about two weeks. No flies because the apartment was as good as sealed to the elements, which I think you’ll agree we’re all very grateful for today. The deceased is lying facedown in the remnants of the shower door with some shards of it on his clothing and in his hair, suggesting that it was his fall through the glass that caused it to break. He has a wound to his left temple”—Tom points at the head, then at the brownish smudge on the bathroom wall, which, since she saw it last, has gained a small piece of yellow tape with a number written on it stuck just alongside it—“which corresponds with this bloodstain here, indicating that that is the point at which he hit his head immediately after he went through the shower door.”

The stench feels like it’s gotten so thick that it’s taken on a solid shape, and that shape is coiling around Lee’s neck like a deadly python, slithering and tightening, making her windpipe dangerously small.

“Accident?” she asks, being economic with her words so as to avoid letting the python inside.

“The fall was possibly, yes, but I don’t think that’s what killed him. The scalp tears easily and bleeds a lot, so lacerations can look a lot worse than they actually are. Their impact is mostly aesthetic. Of course, I’ll have to wait until we do the postmortem to prove it, but I’d be surprised to find a skull fracture. He’d really have to have walloped himself off the wall there with some mighty force in order to sustain a fatal head injury and”—Tom holds out his arms—“you can’t swing a cat in here. You wouldn’t have the space to build up to it and going through a pane of glass would slow you down.” He pauses. “Let’s talk about why he fell. Did you look in the medicine cabinet when you were in here before?”

Lee nods. “There’s Rohypnol in there.”

“He has a prescription for it, I’d say. We know it for its more nefarious uses, but it’s primarily a tranquilizer used to treat things like chronic insomnia. But I’m confused as to why, if he’d taken it—and we have to wait for toxicology to confirm that—he was in here in the first place, still mostly dressed, walking around. There are more pills missing from the pack in the cabinet, so presumably, he’d taken them before. He must have known it’d be a wise idea to already be in bed when he swallows them.”

“The blankets,” Lee says. “They were pulled back on one side. So he was probably in bed . . .”

“I think so, yes. And then he got up for some reason. Although he’s not dressed for bed, but that’s neither here nor there. Anyway”—Tom winks at her—“are you ready for the riddle?”

I’m about ready to projectile vomit,Lee thinks, so I’d rather just skip to the bit where we leave this stench-fest.

But she says, “Go on.”

“Where’s the blood? Can you see any? Apart from our little smudge there on the wall.”

Lee hasn’t been looking. She’s been pretending that the entire area to the right of Tom is pixelated, that she can’t see what’s there, that she can’t see the discoloration, the bloated face, the skin slipping and—

She swallows hard and breathes in deep, trying to capture every last molecule of the VapoRub’s remaining menthol scent.

“Why don’t you just tell me whether or not there is,” she says, “and I’ll believe you?”

“There’s no blood, Lee. And even the smallest, shallowest wound to the scalp bleeds profusely. The scalp is chock-full of blood vessels. And yet, no blood, except for our impact on the wall there. None on the floor—”

“How can you tell? There’s that . . . sludgy stuff.”

“That’s not blood and that came after. It’s like there’s a halo of cleanliness all around the head and upper part of the body. But there was blood, with a scalp laceration like that. So, where did it go?”

Lee tries to think, but almost immediately her thoughts are back on the smell, and how it’s so incredibly overpowering that she could have shoved an open jar of Vicks up each nostril and she’d still be smelling the damn thing. She can feel it. It’s not just hanging in the air, it’s clinging to it. And everything else as well. The second she gets home tonight she’s burning everything she’s wearing. She’ll have to wash—

“Water,” she says. “The blood got washed away.”

“Yes!” Tom seems excessively pleased about this. “Because . . . ?”

“The shower was on.”

“I think”—Tom indulges in a dramatic pause here—“he might have died by drowning.”

Lee looks down at the body, immediately regrets it, looks away again.

“He what now?”

“Death by drowning doesn’t require submersion, you see. There just needs to be enough liquid to inhale, to get into the lungs. So, hypothetically, if our friend here had taken a tranquilizer and then got back out of bed, stumbled in here—perhaps he needed to use the toilet—and fell through the shower door, and he landed as he is now with his mouth and nose on the tile—and right, I may add, in the little depression formed by the drain where water would tend to pool—and the shower was on . . . Well, he might have been a little stunned by the blow to the head, or the Rohypnol was kicking in, or both, and he falls unconscious in that position, which of course means he keeps breathing, and he drowns in a couple of inches of water in his own shower.” Tom pauses. “This is why I truly will never understand why people go skydiving and bungee-jumping and all that malarkey. It’s so easy to die. Why try to make it happen?”

“Why was the shower on in the first place?”

“Good question. He could’ve simply hit the lever during the fall or in his attempts to get back up from it. Those things”—he points at the shower handle—“all it takes is a little force and the water would start to flow. He could’ve been planning to have a shower and just misjudged how quickly the tranquilizer would kick in. But that’s not your million-dollar question, Lee.”

She raises her eyebrows. “It isn’t?”

“The million-dollar question is: Who turned the water off?”

Her stomach sinks.

“We might have a problem with that,” she says.

“Oh? How so?”

“There’s a woman here who’s been annoying the hell out of us since lockdown began. Noise complaints, ratting on her neighbors, etc. When she rang this morning, the station thought it was more of the same. They sent out two new recruits. One of them said he turned off the tap, that it was dripping.”

Tom nods a couple of times, considering this. “I can’t rule out that he didn’t turn off the water himself, in the last throws of consciousness. But either way, I doubt there was anything of evidentiary value on the lever anyway.”

“What makes you say that?”

Tom clasps his hands together and rests them on his stomach. Lee likes the guy, but she wishes he’d tone down the Golden Age–detective routine.

“The whole place is wiped clean,” he says, “according to your scenes-of-crime fellas. Every single surface wiped down throughout the apartment. Thorough job. They haven’t found a single print. So that’s your real riddle. Why would someone wipe down an apartment after an accident? And why on earth didn’t they call for help?”