Free The Dead Soul by M. William Phelps Page B

perfume. Lavender and evergreen. Since he’d stopped smoking, Jake had his smell back. One of the perks.
    “This air freshener, where’s it coming from?” Jake asked. He looked up at the ceiling. Around the room.
    “We have it pumped in,” the father said, “through the air ducts.”
    Must be nice being that rich. Geesh . “You have perfumed air pumped in. Oh … K.”
    “You don’t smell that?”
    “Our maid is not the most efficient, Detective.”
    “No, not a laundry basket smell. Rotting flesh. Like meat that’s gone bad. How have you and Mrs. Taylor managed to avoid it?”
    “Now I do,” Taylor tipped his head up in the air like a dog. Took in a few quick whiffs through his nose.
    “What the hell? Hasn’t anyone said anything about this?”
    “We haven’t been in here, Detective, since that first day Lisa went missing. My wife told you that. Ever since Lisa ran off, there was no need to come in here. The door has been closed. She’s run off before. We never look through her things. She always comes back. When the house stinks, we turn the air freshener volume up and scold the maid.”
    The smell was stronger by the closet. Jake approached the door, but decided against opening it in front of Mr. Taylor.
    “Why don’t you wait out there?” Jake pointed to the hallway. Whatever was in the closet was something the father didn’t need to see.
    Once he was alone, Jake opened the door with caution, walked in. It was a large room, the size of Jake’s bedroom back in Southie. Dark, too. He found one of those bulb lights hanging from the ceiling, pulled the chain. Lisa Marie’s shoes were on one side, clothes on the other.
    Jake walked toward the back of the closet.
    What ?
    The source of the smell came from what hung off two large hooks clipped to the clothes pole.
    “Sonofabitch.”
    Mr. Taylor came up from behind. “What is it, Detective?”
    “Get out of here,” Jake yelled, pushing him out the door. “Go—”
    A pair of legs, lopped off below the knees, hung there, bloated and dripping fluids—a piece of meat in a butcher’s freezer. The toe nails were painted Barbie pink, same shade as Lisa’s room.
    Jake Cooper guessed he was staring at the remains of Lisa Marie Taylor’s legs.
    Dickie heard the commotion, ran up the stairs and into the room. He stood next to Jake, lost in surrealistic nature of such a horrific sight. After a moment, “Hey, kid,” Dickie said, “your phone got an app for that?”
     

 
    13
     
    Friday, September 5 - 4:36 P.M.
     
    Gregorian chants reverberated throughout the house. The booming voices of the choir made for an ominous, enchanting late afternoon. He loved the spiritual mood it put him in. Being a Friday, he got off work, then rushed home to see if that Web order from policesupplies.com had arrived. To his delightful surprise, he saw the brown package on the front steps after getting out of his Jeep.
    He hummed with the music as he stood in front of a pan of photo developer mixed with 200 Solution. This, too, he had ordered online. The combination gave him the best bang for his Kodak buck. Developing photos at home, watching the images he snapped emerge from a solution that smelled of turpentine and chemistry class, was comforting and nauseating. The pictures in the solution were snapshots of dreams coming into focus. Amazing, he thought. A few simple ingredients—film, paper, and feigned darkness—unleashed a life frozen in time.
    Lisa Marie’s killer loved this.
    He hung the photos from a clothes line in the room. When he finished, he inched his way backward, staring at each one.
    I hate you. Leave me alone.
    Memories attacked him like angry bees.
    The first photo was of Lisa Marie’s face, before he thrashed her. Lisa was completely thawed by that point. He tried to make her smile, but rigor had set in, her cheeks hard as a mound of clay left out overnight, not cooperating. Frustrated, he hit her one last time and gave up.
    Next to the shot of