Free Evil at Heart by Chelsea Cain Page A

there.
               
                The knot in Susan’s stomach tightened. “Hello?” she said.
               
                It was under a sheet. Maybe a piece of furniture. People threw white sheets over furniture to protect it if they were going away for a while. Rich people, with second houses, in the twenties. It wasn’t furniture. Old clothes?Something a squatter left, hoping to come back for later?
               
                It wasn’t old clothes.
               
                Who was the guy who’d phoned her? And why?
               
                Call the cops, her little voice said.
               
                But instead she felt in her purse for the notebook and pen.
               
                She traced the form on the floor with her flashlight. Surrounding it, like some sort of offering, were eight or ten big red plastic flashlights, none of them on.
               
                Maybe it was some sort of renovation project.
               
                It wasn’t a renovation project.
               
                “Okay,” Susan said. She moved tentatively forward, notebook and pen clutched in one hand, flashlight in the other. “I’m going to look.” When she got to the form she knelt down, and the knees of her jeans pressed into something wet. She sat back on her heels and shone her flashlight on her legs. Blood.
               
                She jumped to her feet. Blood was everywhere. The form was soaked in it. It pooled on the floor, a viscous jam, shiny in the flashlight beam. She opened her purse, snapped up her spray can of herbal mace, and held it out, index finger on the nozzle.
               
                “Are you okay?” she asked in a tiny voice.
               
                It sounded stupid even as she said it. There was no way someone could bleed that much and still be alive. Don’t look under the sheet. She couldn’t help it. She had to know. She held the flashlight overhead, an ad hoc bludgeoning instrument, and, grimacing, used the spray can of mace to ease the sheet back.
               
                She took his face in all at once—a flash of eyebrows and acne scars, a slender nose, round face, and soft chin, all the details ordering in her brain to form a face, a young man, a guy her age. For a split second, she thought he was okay, that he’d start laughing, that it was all some stupid joke. He was wearing one of those silly hospital scrub caps, for Christ’s sake, a purple one with cartoon elephants on it, like he was in some sort of costume. And his eyes were open. She let the breath she’d been holding escape in a gasp. Then her brain caught up with her.
               
                The eyes weren’t right. The lids were pulled back too far, his fixed stare barely visible under a cataract-like white glaze.
               
                She jerked back, and her flashlight beam momentarily angled up, cutting a path to the opposite wall. For a second Susan thought she was seeing things. She angled the flashlight up again, the beam trembling with her hand. The yellow ball of light slid across the wall, and Susan wanted to turn it off, wanted it to be dark, because even scary pitch-black would be better than this.
               
                The wall had been painted white. But it had been decorated. Someone had covered the surface, almost every inch of it, with hundreds and hundreds of hand-drawn red hearts.
               
                Get out of the house, her little voice screamed. But Susan didn’t move. There was no fucking way she was going back into that basement.
               
                She