Free Next to Die by Neil White Page A

red label just visible.
    The crime scene investigator had been thorough. The flat surfaces of the doors made for good fingerprints and acted like a blank canvas for the blood splatters. The attack had started at the entrance to the bedroom, because there were smears on the door, as if someone had made a bad job of cleaning up. It was the same on the fireplace, with contact marks and then tiny spatters that were consistent with Carrie’s head being banged on the granite hearth. The landlord’s statement was graphic, making the argument seem beyond the routine bickering they normally engaged in. The prosecution case was simple: Ronnie had killed Carrie in their apartment and then removed her, dumping her somewhere. They just didn’t know where he had taken her, or his daughter. If they found Carrie, they expected to find Grace buried alongside her.
    And then there was the visit to the police station, when Ronnie walked in and said that he had killed his girlfriend. That gave Ronnie a problem. All the jurors needed to believe was that Ronnie killed her. The lack of a body was a problem, but juries don’t like to let killers go free.
    Joe closed the sliding doors, so that the low hum of late traffic disappeared and all that was left was the fan of his computer.
    He went to his desk and moved the mouse to fill the screen with the desktop picture of a scanned family photograph, his favourite of them all together, taken on holiday in Portugal. They were on a beach, all of them in shorts and T-shirts, the soft sandstone of the Algarve cliffs behind them, his parents grinning, their arms around Ellie’s shoulders, Joe and Sam on either side. It made him pause for a moment. Although he saw it every time he went to his computer, the conversation with Sam brought back the memory of the holiday. Ellie was dead less than a year later.
    He took a deep breath and then clicked on his internet browser. He knew what he was going to do. Sober, he never went there, but when he felt the jangle of booze in his fingers, he went looking for company.
    Internet dating. He had registered but always ignored the requests for a meeting. It just made him feel like he was back in the game, which was what he needed, but he had no desire to commit. He browsed the pages and read the profiles, imagining what would happen if he got in touch, just to feel that tingle of anticipation that had long since disappeared.
    He got up to close the curtains, but as he stood at the window, he paused. There had been a flash of something on the other side of the water, as if the lights along the canal bank had caught the gleam of something metallic. Joe remembered the man outside the office earlier in the day. He clicked off the light so that he got a better view outside, and as he pressed his face against the glass, there was movement – someone moving quickly.
    He stepped away from the glass. Someone was watching him.

Fourteen
     
    His sobs blotted out the sounds of the morning. No birdsong, no shouting, no hum of the traffic from outside. Just his own steady moans, his arms over his head trying to keep out the noise of his memories, because they had been coming all night, waves of screams and cries, making sleep impossible. Was this how it would always be, never able to forget? Was it too much to ask that he could wipe away what had happened, so that he didn’t have to be tormented by their final moments? The fear in their eyes, their end incomprehensible. He had wanted to say he was sorry each time, that he had never meant it to be like that, but in those final few seconds it was meaningless.
    So he craved the silence that never came.
    It wasn’t just the memories that frightened him. It was the arousal he felt when his mind dwelled on what had happened. It had taunted him all night, the build up of a few hours looking back on it all, it cheated even that small pleasure from him because it was wrong to be aroused by it. What sort of monster had he become?
    It was