Free City of Ice by John Farrow Page B

blank wall, stand on tiptoe and peer at the dust on top of the refrigerator. He seemed scarcely to be breathing. He spent considerable time in the common living and sleeping room, less time in the kitchen, no time at all in the bathroom. He seemed more interested in blank spaces than in the cabinet where the boy had hung, or in the plain dark pine table centered in the apartment. He did stand upon the table once, observing both the top of the cabinet and the room’s central light fixture.
    “All right,” he said finally. “Let’s go.”
    “Émile?” She leaned a shoulder against the wall next to the entry door, where she had remained throughout. “Tell me what you see,” she requested quietly. “Please.” Her husband was a reserved, reticentman. In the heady days of romance spontaneity had never been a problem, but marriage had proven the less successful sojourn. Daily she felt him becoming more removed from her, his secretive nature taking up residence between them as a third and somewhat hostile entity.
    Cinq-Mars gazed back into the room. He considered his thoughts, as though uttering them aloud might diminish their import, or tarnish his ideas in such a way that they’d lose their impetus.
    “The furniture was removed from this room,” he pointed out, “and only the fridge and stove are left in the kitchen. You can see by the shadows where light faded the floor in some places and not others. The bed was here. Over there, a dresser. The way this small rectangular shape turns toward the large one suggests a television aimed at a sofa. No cable. Here, these small shapes? Bricks, placed in a row to support bookshelves. Someone removed every stick of furniture, except the closet and the table, which they probably needed to remain behind.”
    “For the murder?” Sandra asked.
    “They hung him in the closet. But he wasn’t murdered here. The meat hook might have been driven into him here, but the boy was already dead. I think they left the table because it’s so plain, so simple, they know it holds no secrets.”
    She was especially intrigued now, folding her arms together. “What do you mean, secrets?”
    “Here, look.” He invited her over to a wall and crouched. She placed a hand on his shoulder and leaned down. “The wall socket. What do you make of it?”
    His wife did a quick study. “It’s a wall socket all right.”
    “Look closer,” gently, he commanded.
    She did so, crouching herself. She examined thedevice carefully, smiling, warmed by being in her husband’s company for a change, and enchanted by the possibility that something was to be seen here that she could not see. Her husband often spotted attributes or blemishes in horses that she had missed on first inspection. She liked to tease him that he had a pathology for detail, while she preferred the overview, the big picture. He’d get defensive then, saying that he noticed details because he understood them in the context of the big picture. She didn’t doubt it, but kidded him anyway. In this environment Sandra viewed neither. What she was looking at carried no significance for her. “I see a wall socket, Émile.”
    “Ah, but look.” He ran a finger along its edge. “The room was painted some time ago, but it’s fairly fresh, within the year I’d say. The socket was painted at the same time with the same color. Now look. The paint’s been chipped around the plate and scratched off the screwhead. Which means the plate was removed recently.” He straightened a little stiffly to an upright position again. “We know that a moving van was here yesterday, so it’s reasonable to assume that all the furniture was moved out then. Notice how well the apartment’s been cleaned. Swept and vacuumed. But look, check along the quarter-round, a few flecks of paint remain, trapped under the molding. They fell from around the socket. If I had to guess—and I do—I’d say the sockets were opened up and inspected yesterday, after the