Free The Bellingham Bloodbath by Gregory Harris

have returned triumphant,” I announced, presenting the file in the flat of my palms.
    He glanced around, his eyes blank a moment, and then a broad, disbelieving grin spread across his face. “He gave it to you?!” He set the gun’s barrel onto the mantel and rushed over to me, pulling me into a hug that threatened to choke the air from my body. “This is extraordinary! You’re extraordinary!” He grabbed the file and immediately began thumbing through it as he headed back to the fireplace.
    I watched him flip through the photographs without the slightest change of expression, continuously referring back to them as he read through Denton’s report. Only after he had plunged into his chair, lips pursed and eyebrows tightly knit, did he finally look back at me. “Did you see the captain’s remains?”
    â€œI did.” I told him everything I had seen, omitting only the last few moments of my time there. I saw no reason to rile him up when I had done a perfectly good job of defending my honor myself.
    â€œAwful,” he muttered when I’d finished. “Though it certainly offers insight into what likely happened that night.”
    â€œDoes it?”
    â€œAbsolutely.” He picked up the pieces of his gun and quickly began reassembling it. “When you went into their flat, what was the first thing you noticed?”
    â€œHow very clean and orderly it was.”
    â€œPrecisely. It was faultless. Even with a young boy running about, it was pristine.” He sighted down the gun’s barrel before setting it between us. “And what does all that order imply?”
    I gave a shrug. If there was something to be learned from the state of their flat it was lost on me.
    â€œWhatever the killer was after was not in the flat,” he supplied. “Nothing was disheveled. Which suggests one thing: The killer was after that most elusive of desires . . . information. Information that only Captain Bellingham could give. There can be no mistaking that fact.”
    â€œWhich is why he was tortured . . . ?”
    â€œAnd yet . . . what of it?” He glanced at me and I could almost see the cogs in his mind turning. “So specific. So . . . unusual.”
    â€œAn effective way to get a man to talk, I should think.”
    â€œWell . . .” He leapt up and stalked back to the fireplace. “I don’t think that was the point.” He snatched up the file and flipped through it again until he came to a specific page. “It says the captain endured three hundred and seventy-one match burns, and that his sex organs were nearly burned from his body. Do you really suppose he would suffer all of that and then choose to talk?”
    â€œI could hardly think of a better time.”
    â€œI’m asking a serious question.”
    â€œI’m deadly serious—”
    â€œYou’re being lazy.” He scowled, folding his arms across his chest. “Apply yourself.”
    I let out a breath and tried to concentrate on what he had just gone over, but if he was expecting it to suddenly coalesce for me, he was woefully disappointed. “Why don’t you just tell me what you think?!” I groused.
    â€œWhat I think . . . , ” he said, waving the file at me, “. . . is what I posited before. That Captain Bellingham invited the killer into the flat and took him up to the attic. Once there, the killer caught the captain unawares with a clip to the back of his head, knocking him unconscious long enough to bind him to that chair.”
    â€œA clip to the back of his head?” I repeated.
    â€œDidn’t you read the report?” He tossed the file at me. “I think you’ll find it mentions a small hematoma less than two millimeters in diameter just below the left foramen magnum on the occipital bone.” He pointed behind and below his left ear. “The cause was a blunt instrument, probably the butt of the very gun