Free Dangerous Undertaking by Mark de Castrique Page B

there.”
    I started to remind him I had worked in a police department, but I decided I’d probably say the same thing to anyone standing smack in the middle of a murder scene. I set the phone receiver back on the cradle, careful to hold it where I would not smudge any prints. There was nothing I could do for Fats. I took the few remaining minutes before the coming onslaught of law enforcement officials and media hounds to indulge my old police curiosity about the crime scene.
    The writing desk in his bedroom was tidy. I had used the black rotary-dial phone I found squared in the back right corner. The goose-necked lamp was on the left. A plain white message pad lay in the center of the desk. Several sheets had been torn off leaving a red-gummed rim of adhesive binding sticking a quarter inch above the top sheet. Nothing was written on the pad, although I noticed an imprint from the previous notation—“Barry Clayton weather.”
    Just to the side of the desk was a wire-mesh waste basket, its bottom covered with wadded note sheets. I wondered if the one bearing my name was among them. On the floor next to the waste basket lay a retractable ballpoint pen with “McCauley’s Furniture” gilded on the blue plastic barrel. The tip was clicked in position for writing.
    Everything else in the sparsely furnished room seemed in order. The clothes I had seen Fats wearing yesterday were piled in the desk chair. The single bed was made, but the spread had been neatly folded back from the pillow. A closed black Bible rested on the crisp white pillowcase.
    I returned to the hall and opened the door across from Fats’ bedroom. Inside, it was as dark as if night had suddenly fallen on that half of the apartment. I fumbled along the wall until I found the face plate through my handkerchief. I flipped up the stubby switch.
    In the light, I found myself staring nearly twenty-five years into the past. Against the far wall was a single bed covered with a faded peach spread. The oversized white pillow provided support for a collection of cherished stuffed animals: a teddy bear, a purple frog, a Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy. Stacked on the nightstand were My First Speller and My First Math , school books that had never been returned. Everything was waiting for the touch of a little hand that would never come. Fats had turned the room into a shrine.

    “This changes everything.” Tommy Lee slowly twirled the silver pen in his hand. Around it rotated the discharged shotgun shell he had carefully lifted from the sink. The two of us stood in the bathroom, momentarily oblivious to the floating corpse behind us. We stared at the evidence both of us saw linking Dallas Willard to another murder.
    “I’ve got my search teams spread out through the hills, and he walks into town and shoots an innocent man in the bathtub.”
    “What’s the motive?” I asked.
    “I’ll be damned if I can see it. Maybe there isn’t one. Maybe he’s just nuts. Maybe this didn’t come from Dallas’ shotgun and I’m the one who’s nuts. Or simply the last to learn that Remington number one buckshot is the new weapon of choice. Well, I’ll run down Main Street wearing only my holster if the firing pin mark on this shell doesn’t match those from the cemetery.” He slipped the shell into a plastic evidence sleeve. “If it’s Dallas, and if there is no logical motive, then every citizen in this county is a potential victim.”
    “Let me show you something else,” I said. I took Tommy Lee into Fats’ bedroom and pointed to the notepad on the desk. “Looks like Fats or somebody wrote down my name and the word weather. Maybe the sheet is in the trash.”
    “Weather?”
    “It was raining last night. Could be two separate thoughts.”
    “The state mobile crime lab is on the way. I want them going over the apartment before we remove the body. I’ll tell them to look out for anything that might have come off this pad. No way to know if he wrote it last night