BYRON MONTGOMERY HADN’T BEEN INSIDE THE BARROW HOUSE IN YEARS. Once he’d gone there every day to meet his high school girlfriend, Ella, and her stepsister, Rebekkah. They’d both been gone for nearly a decade, and for the first time, he was grateful. Ella and Rebekkah’s grandmother lay on the kitchen floor in a puddle of partially congealed blood. Her head was twisted at an odd angle, and her arm was torn. The blood on the floor seemed to have come mostly from that one wound. It looked like she had a handprint bruise on her upper arm, but it was hard to tell with the amount of blood around her.
“Are you okay?” Chris stepped in front of him, temporarily blocking the sight of Maylene’s body. The sheriff wasn’t an unnaturally large man, but like all of the McInneys, he had the sort of presence that commanded attention under any circumstances. The attitude and musculature that had once made Chris a sight to see in a good bar fight now made him the sort of sheriff that invited trust.
“What?” Byron forced himself to stare only at Chris, to avoid looking at Maylene’s body.
“Are you going to be sick or something . . . because of the”— Chris gestured at the floor—“blood and all.”
“No.” Byron shook his head. A person couldn’t be an undertaker and get squeamish at the sight—or scent—of death. He’d worked at funeral homes outside of Claysville for eight years before he’d given in to the insistent urge to come back home. Out there, he’d seen the results of violent deaths, of children’s deaths, of lingering deaths. He’d mourned some of them, even though they were strangers to him, but he’d never been sick from it. He wasn’t going to get sick now either, but it was harder to be distant when the dead was someone he’d known.
“Evelyn went and got her clean clothes.” Chris leaned against the kitchen counter, and Byron noted that the blood spray hadn’t touched that side of the room.
“Did you already collect evidence or . . . ?” Byron halted before he’d finished the sentence. He didn’t know what all needed to be done. He’d picked up more bodies than he could count, but never from a still-fresh crime scene. He wasn’t a pathologist or in any way involved in forensic investigation. His job commenced afterward, not at the scene of homicide. At least, it had been like that elsewhere. Now that he was back home, things weren’t what he was used to. The small town of Claysville was a different sort of place from the cities he’d roamed. He hadn’t realized exactly how different it was until he’d gone away . . . or maybe until he’d come back.
“Did I collect evidence of what?” Chris glowered at him with a menace that would make a lot of folks cringe, but Byron remembered when the sheriff had been one of the guys—likely to go into Shelly’s Stop ’n’ Shop to grab them a twelve-pack when Byron wasn’t quite old enough to buy it for himself.
“The crime.” Byron gestured at the kitchen. Blood spatter had arced across Maylene’s floor and cabinet fronts. A plate and two drinking glasses sat on the table, proof that there had been a second person at the table—or that Maylene had set out two glasses for herself. So she might have known her attacker. A chair was knocked backward on the floor. She’d struggled. A loaf of bread, with several slices cut and lying beside it, sat on the counter cutting board. She’d trusted her attacker. The bread knife had been washed and was the lone item in a narrow wooden drying rack beside the sink. Someone—the attacker?—had cleaned up. As Byron tried to assign meaning to what he saw around him, he wondered if Chris simply didn’t want to talk about the evidence. Maybe he sees something I’m missing?
The lab tech, whom Byron didn’t know, stepped into the kitchen. He didn’t step in the blood on the floor, but if he had, his shoes were already covered by booties. The absence of his kit seemed to indicate that the tech had already done what he needed in this room.
Or wasn’t going to be doing anything.
“Here.” The tech held out disposable coveralls and disposable latex gloves. “Figured you’d need help getting her out of here.”
Once Byron had the coveralls and gloves on, he looked from the tech to Chris. The attempt at patience vanished; he needed to know. “Chris? That’s Maylene, and . . . just tell me you’ve got something to . . . I don’t know, narrow in on whoever did this or something.”
“Drop it.” Chris shook his head and pushed away from the counter. Unlike the tech, he was very careful where he stepped. He walked toward the doorway into Maylene’s living room, putting himself farther from the body, and caught Byron’s gaze. “Just do your job.”
“Right.” Byron squatted down, started to reach out, and then looked up. “Is it safe to touch her? I don’t want to disturb anything if you still need to collect—”
“You can do whatever you need.” Chris didn’t look at Maylene as he spoke. “I can’t get anything else done until you take her out of here, and it’s not right her lying there like that. So . . . just do it. Take her out of here.”
Byron unzipped the body bag. Then, with a silent apology to the woman he’d once expected to be part of his family, he and the tech gently moved her body into the bag. Leaving it still unzipped, Byron straightened and peeled off his now-bloody gloves.
Chris’ gaze dropped to Maylene’s body inside the still-open bag. Silently, he grabbed the biohazard bag and shoved it at the tech. Then the sheriff squatted down and zipped the bag, hiding Maylene’s corpse from sight. “Not right for her to be looking like that.”
“And it’s not right to contaminate the exterior of the pouch,” Byron retorted as he dropped the gloves in the biohazard bag, removed the coveralls, and carefully put them in the bag, too.
Chris crouched down, closed his eyes, and whispered something. Then he stood. “Come on. You need to get her up out of here.”
The look he spared for Byron was accusatory, and for a split moment, Byron wanted to snarl at him. It wasn’t that Byron didn’t feel for the dead. He did. He took care of them, treated them with more care than a lot of people knew in their lives, but he didn’t stand and weep. He couldn’t. Distance was as essential as the rest of an under-taker’s tools; without it, the job was impossible.
Some deaths got to him more than others; Maylene’s was one of them. She’d had an office at his family funeral home and a longstanding relationship with his father. She’d raised the only two women he’d ever loved. She was all but family—but that didn’t mean he was going to grieve here.
Silently and carefully, Byron and Chris carried Maylene to the cot Byron had left outside the door, and then they put her in the waiting hearse.
Once the back of the hearse was closed, Chris took several breaths. Byron doubted that the sheriff had ever dealt with a murder investigation. Claysville, for all of its eccentricities, was the safest town Byron had ever known. Growing up, he hadn?
??t realized how rare that was.
“Chris? I know some people I could call if you wanted to call in help.”
The sheriff nodded, but he refused to look at Byron. “Tell your father that—” Chris’ voice broke. He cleared his throat and continued, “Tell him that I’ll call Cissy and the girls.”
“I will,” Byron assured him.
Chris took several steps away. He stopped outside the same side door where they’d exited, but he didn’t look back as he said, “I suspect someone will need to tell Rebekkah. Cissy isn’t likely to call her, and she’ll be needing to come home now.”