Zero Island (Blessid Trauma Crime Scene Cleaners Book 2) by Chris Bauer (mobi ebook reader .TXT) 📗

three of them stepped inside, the bathroom spacious. They were immediately drawn to the tub, red stains draping the inside of the porcelain. Soon after hovering over the tub, their interest went to the window, the lower frame closed but empty, the glass gone.

Philo checked the frame for jagged glass, found none. He poked his head outside, surveyed the jungle-like overgrowth that started fifteen feet or so from the house, beyond where the green grass ended. Directly below the window, on the grass, the glass shards sparkled.

“Broken from the inside out,” Philo said.

But inside, the floor tile crunched under their feet. “Then what’s this?” Evan said, lifting his boot.

On the white tile where they stood, a splotch of yellow, the tile it covered feeling gritty underfoot. Philo got down on one knee, stuck a finger into the dried stain, rubbed it, raised it to his nose. “Urine. It crystalized.”

“Betsy was in here,” Evan said. “Her dog.”

“Sirs?” Patrick redirected them to the tub, to the blood stains there. “See—more dry ice chunks.” A haze surrounded two more pieces of dry ice the size of baseballs sitting on the tub’s drain.

“Almost melted,” Evan said.

“Like I said, it sublimates directly to a gas. CO2. The tub is tilted so water drains out of it,” Philo said. “The dry ice slid toward the drain because of the tilt, not because it was melting.”

Philo crinkled his nose and leaned sideways, now looking for the origin of another smell. He checked out the space between the freestanding slipper tub and the back wall.

A large, single, tootsie-rolled dog turd lay there, hardened. “It seems Betsy left another gift.”

Evan said it first. “They locked her dog in here with her.”

Philo closed the bathroom door so they could get a look at the back of it. It was scuffed with nail marks and bite marks, and chunks of the white wood were ripped out.

“Probably locked the dog in here first,” Philo said, pivoting for another look at the window, “but the dog wanted out.”

“Wanted to protect Miya,” Evan said.

Philo couldn’t stop himself from a reflexive glance in the tub’s direction. Chances were at some point it was more like Betsy was protecting Miya’s dead body. “Yes,” he said, “before and after.”

The toilet seat, next to a hamper, next to a vanity, next to the window, was the path the dog took. “Then Betsy went through the window, the only way out.”

“The cops,” Evan said, incredulous, “why didn’t they mention any of this to me?”

“I don’t know. Still working the case, not in a sharing mood maybe. Let’s have a look outside for the dog.”

Behind the house Evan called for her, getting no response other than a heightened cacophony of birds, insects, and animals. The three of them fanned out, wandered ten yards or so into the jungle, wild Hawaiian flora reaching at them as they walked. Philo pulled up, stopped calling for the dog, shouted to Evan.

“Any water nearby? Rivers, lakes, a pond maybe?”

Evan answered, kept walking. “Yes. A pond, another twenty yards. Why?”

“Evan, I didn’t mention this back there, but—”

“Philo sir.” Patrick’s voice came to them from up ahead, slightly right. “Over here, sir.”

Philo and Evan swept away eye-level tree branches as they trudged through the thick, frondy vegetation brushing their legs and ankles, soon converging on Patrick. Buzzing flies feasted on something at ground level in front of him. Evan got into a crouch.

“Sweet Jesus. Betsy sweetie…”

He swiped at the flies on Betsy’s cold nose and those hovering near it, blood caked on the dog’s forehead, but the mark was only slight, not more than a scratch, certainly not a mortal wound. “What happened to you, Betsy…”

Philo laid his hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Evan. Evan…”

Evan, now distressed: “What, damn it?”

“I’m surprised she made it this far, bud. She wasn’t attacked, Evan; they left Betsy in that bathroom, in there with the dry ice and Miya. The sublimation… it was suffocating her. CO2’s heavier than oxygen, will stay near the floor until it builds up. My guess is this is why she left her dead mistress’s side and bolted through the window. Lightheaded, woozy, she was trying to stay conscious, maybe looking for water…”

Evan raised his head, faced forward, Philo and Patrick doing likewise. The pond was less than thirty feet ahead of them. Evan finally lost his shit, his sobs turning malevolent as he bellowed at the insects gathered on the corpse, swatting at them, brushing them off, stomping them into the dirt, no other wounds visible on the dog and yet there she lay. He now pulled at her body, started dragging it toward the pond—

“I gotta give her a chance…”

“Evan. No. Evan, c’mon now, bud…” Philo crouched, put his arm around his friend.

Evan pulled back, dropped ass-first onto the forest floor, buried his head in his hands, his shoulders rising and falling in waves. He suddenly calmed himself, like he’d been stiff-armed to his face.

“Why… the fuck… was there dry ice in that tub?”

When Philo didn’t answer right way, Evan tilted his head, analyzing the hesitation: “What is it? Tell me, damn it!”

Philo and Patrick shared glances. It would be Philo’s place to spell it out, as a crime scene cleaning pro, but more so as Evan’s close friend.

“Chances are they brought it for the organs. For transport.”

7

Incognito on Tahiti, the status of one Kaipo Mawpaw. A status presently undergoing interruption in French Polynesia, the South Pacific island collective.

She needed to leave Tahiti behind for a bit after hearing the drumbeats from the north. More like word-of-mouth omens, drifting twenty-four-hundred miles south on the warm sea winds that occasionally brought a few of her home-island’s former inhabitants to her newly adopted residential paradise. The message: trouble from the U.S. mainland had breached Kauai and was about to spread.

She boarded a plane in Papeete, the collective’s capital, on Tahiti-Nui, the bigger portion of the island. Her new home was Iti in the southeast, connected by an isthmus. Smaller, less developed, much less