The Year We Had Murder, A Matt Kile Mystery by David Bishop

Author:David Bishop [Bishop, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-05-23T04:00:00+00:00

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An hour later, I rang the front doorbell at Gloria Turner’s home on Naples Island, got no answer, and used the key to go inside. When I went to disengage the alarm system, it was already turned off. That suggested James was there, but he hadn’t answered the door. I called out for him. No answer.

The real Christmas tree in their front window was sagging. One large red ornament had somehow disengaged from the tree and shattered on the floor. I doubted James could undecorate the tree by himself, let alone remove it from the house. They probably hired a decorating service. It was strange that James hadn’t swept up the shards from the fallen ornament.

I looked through the windows to the side and small backyard without seeing him. I called his name up the wooden stairs off the hallway that led to his second-floor living quarters. Still no answer.

I repeated what Dr. White and I had done earlier. I walked the house, checking the powder at all the doorways and at the top and bottom of two sets of stairs. There were no signs of any of it being walked through by anything with a bunch of little legs. Apparently, Doctors Hernandez and White captured the only Brazilian wanderer in the house and, as Fidge told me a few hours ago, it had been verified to be the one that bit Schulz.

That also meant the house was not infested with crawly things that might dine on me. After seeing the bite on Schulz’s hand and seeing him dead, I wasn’t eager to meet one of those critters.

The last room I got to was James’ bedroom at the end of the upstairs hallway. I went inside. James hadn’t responded, but he was there. He hadn’t answered the front doorbell or my knock on the door of his room for the same reason—he was dead. His bushy gray eyebrows and the corners of his mouth turned down. Here, in his room, pale and still, he looked even older and more frail.

His arms were draped over the armrests of a frayed green upholstered chair. The hardwood floor below his hands was blemished with quiet pools of gummy red blood. Both his wrists had been slashed. The tool, a knife, lay on a smoothed red cloth in the center of the table across the symbol of the German Nazi Party, a swastika. A dozen or so photographs were scattered around the knife. The neatness of the scene was sullied only by the life juice drained from his body.

Even at ninety years of age, cutting wrists is a slow and unsure way to die. I rushed into his bathroom and opened his medicine chest to check his prescription drugs. With my limited knowledge of medicines, I recognized nothing that would aid his bleed out. When I turned to leave, I saw one more prescription bottle next to the sink, coumadin, a blood thinner. That would do it.

I turned on the light and went back to the table to study the pictures.

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