Redheads Read Free

Leaves lay strewn across the lawn. It was windy, too: there was a leaf caught in the spokes of her front bicycle tire, and Allison’s red hair lifted off to the side. She was laughing. She had a beautiful, delicate face, and her eyes were the color of a summer river: green and deep and warm.
    He went down the wooden stairs to the kitchen and poured another cup of coffee, then drank it looking out the window at the ginger blossoms tapping against the glass in the wind. It was going to rain again. He went to the phone on the wall by the refrigerator, dialed Mike on speaker, and went back to the window.
    “How’s it, Chris?”
    “I found her picture in today’s Houston Chronicle .”
    “So did I. I just printed it out for you.”
    “Don’t worry about it. I just need to decide what I’m going to do.”
    “Okay.”
    They didn’t talk for about a minute. There were dogs barking outside of Mike’s house, children’s voices.
    “You still there, Chris?”
    “Yeah,” he said. “Keep your cell on. I’ll call you if I need anything.”
    “You got it.”
    He went to the phone and hung it up. Then he went back to his study and booked the first flight to Houston.

Chapter Four
    He waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness inside Allison’s apartment.
    After he closed the door, the first thing he noticed was the sharp chemical smell from the forensic team. That would be print-developing chemicals applied to the walls and door knobs and probably every sharp or hard object in Allison’s apartment. A good team could lift a print from a glass that had gone through a dishwasher. With the right tinctures and tests, a careful lab technician could tell the print of a smoker or heavy coffee drinker by the chemical traces deposited with the rest of the oils in the print; a single print could yield a DNA sample. But the strength of the chemical smell told him what he also already knew: the forensic team had gone wall to wall and floor to ceiling and had not found a single print that could not be ruled out as belonging to Allison or Ben.
    He crouched low, shining his dim flashlight at his feet. The floorboards in Allison’s apartment were either refurbished originals from the condominium’s days as a cotton warehouse, or had been salvaged from an old barn by an interior decorator. They were aged a deep brown and dented with the wear of years, but the new stains were easy enough to see. A rivulet of dried blood ran out of the living room into the foyer. He stepped to the side and played the light across the floor until it reached the red brick wall of the living room. He crept across that space, mindful the flashlight beam stayed low and well clear of the three tall windows on the far side of the room. Now, in addition to the smell of the forensic team’s chemicals, he could smell something far less clinical. Blood was rotting in the grain of the wood. The entire living room reeked of it. Combined with the antiseptic bite of the print-developing chemicals, the room was close and thick with a smell like bandages peeled off an infected wound. And it was painfully hot. The police left the air conditioning off, and the living room’s west-facing windows let in the sun all afternoon.
    Breathing shallowly, he went to the bedroom.
    It started here.
    He risked letting the light shine up the wall behind the bed, then let it roam upwards. Fine blood droplets misted the ceiling; the spray was thicker as it came down the wall towards the bedframe. The mattress and box spring were both missing. The forensic team would have bagged them both and carried them to a lab, for trace analysis. A spill of semen, a single hair. He could see the things Allison stored under her bed: a Prada shoebox, a giant Tupperware container of folded sweaters, a low cardboard box of photo albums. Dust bunnies were strewn around, motionless in the breezeless air.
    The blood trail started by the bedframe, crossed the floor between his feet, snaked through the