Page 26 of Stay in Your Lane!

KYLE

The scenecould’vewaited until tomorrow. My liaisons at the department always emphasized that while everyone wanted scenes to be cleaned and released quickly, it was fine for me to wait until… you know… daylight.

But as with Rick Leighton’s death scene, the powers that be had wanted to transfer it to someone else to minimize overtime and appease the bean counters. And as long as I was here, I might as well get to work.

So, there I was, decked out in a Tyvek suit at ten at night, scrubbing at stains I tried not to identify if I could help it. Sometimes I needed to so I’d know which chemical to use (or, more to the point,notuse), but for the most part, I tried to consider them like unnamed extras in a film.“Dark red stain in the corner.” “Weird brown smear on the linoleum.” “Chunky multicolored substance on the stairs.”In my line of work, it was best to just… not overthink things.

And theotherreason I was out here at this late hour instead of waiting until normal business hours was, quite frankly, because this was mid-July. Death scenes always smelled a bit ripe, and tackling them during the cooler hours meant themiasma was a bit less aggressive. Some of the cops in town complained that whenever people died at home and were found later, they somehow always did it when their A/C was broken or their thermostat was set to eighty-seven or something. They, being investigators, couldn’t tamper with anything, so they had to just sweat and swelter.

I, on the other hand, had the luxury of turning off the furnace, cranking up the A/C, and even bringing in my own industrial fans. Plus, like, coming in after the sun went down instead of fourth-circle-of-hell-thirty in the afternoon. All those things only did so much to combat the smells, especially since death scenes had usually been sitting for a while by the time I got to them, but they were better than nothing.

Tonight, I would take everything I could get. The homeowner had apparently been dead for at least a few weeks before someone had noticed Amazon packages piling up on the porch. I didn’t know what the cause of death was. If I had to guess, the medical examiner didn’t either—it got a lot harder to tell as time went on. If the body was someplace hot, that was even harder.

This death hadn’t involved foul play, though, so the scene had been released, and now I was here…

And I couldn’t fucking concentrate.

Like, yeah, I did try tonotthink about certain things while I worked, but while this may have seemed like a mindless job to some people, therewerethings Ididneed to think about. I had to focus so I didn’t cause a fire, damage the house further, ruin belongings, or become the reasonanotherdeath scene cleaner was called in. Mixing bleach and ammonia was considered a bad idea, for example, unless you actually wanted to make mustard gas (spoiler: I did not want to make mustard gas).

But that was exactly the kind of careless shit that could happen if someone’s mind went wandering at the wrong time. You would think the smell would give it away—just take a whiffof what was in the bucket to figure out what I’d already poured into it—but in a scene that smelled to high heaven of hot decomp, rotting trash, and literal shit, I wasn’t really keen on taking a deep sniff ofanything.

Finally, I took all the chlorine-based cleaners out to the truck and stuck with ammonia for the time being. If something needed bleach, it could wait until later. And it probably would need it, given that the deceased had done their deceasing in the bathroom.

With the bleach safely out of reach of the distracted crime scene cleaner, I resumed scrubbing at the viscous substance that had slithered down the side of the toilet before congealing.

And just like it had done the whole time I’d been here… my mind wandered.

It went to three predictable places: the calling-that-a-suicide-is-bullshit decedent, that guy’s friend who hadn’t returned our calls, and my unexpected partner in crime-solving.

Leon was stressing me out. I needed him to call us or answer our calls. I didn’t like the idea of spoofing a number and tricking him into answering—it sounded very illegal and shady and underhanded—but I also didn’t like not being able to reach him. He could know something about Rick’s death. He could be in danger himself, either because of what he knew about his friend’s death or… or any number of things.

I pulled my phone out of the pocket of my Tyvek suit. It was encased in a freezer bag so I didn’t get any gore or unidentified substance #2 on it, but I could at least see the screen.

No missed calls. No texts. Damn it.

Well, there were some texts, but they hadn’t come from Leon or anyone else. They hadn’t even come from my brother to browbeat me into joining him on the retirement gift for Dad.

They were from Everett.

I just realized you didn’t tell me your other fish’s names.

Steve needs his own Instagram. He’d get a million followers for sure.

Would the fish like one of these?

That last one included an Amazon link. I was curious, but I couldn’t check it right now. Probably a toy of some kind. Maybe a plant?

That Golden Retriever vibe of his was surprisingly endearing. I could get seriously annoyed with people who were super eager, doing the human equivalent of bouncing and wagging their tail in hopes I’d throw the metaphorical toy. With Everett, it wasn’t annoying. Caught me off-guard sometimes, especially since most people weren’t bound and determined to befriend a piranha (especially Steve), but it wasn’t annoying.

Maybe I’d just been around too many dickhole cops. I didn’t even mind that they snarked that I should wear a French maid costume; what bothered me was their dark humor. I knew they needed it to cope with a lot of the things they saw and did, but it could cross lines that made me uncomfortable. There was a sergeant who could always be trusted to say something so crass at a crime scene that if Steve could speak, he’d say,“Dude, that’s mean. What the fuck.”

Everett sometimes said… I couldn’t even call the things he said inappropriate. Just maybe awkwardly timed? He could sometimes make question marks float above my head, but nothing he said ever seemed to come from a place of malice. If anything, he was…

Well, he was kind of like the Golden Retriever who eagerly chased sticks, then innocently brought back a venomous snake. If he did or said the wrong thing, it was with the best of intentions.

Or maybe I just haven’t known him long enough to see his Steve side. Because everyone has a Steve side.

…a Steve side? God, I’ve been inhaling too many ammonia fumes.

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