CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Putting It Out of Its Misery
Blair felt bad about dragging Vanessa into all of this, but he didn’t know what else to do. He needed someone’s help, especially if that someone had a car, and she was nice enough to comply. Without much difficulty, he talked her into taking him over to Kevin Massey’s apartment. Truth was, she was so glad to get out of Calvin’s office, she probably would’ve agreed to drive him anywhere.
Vanessa pulled up to the curb in front of the building and shut off the engine. “Do you want me to wait for you?” she asked him.
“No thanks.”
“How are you going to get home?”
“I’ll walk. As soon as I touch pavement in this city, I’m home.”
Watching his face as if waiting for the punch line to a joke, she sighed when she realized that he wasn’t trying to make one. “You don’t have anyplace to go?”
“You could invite me back to your apartment….”
Although she shook her head emphatically, she didn’t seem surprised to hear him say that. “I can’t let you stay with me.”
“Can’t blame a guy for trying,” he said, getting out of the car and closing the door behind him. Vanessa put down the window.
“Good luck in there. I hope you find whatever you’re looking for.”
“Me, too,” he said, glancing around to see if anyone else was nearby. “You’d better get going.”
She waved and then started the engine. Pausing for a second, she reached over and lifted Cal’s flashlight from the seat. “Don’t forget this, boy scout,” she said, handing it to him. Smiling, he thanked her again. Blair watched her car until it turned the corner at the light and took off west.
Stuffing the flashlight in his suit jacket, Blair walked around to the side of the building and tried to figure out how it was laid out. There were four separate apartments in the building with a common door, hallway, and stairwell connecting them. Lights were on in three of the four apartments, so it made sense that the one still dark was Kevin’s. Unfortunately, it was one of the two on the second floor.
As Blair passed by the ground floor apartment on the left, he could hear a man and a woman arguing with one another. The apartment across from them on the ground floor, right, had a stereo blaring a distorted version of a song by R.E.M. The song sounded odd because the volume was up so high. This caused various dogs in the neighborhood to yelp and whine in protest. Blair felt like joining them.
Each of the apartments had its own balcony with glass double doors leading out to them. Blair climbed a big oak tree next to the building until he was almost at the same height as Kevin’s balcony, and then crawled out as far as he could on one of the branches until it could no longer support his weight. At that point he leapt over, grasping the black metal fence enclosing the balcony.
Almost falling, he hung on until he managed to pull himself up. As he stepped over the fence, he knocked one of three potted plants to the cement floor. That didn’t matter much, since the begonia looked all dried up and just barely hanging on already. Perhaps Blair had done it a favor by putting it out of its misery.
Misery. Now that was a word he knew a lot about. The close work in the laboratory had made his head start throbbing ferociously, and his ears were ringing in the key of G. Aspirin didn’t help, and, quite frankly, he wasn’t sure how many he’d already consumed. The fifty-count bottle was down to twenty, and his stomach had lots to say about that.
When Blair tried the glass doors, he found them locked. Taking out a straight nose, slow-speed handpiece with a diamond bur he’d borrowed from Cal’s laboratory, Blair gripped the handle tight and manually put a deep circular scratch in the glass just the right size for his hand to fit through. His hands trembled so much that it was hard to cut the circle neatly. Wrapping his fist in the jacket he’d been wearing, he punched the glass, hoping the scratched circle would encourage it to break cleanly.
The broken glass had jagged edges, but the hole was large enough for him to avoid getting cut when he reached through to unlatch the door. There was an aluminum security bar attached to the door but to Blair’s happy surprise, it hadn’t been put in place. Once inside, he closed the door and then swept the broken glass behind the drapes with his foot. Taking out the flashlight and looking around, he was careful to keep the beam of light away from the windows.
Because the apartment had been closed up for the past few days, the air was beginning to smell stale. It was hard for Blair to breathe, and it aggravated his sick stomach. He burped cautiously, hoping that expelled air would be the only thing that would materialize.
Blair examined the furniture in the apartment carefully, and for a minute he had an eerie feeling about the place, an odd sense of familiarity. Perhaps it was the fact that all young men’s apartments were the same to some extent: they were usually long on essentials and short on decor. Shaking his head, Blair got on with the business at hand.
There was a fair-sized aquarium in the room with about fifteen fish swimming around in it. It was beautifully decorated, and dozens of colored marbles peppered the bottom. The fish were a pretty good size, too, so Kevin must’ve had them for awhile. Blair picked up the food next to the aquarium and sprinkled some in. “You boys must be hungry,” he said.
Next Blair went into the bedroom and checked under the bed for some kind of case or strong box. He did find a box, but it wasn’t locked. Inside was a decent assortment of minerals, including amethyst, agate, pyrite, rose quartz, and some calcite crystals. The bedroom doorstop was a nice piece of marble. Obviously Kevin and Cynthia had some things in common: a love of rocks and parents with a not-so-kosher attraction for one another.
“Cynthia must’ve known Kevin very well,” Blair said out loud. “Maybe they were lovers.”
More rock samples and a jewelry box were over on the dresser. While holding the flashlight under his arm, he opened the box and examined small earrings, neck chains, tie pins and clips, and cuff links. Nothing unusual. “He must’ve had a pierced ear.” Blair tried to examine one of the earrings in the light from the flashlight. It was a red stone mounted in a gold setting. “Probably a garnet,” Blair surmised; it was impossible to tell what it was under those conditions, but at least that seemed reasonable. As a matter-of-fact, there were what appeared to be gemstones in every piece of jewelry. “So you liked brilliance and fire,” Blair said as he closed the box. “Then you would’ve loved owning a ruby, boy. Pigeon blood.”
In Kevin’s closet was a carry sack loaded with rock collecting equipment: a rock pick, rock chisel, chipping hammer, gem scoop, magnifier, and Gad pry bar. Blair grabbed the rock pick and examined it; Kevin had scratched his name along the stainless steel part of the handle. Latrice had used a rock pick like this one to kill Kevin and Cynthia.