Eighteen

He glanced at the directions Frank Harriman had given him and forced himself to concentrate on the job at hand. Frank Harriman and his wife-Irene Kelly-were among Ben’s closest friends. Frank had called a few minutes ago to ask Ben if he would bring his search dogs to a neighborhood about seven miles from Ben’s home.

“We’ve got a homicide, a male in his late thirties,” Frank had said. “Turns out he was a widower, raising a kid on his own. We’re just starting to work here, but we can’t locate the boy. There are some indications that he might have been taken from the home, maybe even injured. We want to find him as soon as possible, of course, and I thought you might be able to help out.”

“You said his name is Alex?” Ben asked, studying the boy’s photograph.

“No,” Frank said. “Lexington. Neighbors call him Lex or Lexie. Think you’ll be able to help us out here?”

“Hope so,” Ben said absently, not looking up from the photo. A ski

Frank shrugged. “Neighbors say he looks like that one, that he’s small for his age. You know how it is with searches for kids-they change quickly, but the parents don’t take as many photos once the kids are school age. And it doesn’t look as if Toller was exactly staying on top of things here, does it?”

Ben looked toward the body of Victor Toller, which lay face down on the living room carpet, in a north-south position, so that his head was not far from the front door. Toller was a little over six feet tall, big-boned, with thick arms and broad shoulders. And a skull that had taken several crushing blows during a struggle that had left its mark on the living room.

Ben noticed a shotgun propped near the front door. “I take it the gun hasn’t been fired?”

“No, not recently. It’s loaded, though. Neighbors say that was always there.”

“Christ, with a kid that young in the house?”

“He wasn’t anybody’s idea of Mr. Responsible, it seems.”

Ben glanced around the room. He doubted it had been orderly even before Toller met his fate. It reeked of booze and cigarette smoke, mixed with the rancid scent of cold greasy food. Empty bottles could be found on almost every flat surface. A quick glance at their labels showed that Toller’s tastes seemed to have varied from vodka to beer and cheap red wine. Crumpled paper wrappers, plastic foam hamburger boxes, and other scattered “to go” containers made up a monument to meals purchased at drive-up windows. A chair not far from the body had been knocked over. There were blood stains on it.

There were bloodstains consistent with Toller’s head injury, apparently delivered by the heavy fireplace poker being photographed by an evidence technician. Ben could see blood and hair on it. He glanced across the room, and saw the rest of the set of tools near the fireplace. There were no ashes in the fireplace.

Ben said, “You think his attacker probably dropped him where he stood?”

The evidence technician looked up, first at Ben, and then at Frank.

“It’s all right,” Frank said to the technician. “He’s authorized to be here. This is Dr. Ben Sheridan. He’s a forensic anthropologist, but he’s also a search dog handler. He’s going to help us look for the boy. Ben, this is Mark Collier, one of our crime scene specialists.”

Collier nodded. “Good to meet you. Look up on the ceiling and this nearest wall-judging from the spatter patterns, someone swung hard, co

“Who found the body?”

“Toller has a hunting buddy who came by for him about five this morning. Got a little worried when he saw the car here but didn’t get an answer, so he looked in the window and saw this.”

Frank carefully led Ben down a hallway-both of them doing their best not to disturb another technician, who was trying to raise prints from the hall door. “Note that there are no visible bloodstains leading away from the body or on the hall carpet up to this point,” Frank said, as they reached a bedroom door. “So, my guess is the same as yours-Toller didn’t get up again after he received that blow. But what worries me is that there are some bloodstains in the boy’s bedroom, and some blood drops leading from here.”

Ben saw crime lab markers near a few blood spots on the hall floor. He bent closer, and saw that they were slightly elongated, as if whoever was bleeding was moving. He looked toward the end of the hall, where sunlight came in through the barred window of a door. “That leads to the backyard?”

“Yes.”

“Why the bars? Is there some treasure in the kid’s room?”

“Far from it. Take a look,” Frank said, gesturing to a doorway to the left. “At first glance, I wondered if this room was some sort of guest room. Didn’t seem lived in. Especially not by a boy. Toller had a gun collection in his own room. I suspect that’s what the bars were for.”

When he looked in Lex’s room, Ben agreed-it didn’t look like a child’s room at all. No toys were visible, just a few school books, aligned with the corner of a small desk. No posters or pe

“I don’t think so. Neighbors say the mother was blonde, and died about four years ago. When I described the woman in the photo, they told me she’s probably his aunt-his mother’s sister. She was over here last night, and two of the neighbors heard loud arguing.”

“You’ve tried to reach her?”

“Pete just talked with her.”

“So does your partner think the boy could be with her?”

“She says no, but Pete’s still not sure about that. With the blood you see here-you can understand why I’d like to have Bingle and Bool go through the place.”

“Yes. I’ll start with Bool. Is there a laundry hamper here?”

There were socks and underwear in the hamper, along with a pair of pajamas. “Anybody else touch these clothes today?”

Frank asked Collier, who said, yes, there was a preliminary look through the hamper-the outfit the kid was last seen wearing was not with the other laundry, so they were assuming he was still in his jeans and T-shirt.

“Why don’t you pre-scent the dog with that bloody pillow-case?” Collier asked.

“Because I don’t know that the blood is the child’s.”

“Oh.”

“Maybe the bathroom-”

“Looked like somebody had washed up in there,” Collier said. “Towels were a little damp. May have bandaged a wound-there were fragments of gauze in the wastebasket.”

Ben raised a brow and turned to Frank. “Toothbrush or fireplace poker-you want the child or the suspect?”

“Both, but the boy is our first concern.”

“Toothbrush it is, then,” he said, and went into the bathroom. He used gloves to take the child-sized toothbrush from its holder and placed it in a plastic bag. They walked out to the shady spot where another officer-a dog lover who had worked with Ben on previous cases-was keeping an eye on the crated dogs.

Bingle greeted him with a little song of anticipation, perhaps already smelling Toller’s body. Like Bool, Bingle was trained in cadaver work, and probably thought this would be an easy day’s work. But it was big, drooling, sweet-natured Bool he’d work with first today.