THE BEAST ─ five hargreeves

[ 063 ] milf: mother i'd like to flee

LXIII.

m i l f :
m o t h e r i ' d
l i k e t o f l e e

—SOMETHING WAS WRONG in Elliot's apartment. Diego knew it from the second he stepped in.

The curtains were drawn and the lights low. He had his flashlight but he preferred not to use it. That would have made him feel something like an unlawful intruder—a burglar—and he liked to think he was better than that.

He felt for a switchplate and eventually found one with two switches. The top one turned on the hallway light and he turned that off quickly. The bottom one turned on the living-room light.

He looked around for a long moment, doubting what he was seeing. At first he thought it must be some trick of his eyes, that they had not adjusted to the light or something. But nothing changed, and his heart began to pump quickly.

Gotta be careful, he thought. Feds could still be here. Can't balls this one up.

He had almost forgotten about Reginald's words, and he had forgotten about feeling like a burglar. He was scared and excited.

Something had happened here, all right. The living-room had been thoroughly ransacked. There was shattered glass from a knickknack shelf all over the floor. The furniture had been overturned, the books had been scattered every whichway.

The big mirror over the fireplace was also broken—seven years' bad luck for somebody, Diego thought, and found himself thinking suddenly and for no reason about Patch . . . Detective Eudora Patch, who'd had her heart blown out of her body. Diego arms broke out in gooseflesh suddenly. This was no place to be thinking about Patch.

He went into the kitchen through the dining room, where everything had been swept off the table—he skirted the mess carefully.

The kitchen was worse. He felt a fresh chill creep down his spine. Someone had gone absolutely crazy in here. The doors to the bar cabinet stood open, and someone had used the length of the kitchen like a bowling alley at a country fair. Pots were everywhere, and white clumps that at first looked like snow but were actually cat hair.

Written on the floor below the overhang in large and hurried blood-letters was a simple phrase:

Ö G A F O R Ö G A

Suddenly Diego didn't want to start looking for the thing he knew he would find. A body, someplace, somewhere, watching him . . .

He had seen death before and he'd helped clean up bodies, but it didn't mean he was used to it. Patch . . . poor, poor Patch . . .

He never wanted to see anything like that again. And suppose it was one of his siblings here, shot or slashed or strangled?

Diego had seen plenty of violence in his time. Two summers ago he and some buddies had pulled a man out of a potato-grinding machine in pieces and that had been one to tell your grandchildren about. But he had not seen a homicide since Patch and he did not want to see one now.

Who would it be?—Luther?—Klaus?—Allison? Does any one life hold more value than the next? Diego didn't know who he should hope for. He didn't know that he should hope for anything at all.