The room looked pretty much as it had on my last visit, except this time, the guy strapped to the big X wasn’t doing any struggling.

He was dead.

I froze when I saw him. Stripped to the waist, arms and legs secured, throat cut, blood everywhere.

Martin Benson.

11

“DID YOU FIND IT?” Trixie shouted from upstairs. She must have been wondering why it was taking me so long to find a tin of coffee in a fridge. “You’re not playing with my toys, are you?”

“No,” I said, unable to take my eyes off Benson. I don’t exactly have a medical degree, but I was as sure as I could be that there was no urgency to check for a pulse, to get the paramedics here pronto. Martin Benson looked very, very dead.

His head was tilted to the right, resting on his shoulder. The gash in his neck appeared to run right under his thick chin, but with his head slumped slightly forward, it was difficult to tell. But that was where the blood started, and there was a lot of it, smeared across his oversized torso, blackening his trousers, on the floor.

Over in the corner, I saw a shirt and jacket and tie, presumably his.

I think I might have thrown up if I hadn’t heard Trixie coming down the steps. I whirled around, saw her long legs appear first, then the rest of her. “What has caught your interest down here, Za—”

Her jaw dropped, and then she screamed.

I ran to her, held on to her, pulled her toward me so she wouldn’t have to look. “Oh my God!” she said. “Oh God oh God oh God!”

She broke away from me, approached Martin Benson slowly. “Oh God, it’s him,” she said. “The guy. The son of a bitch from the paper.”

“Yeah,” I said slowly. “It’s him.”

She took another tentative step toward him, reaching out.

“Don’t touch anything,” I said. “Just leave everything the way it is.” I looked away again, took a couple of deep breaths. “I’ll go call the police.”

“Look,” Trixie said, pulling herself together. “There’s a note.”

A piece of paper was rolled up and tucked into one of the closed handcuffs hanging from the wall display. She slid it out.

“Trixie, you shouldn’t be touching that. The police will want it, they’ll want to check it for fingerprints, they’ll—”

Trixie unrolled the sheet, looked at what was written on it, and went very white. She whispered, “They’ve found me.”

“Who?” I said. “Who’s found you?”

“Someone must have seen the photo and told them. They’ve got friends everywhere.” There was panic in her voice.

“What does it say?” I asked her. “Show me the note.”

But she had already folded it and put it in the front pocket of her jeans. She stood a moment, breathing out slowly, pulling herself together.

“You’re going to have to help me,” she said.

“Help you what?”

“We have to get rid of the body.”