In The Dark. We Pray

Chapter 4

The Home of Ellen Timms

Walking up the ancient wooden steps of that old stoop was always hard for Detective Demmer. The entire house bled sorrow.

Knowing what he knew, knowing what he didn't know, seeing that frail, elderly woman in anguish, it was always a lot. Now he was going to go into her den and feed her grief ridden hysteria with these insane questions.

The smell of dead ivy and grass, a little too tall for itself, usually followed you well into the house, a kind of smell that stick to you well into the night, but today it ended abruptly at the door today. Which caught Demmer by surprise. Instead, a vague scent of copper hung in the air. Something wet.

As he opened the rusted screen door to knock, he noticed it. The small scrape. A long thin shaving of bright silver metal inlaid into the rusted patina of the door itself. Right by the latch.

'Strange, that's the kind of mark left when-'

Greg's guard went up alongside the intuitive hair on his neck. He slowly opened the screen door, put two fingers on the main and applied pressure.

'Creeeaakkkk'

The door swung wide. loud, but effortlessly. His senses were dulled from all the events ramping up in his world recently. Otherwise, he would've already had his Glock in hand. But doing so now was still equally smart. The house was dark. Abnormally so, with the mid-day rays beating on the front face of the home.

Demmer produced a penlight from his pocket, cross-locked his arms, and focused his barrel and the light into the darkness.

'Blackout curtains?'

Demmer made a mental note, 'these weren't here a few days ago.'

A quick scan of the immediate entrance showed a disaster. Greg stuck to the rules when it came to these things.

Demmer knew that protocol dictated a return to the vehicle, a radio for report and reinforce and no contamination of the crime scene if there was any.

'Damn it, Molly and I should've stuck together today.'

His fear overrode any respect to the protocol today. Because now he found himself stepping over a broken kitchen chair. A chair that should be in a dining room on the other side of the home, and trying not to slip on a pile of tossed about paperwork with no drawer in the hall to call home.

'What the fuck happened here.'

Greg approached the door to the living area and swung left, beaming his light within. Blood spackled right corner seat of the flowered sofa where Mrs. Timm's sat and spoke to him before.

'Fuck'

Streaks of red permeated across the white carpet and further into the darkness the shared wall at the far right of the room. Greg remembered using the half-bath on the other side to wash his hands the first time he came and broke the news to Old Lady Timm's. He knew that the next hallway door was the second entrance to that bathroom.

Taking another step into the home, this time side stepping a puddle of spilled 'something' He took a deep breath and twisted the handle to the half-bath hall entrance, Shoving it wide and fast.

At first glance, Demmer's eyes caught a non-climatic sight. But that was because he expected a body. After a moment, however, what he discovered was much worse. The scene made Demmer's vision flash like an old bulb on a noir era crime scene camera.

'Blood stained the sink'

flash!

'A clump of hair still attached to flesh on the tiles'