Ashes to Ashes by Nathaniel Fincham Read Free Book Online Page A

communities, and an apartment complex was nothing
more than micro-community. They would not be able to provide the
psychologist with anything solid, anything fact based.
    When the young couple moved to the elevator,
Ashe departed and rushed off toward the stairs. He recalled that
Scott lived up on the third floor, which was a lot of steps for his
tired legs. Breathing heavily, he finally found himself in front of
Scott's door. A yellow crime scene banner still crisscrossed over
it, like the bones on a pirate’s flag. It was a warning. He had
long ago lost count of how many times he had been invited to
venture past the borders of the yellow banner and into a crime
scene. But he had been ordered, sternly, to remain on the other
side of the current one. An order he dismissed by opening and
swinging forward the unlocked door.
    He was immediately curious to why it was unlocked. He figured there wasn't much point in locking
it. The damage had been done. And a pair of rookies was outside
watching the building.
    Ducking beneath the yellow strands of
plastic, he entered the apartment. Closing the door behind him,
Ashe was suddenly smothered in black. He didn’t have any access to
a flashlight, so he decided to pull his cell phone from his pants
and use the dim light of the screen. The undercovers wouldn't be
able to notice it from the outside, like he would notice if the
overhead apartment lights suddenly sprung to life.
    Scott was never the cleanest person and Ashe
wasn't surprised to find the kitchen little untidy, dishes in the
sink and trash protruding from the top of the garbage can. As a
young boy, his son liked to leave behind evidence of his existence,
a discarded sock or candy wrapper. He would often follow behind
Scott, picking up clothes as they fell from his body. If he had
found the counter tops freshly wiped with the salt and pepper
shakers labeled and evenly spaced, he might have been worried.
    Moving the light into the living room, Ashe
looked for signs of a struggle. But he reminded himself that Owen
had been shot in his bed, obviously while sleeping. There wouldn’t
be any struggle or signs of one.
    Standing in the center of the living room, he
illuminated all around him, across the couch, the walls, and the
floor, searching for anything out of the ordinary, something that
would stand out as weird. But there was nothing. The couch had the
expected wear and tear. The walls were pretty much bare, except for
a single cheap painting of an orange flower in a brown vase. The
carpet had a handful of stains, most likely from spilled soda or
beer. It was a bachelor pad. Nothing more. Nothing less.
    Sigh.
    It all seemed impersonal...lacking
personality. There wasn’t anything that represented Scott or his
roommate Owen. He needed to more than bland and boring. He needed
to find something personal. He needed to understand who they were.
Even his own son had become a stranger that he needed to better
understand. Without that understanding, Ashe had nothing. He looked
down the hallway. The bedroom, he considered, was always thought of
as personal space, where nothing was secret, even the whips and
chains hanging in the closet.
    Using the cell phone to guide him, Ashe made
his way down the hallway. It was a short distance before the first
bedroom appeared on the left, the door wide open. The smell of
blood still hung in the air, drifting from Owen's room, like thick
metallic vapors. He wasn't sure but he thought he also smelled the
stench of a fired weapon. Blood and gun powder sometimes liked to
hang in the air long after the initial expulsion.
    Ashe followed the odors into the bedroom and
his eyes instantly fell upon the bed that Owen had died upon. The
blankets and sheets had been stripped away by the Crime Scene Unit,
but the blood had soaked deep into the mattress, which had been
left behind. He could perfectly make out where Owen's head had
laid.
    Shooting someone while they slept could have
meant many things. It could