Yesterday, 2015

Blood curdling screams. Lots of them. That was the report that brought him to the small, ramshackle house on a quiet residential street in the Saint Louis suburb of Creve Coeur.

Detective Pratt Davies stood back and cast a leery, golden brown gaze over the house, noting the broken window on the first floor and the quiet flap of cotton cloth dancing from a jagged blade of glass in one corner.

His partner, Pam Rogers stood near the rusted gate which dissected the tipped and sunken sidewalk. She stood with her hands in her pockets, nodding as the man who’d called them spoke in rapid-fire English, made nearly indecipherable beneath his thick Latino accent.

Other than the soughing of moist air through the trees hanging over the small house, the area was quiet. Eerily so. The hairs on the back of Pratt’s neck had risen the moment they’d pulled up to the curb and climbed out. His inclination had been to call for support as soon as they arrived.

Only Pam’s cool resistance had kept him from making that call.

The house was supposed to be empty, except for a bunch of feral cats that had taken up residence there the previous fall.

So they’d decided to question the neighbors first.

Pratt knew his partner was right. If it turned out that the screeching the neighbors had heard came from a couple of mating cats and he’d called for backup, they’d never live it down.

Still, when he and Pam had circled the house after arriving, Pratt had felt death like an icy touch skimming over his flesh, bringing gooseflesh up along his arms.

Pam had cast her hard, brown gaze over the peeling white paint and overgrown yard and had shaken her head. She had a mental card file of victim types, which she accessed upon receiving the first impressions of a crime scene. It was based on a concise list of assumptions that Pratt hated to admit turned out to be right more often than it was wrong.

In Pam’s world, certain people, in certain situations, generally suffered a predictable array of outcomes.

He guessed that, in this case, she was thinking drug addicts. Empty, run-down house on the edge of town. Nobody policing it. The scene was tailor made for people who were beyond the ability to control their rabid hunger for the drugs that were methodically removing them from the functioning world, a snort or an injection at a time. In Pam’s estimation, these people followed an expected progression from happy and normal to sick and debauched and generally suffered violent ends.

It wasn’t a new story. But it was an unpalatable one.

Pratt was hoping that, this time at least, she was wrong. He was pulling for mating cats. Though the words of the small woman with the pale face and ratty nest of graying brown hair were rasping across his nerves like a razor on glass.

“They were horrible, terrifying screams,” she’d said.

“Human?” Pam asked, because she needed to. Pratt could tell from her tone that she hadn’t any doubt. Her assumptions had already been made, locked and loaded. They awaited only her documentation to become final.

“Yeah. A woman and a man it sounded like.” Pratt turned to see the tiny woman’s pinched white face folding into a frown. She swallowed hard. “I heard a child too.”

Pam’s head shot up and her gaze skidded to his. Her hand was already on her gun as Pratt nodded and started forward.

“Stay back,” his partner told the small crowd of onlookers as she fell in behind him, moving low and fast, one long fingered hand holding her Glock 9 and the other bracing the small flashlight along the muzzle.

Pratt shoved the gate open and pointed toward the sagging front porch. He cut left, intending to enter the back door of the house to cut off the escape of anyone who might be inside.

Pam headed for the front door.

As Pratt jogged around the house, his gaze skimming the area around him for shadows that didn’t belong, he heard Pam’s raspy voice call out, “Police!” just before she kicked the door into the house.

He reached the back door just as the front one slammed into the wall. An oily hiss slipped through the pitch-black space where he stood and fear stabbed through him like a well-honed blade. Pratt stood for a moment and looked around, seeing only the bulky form of a dark green stove on the wall across from the door. The adjoining wall held a short bank of cabinets, the doors hanging crooked against the frames.

An ancient refrigerator stood next to the room’s only window, its dark, rounded frame made misshapen by a broken door sagging from broken hinges.

Nothing moved in the room. Except for a murky haze that felt as if it was filled with ice, it looked like no one had entered the kitchen in years.

Gunshots thumped into the drywall in the hallway, just beyond the kitchen where he stood. Chunks of wall and moldy insulation flew into the air, and settled down to a sloping wood floor with a soft clatter.

He hunkered down, cursing silently that Pam was firing in the direction she knew he’d gone. “Kitchen clear!” he yelled, just to remind his partner where he was. He hurried into the hall and stopped at a widely-arched doorway. The haze that had turned the kitchen icy was so thick in the main part of the house that Pratt could barely see. He had a vague impression of sagging furniture and smelled old smoke from a fireplace that spilled bricks onto the hearth beneath it.

But there was something else within the haze.

Death.