And In This Corner

"Ok, I wasn't expecting this," I said, standing in the open doorway of Nathan Comstock's house and looking down at his corpse.
"Is he dead?" Amy, standing beside me, asked. If she was either shocked or alarmed, she demonstrated neither.

I took a broad step over the body, into the house, and looked around for a light switch for the foyer. I found one, and flicked it with my knuckle. An overhead light turned on, scaring away the shadows from around Comstock's face. Oh yeah, he was dead.

"Still wondering?" I asked, looking down still.

Comstock's body was rigid, lying across the wood floor like he'd stopped suddenly in the middle of running. His legs were bent, his arms tucked in against his body. His fingers were flexed as if holding invisible baseballs. His face was pale and sickly, trapped in an expression of panic. There was no blood anywhere. He was wearing khaki slacks, a turquoise polo shirt, and brown loafers; as if he had planned to go out for a late brunch, got as far as the front door, and dropped dead.

"Why does he look like that?" Amy said before stepping over the body.
"It looks like rigor mortis," I said. "The more pertinent question, I think, is why he was killed."
"I thought rigor mortis takes a few days to set in. And why do you think he was killed?"

I looked up from the body, around the parts of the house I could see from where I stood. Everything looked reasonably normal. He couldn't have just died, though. Not when he's in the middle of this whole stupid conspiracy that keeps trying to kill me. I was somehow involved in a spinning swarm of death and secrets. Anybody inside that swarm suddenly dying, it wouldn't be an accident. I tried to explain that.

"We should call the police," Amy said.
"Should we? I mean, are there any reasons we shouldn't?" I asked, trying to think through it. They'd wonder why we were here, but there's nothing too suspicious about that. The FBI would probably swoop in anyway and take over.
"I don't know. Maybe you should call one of your FBI pals instead," Amy said.
"I was just thinking that," I replied.

I pulled out my phone and held it in my hand as I took a few steps around.

"It's disgusting," Amy said as I walked away. "Look, his eyes are still open."

I stepped around a corner and found myself in the kitchen. It was nicely appointed with stainless steel appliances and Italian-looking tile. There were some bags and wrappers from a carry-out place nearby scattered around the counter. Maybe he had brunch in, instead.

"He might just be paralyzed," I said, loud enough so Amy would hear me from where she was. "Should check for a pulse."
"I'm not touching him. It could be contagious," she called out.
"Death isn't contagious," I said, going around a corner into the living room.

The lights were out in the living room, but enough light from the kitchen and foyer came in to let me see rough shapes. There was a glass sliding door in the back, a long sectional couch facing a square TV set sitting on a wooden stand, and a fireplace on the opposite wall.

"Who could have done it?" Amy asked, now in my line of sight.
"He was afraid that his bosses in the Marines were going to kill him, I guess he was right," I said, standing in the middle of the living room.
"If they're capable of doing that, if Schumer or whoever would kill for that, then this is worse that you figured."
"Yeah," I said, "it's bad."

It was very bad. I'd always hoped that the threat was coming from some outside party. Schumer acted like he wanted to help me, the FBI agents acted like they wanted me to help them. Someone came to my house, shot at me, and then burned the place down. If it was Schumer or the Marines behind all this, there's nothing I could do to stop them. I couldn't outrun them, I couldn't hide. The real mystery was why I wasn't dead already.

The sight of Comstock's face flashed in my mind for a moment, sent chills down my spine. The last time I saw the face of a dead guy was that photograph Pratt showed me in the Vienna coffee house. Some political guy that Pratt thought I'd killed. Killed with some injection that causes or mimics a heart attack. I wondered if that's how Comstock died. Could they have been connected? Comstock and some Austrian guy;Nes-something, Nessiri? Nessimi? Swanson?

If the death was the same, it meant somebody came in here and shot him up with something. Somebody good. There's not a lot of people with the ability to call professional hitters for every little job. The only person I knew with a hitman on his speed-dial was Comstock, he called Dingan to -- allegedly -- bring me in for questioning or more brainwashing. Maybe Comstock had a whole Rolodex of hitmen. Maybe Schumer has his own Rolodex, or the same. Maybe Schumer did have Comstock killed. But why?

"I can't figure out why someone, Schumer or anyone, would really want Comstock dead," I said, still in the living room.
"Comstock thought there was somebody after him because he lost track of you and screwed up with the Dingan thing," Amy said.
"Is that worth killing the guy over? Because I stopped going to school? It couldn't have messed them up too bad. I marched right into Quantico twice now, if they really needed me back in the hypnosis-chair, they've had plenty of chances to grab me."
"Because he talked, then? Maybe since Vienna, he's been talking to someone else. The FBI, the press, anyone."
"I don't know. I guess so. From what I can tell, the stupidest thing he's done in the last month has been sending a hitman to track down a teenager and then having that teenager end up killing the hitman."

"You killed Dingan?" came a different voice, from behind me.

I turned around, and from the darkness in the corner of the room, behind the fireplace mantle, stepped a man. He was dressed in black, like the men who'd come to my house, with various indiscernible shapes hanging from his vest harness. In his hand was a black and silver pistol with a long, silver cylindrical tube jutting from the barrel. The gun was pointed at me.

"I'd heard the cops got him," he said, "that changes things just a bit." His voice had a bit of an accent, though I couldn't put my finger on it.

Amy hadn't said a word. I assumed she was still in the foyer and was seeing this.

I looked at where the man had come from. Unless he'd been creeping around, I would have walked right by him and not seen him. That, the suit, and the gun; it all added up to one thing.

Ladies and gentlemen, I thought, may I introduce: the second hitman.