As he reached the top step, he raised the bundle of keys the real estate lady had handed him, and located the one she'd said was for the front door. He could see inside, through the gauzy layer of curtain beyond the big windows flanking him on both sides. The lights were still on.
The moment he opened the door, Ryan knew something was wrong. He hadn't smelled death before, but couldn't think of anything else to attribute the stench to. He grabbed a small table from just inside and used it to prop the door open. He'd crack some windows as soon as he'd determined what the source was.
Whatever else Davis might have been, he was a man who didn't like clutter. The big room had a few carefully placed chairs and tables, Danish Modern from the look of them, and little else. He glanced down the long corridor that led towards the back of the house, but didn't see any lights. So he followed the dogleg around to the right, and towards the arched entry to the dining room. He was getting closer, judging by the smell.
Steeling himself, Ryan stepped past the long dining room table, only tangentially aware of the intricate inlay work along its edge. Finding a body slumped over a table in the kitchen had been so overused in film and fiction, he was already flashing to several vintage mysteries, in a half-hearted attempt to lighten the mood. So, when he crossed the threshold and scanned the room, he was relieved to find the man he assumed to be the former owner, collapsed over the island sink, with a bloody pile of towels strategically placed to minimize the mess.
"How thoughtful, Mr. Davis" he said to the corpse. "Low profile to the end. I guess now I know why your house was so attractively priced."
After opening the kitchen door and windows to clear the air a bit, Ryan returned to Davis' impromptu sacrificial altar for another look. He'd cleanly slit his wrist with one of seven knives he'd laid out for the chore. The lucky one was submerged in the half-filled sink.
"Indecisive?" he asked. Then, spotting an open bottle of prescription narcotic near the microwave, he added, "And conscientious, too. So who were you, and how did you come to this?"
Not too long ago, a discovery like this would have been reason to call 911. But that was before the meltdown, before the city government admitted that it had been engaging in foolhardy investment schemes, too. It was just as broke as Davis here. The only city services still functioning were the ones charging users directly, like the bus system. The fire department had taken to using a pay-as-you-burn system. They'd put out your fire as soon as you showed them enough real money to cover the call, which meant that for most people, there was no fire department.
Davis was Ryan's problem.
He'd have to dispose of the body himself, unless he had some way to pay for someone else to do it. Fortunately, there was plenty of lawn. All he needed was to find a shovel. Who knows, maybe the guy left one of them around, too.
But that could wait. At the moment, he was more interested in finding out more about his late benefactor. So he set off into the house in search of clues. Not surprisingly, it was a brief search. Davis had left some papers open on his office desk, and Ryan sat down to look through them.
The one on top was a copy of Davis' will. Before the meltdown, he'd decided to leave everything to charity, a foundation that helped people rebuild their credit after going through bankruptcy. "Feeling guilty, were you, Greg?" he said as he paged through the man's financial records. Just about every bit of his estate had been tied up in one kind of risky derivative or another... bundled mortgages, several kinds of GDP futures. It was a veritable grab bag of monetary moronity. And they were all worthless.
The only saving grace in the whole stack was a frayed news clipping, part of an old investigative piece that, if it were true, nearly landed the man in a Senate hearing room. Ryan flattened it out and began to read. About two-thirds of the way through, the author asserted that Gregory Davis had been instrumental in getting the government's oversight board to look the other way when they had the chance to stop the worst of the schemes from being launched.
Davis had personally cocked the trigger. He was responsible for having set up the meta-derivatives that were offered to the governments of the world as a way to actually profit from their own debt. The meltdown, as inevitable as it might have been, must have been triggered by something. He was just unlucky enough to have been the fool who placed that last straw on the camel's back. And nobody knew. It was his secret, and he couldn't live with it. No wonder he killed himself.
Ryan dropped the clipping and went back to the kitchen... back to the site of what he now guessed was Davis' idea of ultimate penance: personal blood sacrifice. He stared at the man's body for a long moment, with not so much as a thought coursing through his head.
It wouldn't do to clean up the mess, he decided, not after Davis went through so much trouble to make such a dramatic, albeit private, exit. No. Not when it could be put to such a good use.
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