I used to be a slot-car racing fool when I was a kid, and I knew damn well that you can only run a power supply for so long before it starts to really heat up, and if you push your luck (like I always did) you were apt to blow a fuse before you were done.

And if for some reason you had several tracks and power supplies running at the same time…you could blow out the electricity to the entire floor of an apartment building.

I was so caught up in my own amazement that I didn’t even realize Dobbs had left the living room until he came back in and said, “Oh, man, you gotta see the rest of this place! She’s got tracks mounted everywhere—in her bedroom, the guest room, the kitchen…hell, she’s even got a little one set up in the bathroom!”

“We’re never going to get the gurney through here,” I said. “There’s barely room to walk around.”

Dobbs nodded his head. “Yeah, I already figured that out. We’re gonna have to move a couple of these tables. But not just yet.” He squeezed past me, pressing the clipboard into my hands, heading for the door.

“Where are you going?”

“You just stay here, all right? Miss Driscoll’s laid out in the bedroom, so you wait and take a look around. I don’t think she’s gonna mind.” He stopped, then turned to face me. “I got a digital camera in my bag down in the wagon. I have got take some pictures of this place. My wife’ll never believe me.”

I stared at him, blinked, then asked: “Why would anyone working a job like this carry a camera with them?”

He grinned. “Because every once in a while I come across something really weird, and my wife requires proof.”

“Do you lie to her that much?”

“I don’t like to think of it as lying. I…embellish. I embroider. I exaggerate.”

“You lie.”

“I lie. Just to keep her guessing, mind you. Believe me, after 32 years of marriage, nothing I do surprises her anymore, so I gotta do something to make it interesting for the old gal.” “So you carry a digital camera to work in case something weird comes up.” “That’s it. Don’t you ever fib to your wife?” “I’m divorced.” “Oh, sorry. Well, didn’t you ever fib to her when you were married?” “Probably.”

I was tempted to ask him what other weird things he’d encountered that required him to take pictures so his wife would believe him, then decided that some things were better left as mysteries. “I’d rather not stay here by myself, Fred. Okay if I come along?” “Sorry, my friend, but once we’re on the premises, at least one of us has to be with the body at all times. Them’s the rules.” “Then let me go and get the camera.”

“Oh, no, sorry. I paid a pretty penny for that thing and nobody but me handles it. Look, you’ll be fine. Back in a couple of minutes. Take a look around, it’s pretty interesting.”

And with that, he left me alone with a dead body, several thousand dollars’ worth of custom-made slot-car racing track, and what felt like a solid rod of iron running from the top of my throat to the bottom of my stomach.

2

Okay, confession time: this was not the first instance of my being in a situation like this.

Back in the Neolithic Period, when I was a senior at Cedar Hill High School and working part-time for the same janitorial company I still worked for, a guy in my class by the name of Andy Leonard flipped out one Fourth of July and killed a bunch of people, including most of his family. The man who owned the company at the time—a Vietnam vet named Jackson Davies—was hired by the city to go in and clean up the Leonard house after the police were finished with it. No one who worked for him wanted to help, so he wound up offering me and a couple of other guys—Mark Sieber and Russell Brennert—300 dollars each to go in with him. Brennert had been Leonard’s best friend. Mark and I gave Brennert a pretty hard time that night; hell, everyone in town was still upset and sick about the murders, and I guess we were looking for a scapegoat. Things were pretty bad in Cedar Hill for a long time after that particular July Fourth.

I will never forget what that house felt like; even from the street, you could sense the death that had soaked into its walls and floors. And once inside, that death got on your own skin, as well.

And it was so cold. I don’t think I’ve ever been that cold in my life. I couldn’t stop shaking the whole time we were in there.

I don’t know if it’s possible to put into words how it feels to mop up a puddle of blood and tissue that used to be a human being. Sometimes I still have nightmares about it.

Brennert wound up going into the nuthouse for a few weeks after that night. After we graduated, he kept on working for Davies until Davies decided to retire to Florida. Brennert bought the company from him. It said an awful lot about Brennert’s character that he hired me right on the spot when I came looking for work after both college and my marriage (in that order) didn’t work out. We never talk about that night. I guess we can still smell that cold, cold death on each other. Like I could smell it now. Hence the rod of iron inside me.

Since I couldn’t just stand there—it seemed like there were shadows in every corner trying to move in around me—I heeded Dobbs’ advice and took a walking tour of the place.

Altogether, Miss Driscoll had 17 tracks of various sizes mounted throughout her apartment—though the track in the bathroom, a small, simple oval, was a battery-operated child’s version of what engulfed the rest of the place. She had arranged the larger tracks to create aisles so that she could move easily between rooms. I couldn’t help but wonder at her fascination with these things.

And then thought of her loneliness.

Everything told you that this wasn’t just a hobby with this woman, it was an obsession, something she’d fostered to fill the holes in her life. Dobbs might have found this interesting in a weird sort of way, but the more I moved from room to room, seeing the details she’d added to each setup (tiny bits of trash spilling from a trash can at a rest stop; the tired, road-weary expressions on the peoples’ faces; a vending machine with an Out Of Order sign taped to its front), the more it all struck me as frighteningly sad. A lot of care had gone into the construction and maintenance of these tracks, and I couldn’t help but wonder if it had been her way of avoiding her loneliness.

It was in the guest bedroom that I first began to notice the trashed cars and tiny memorial wreaths set among the HO-scale buildings. The trashed cars were bad enough—how she’d manage to crumple some of these like she had was beyond me, but damn if they didn’t look like the real thing—but it was the miniature wreaths and crosses that really started to unnerve me. You’ve seen the real thing, I’m sure: drive for any length of time on any stretch of highway through any state, and you’ll pass them; sad little shrines—some homemade, others bought from florist shops—left behind by family members and friends to mark the place where someone they loved died in an automobile accident. Crosses and hearts seem to be the two most popular shapes, usually constructed of wire mesh covered in plastic flowers or plastic white lace to make the shape stand out, ribbons hand-tied all around to flutter in the breeze as if that silent activity was meant to fill the world with movements the dead could no longer make for themselves…and always, in the center of these memorials, staring out at passing cars whose drivers never return the eye contact, are the photographs, the faces of those who will never again see a new place, a different road, or a light in the window waiting for them at journey’s end.