Nemesis-continued (Draft)

       Deco finally stepped through the front door and stopped. For a moment she seemed to contemplate the fact that death was at play, that Just up the flight of stairs she would come face to face with it, sure.  But her contemplation came mostly in the existential sense---of her own eventual demise; of the prospect of the inevitability. The how, the when, the where. By whom would it be orchestrated and under what circumstance? Would she be one of the lucky ones who moves on to the after-life while they sleep, or would it happen much like the man's? The questions came on like an epiphany. She was sure that the dead man upstairs had had the same play of thought...at one point or another. And like a normal person, had compartmentalized and tucked it away like one would the memory of traumatic childhood experience. A constant reminder that imprisons you and at the same time propels and shapes who you ultimately become. Like herself, she was sure the man loathed the idea of its manifestation, not because he couldn't accept it, or that he didn't know when it would happen and how, but because he'd come to realize that it would be in the precise moment when the curse takes hold that the answers would come and not a moment before. Or at least this was what she surmised.

She smiled warily at the idea. It was hopeless, really.

  Now at the bottom of the stairs, she seemed to coach herself to the task at hand.  "Focus," she said to herself.

She checked her wrist watch which indicated that it was now 7am as she began her ascend. In about an hour the place would surely be crawling with reporters and camera crews looking to snag a story. And this would be an especially thick one: a policeman slain in the comfort of his bed in the small hours of the night. And all it meant was that there would be questions, the answers to which, if found, and no doubt by some mid-level reporter looking to rise to journalistic prominence they could, wouldn't help the already strained police public relations. What a drag she thought. On the wall above, at the peak of the steps, she noticed a gold framed version of Rembrandt's fragile altruist. By this she stopped mid-way up the stairs and allowed herself to observe her surroundings.

The man was a bachelor and lived like one. Sleek and modern furnishings were on display--that along with a hint of obsessive compulsiveness, an assumption on Deco's part. Nothing seemed to be turned or out of place from the living room to the kitchen both of which were on view from the woman's vantage point. A stack of books on a table in the living room had either never been touched, or careful consideration went into reorganizing them each time they were. A shelve of books on a far wall  presented evidence of a kind of methodology that went into their arrangement. The books were shelved shortest to tallest, from left to right, but not without taking their widths to account. The furniture were square, the paint on the wall gray, carrying with it a hint of either dread or skepticism that was almost visible to the senses. She wasn't sure which of, but she also noticed that there, between those gray walls, was an obsession with time as there was at least four clocks between the living room and kitchen spaces. To the untrained eye they appeared as mare furnishing but they weren't. Like the arranged books, quite some thought went into their placement. At each common passageway within the space, the man would have a clear view of one of the clocks at any given time. The one above the book shelf was in plain view from where she now stood. She checked the rest. She was right in her theory.

All the same, at this point she wasn't quite sure how all of it would help what had already happened other than that...here lived an obsessive compulsive skeptic who dreaded the wasting of time, or perhaps the passage of it, and who just so happened to be a policeman. There wasn't more to it than that. Skeptical, she'd even go as far as to call them cynical, policemen weren't so hard to find. As far as she was concerned it was an occupational hazard, if you will, especially in a town where policemen were at odds with popular consensus. Still, she felt that they, especially his obsession with time, would add up to something with a little effort in scrounging. This she based on what the killer left on the wall of the man's bedroom above his corpse.

 

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