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STUDIOMATIC PRODUCTIONS
CONTENT SOURCING PROTOCOL, REV. 4
Local police-band scanners, county court filings, and regional obituary notices are monitored on a rolling basis by development staff. Incidents meeting two or more of the following criteria should be logged for potential development: (1) cause of death unresolved or sensational, (2) residential setting, (3) surviving family unlikely to pursue media rights, (4) property likely to change hands within twelve months.
Nothing in this protocol should be read as encouragement to expedite items three or four.
— M.R.
Chapter One
The Producer
Joseph Byrne woke from a dead sleep with no understanding of what had pulled him out of it. The master bedroom was dark and he was alone in it, as he had been every night for the better part of a decade. He lay still for a moment with his eyes open, listening, but the house gave him nothing. He reached across the nightstand and fumbled for the switch on the bedside lamp. The light came on and showed him a room exactly as he had left it; nothing was out of place, nothing had moved. For a moment he allowed himself to believe that the noise had belonged to a dream and that he could turn the lamp off and return to sleep.
Then something thumped beneath him. It was a single sound, dull and heavy, transmitted up through the floor of a house that he knew to be empty. He sat up, opened the drawer of the nightstand, and took out the flashlight he kept there for power outages, finding a small comfort in the weight of it in his hand. He pushed back the covers and brought himself to his feet, slower than he would have liked, his knees registering their familiar complaint. He crossed to the bedroom door and opened it without a sound, and he stepped out into the hallway.
The upstairs corridor ran the length of the second floor in both directions. Byrne turned his head one way and then the other and saw nothing in either direction, only the closed doors of rooms he never used and the faded spots on the wall where framed prints once hung before they had been packed for the move. The flashlight beam cut a narrow cone through the dark and illuminated nothing that did not belong. He moved toward the staircase that descended to the lower floor.
He had taken perhaps three steps when something shattered below him, a plate by the sound of it, dropped or thrown hard enough to break apart in one clean report against a hard floor. His hand tightened on the flashlight. He stopped at the top of the stairs and made his voice as steady as he could manage.
“Whoever you are, please leave my house. I am armed.”
It was a lie, and he suspected that anyone who had broken into a house in the middle of the night would know it for one. He kept the flashlight trained ahead of him and started down the stairs, placing each foot with care, his free hand sliding along the banister. From somewhere beneath him came the sound of movement, soft and deliberate, the suggestion of a body shifting in a room he could not yet see. He reached the foyer at the bottom of the steps.
He stepped off the final stair and turned to take in the two rooms that opened off the entry. The dining room lay to his left, the living room to his right, and he swept the flashlight across both of them, finding no one. What remained of the furniture sat where it always sat, just covered in beige moving blankets in preparation for the relocation to the West Coast. The shapes in the dark resolved themselves into chairs and shelves and the long table where he had not eaten a meal in months. He drew a breath that did little to slow the pace of his heart and moved into the dining room.
It was there that he noticed the fog. It came across the floor in a low pale sheet and pooled around his ankles, and he stood for a moment trying to make sense of it. There was no door open to the night, no broken window letting in the cold, nothing he could point to that would explain the way it rolled toward him across the hardwood. His breathing quickened. He told himself that there would be an explanation, that there was always an explanation, and he carried that thought with him as he walked into the kitchen.
The kitchen was pitch black. The flashlight beam seemed to reach a certain distance into it and then surrender, swallowed by a darkness that felt thicker than the ordinary dark of the rest of the house. He reached for the wall switch out of habit and pressed it. Nothing happened. He pressed it again, and again the room stayed black, the overhead fixture refusing to answer him. The fog was heavier here. It climbed past his ankles and rose around his legs, and behind him the kitchen door swung shut on its own and struck the frame with a force that made him turn.
He took hold of the handle and pulled. The door did not move. He pulled harder, throwing his weight against it, and it held as though it had been bolted from the far side, though there was no bolt and never had been. When he turned back to face the room, the darkness in front of him had changed.
Two points of red light hung in the air above the counter. They were the color of a wound and they did not flicker, and they were positioned at the height where a pair of eyes would be if something were standing there in the dark and watching him. Byrne went very still. The flashlight trembled in his hand and its beam passed through the space where the lights hung and found nothing solid to land on.
The screech, when it came, was a sound no living throat should have been able to produce. It tore through the kitchen at a pitch that drove him back against the jammed door, and the two red lights came off the counter and rushed toward him through the dark.
Joseph Byrne screamed. The house, which had stood at the end of Primrose Avenue for nearly a century and would stand for many years more, absorbed the sound the way it had absorbed every other sound that night, and gave nothing back.
•
By the time the sun came up, the quiet street had filled with the machinery of a violent death. An ambulance sat at the curb with its rear doors open and no urgency in the movements of the people around it, because urgency was no longer required. Three police cars were parked at angles along the road, and a length of yellow caution tape ran the perimeter of the property and snapped lightly in the morning air. The house at the end of Primrose Avenue had been for sale for some weeks. A sign still stood planted in the front lawn, and across the face of it someone had slapped a bright sticker that read SOLD.
An unremarkable sedan pulled up in front of the house and parked behind the last of the patrol cars. The man who got out of it was dressed for a longer day than he had planned on, in a coat that had seen several winters and shoes that had given up their shine. He crossed the lawn to the tape, lifted it over his head, and stepped onto the property. A uniformed officer broke away from a cluster of personnel near the porch and came to meet him.
“Oh good, you’re here,” the officer said. “This is a pretty bad one.”
“Any murder is a bad one,” Detective Farrow said. “The town has a population of about three thousand. People are going to start talking. I’m surprised that gnat from the Herald isn’t here trying to get an answer out of us yet.”
“I meant in terms of what happened to the victim.”
Farrow let that sit for a moment. He had worked long enough to know that an officer who led with the condition of the body was an officer who had already seen something he wanted help carrying. “What do we know?”
“The victim is a man in his mid-sixties,” the officer said. “Identified as Mr. Joseph Byrne. He was the owner of a production company that was relocating to Southern California.”
“I remember hearing about that back when they announced the relocation,” Farrow said. He started toward the house and the officer fell into step beside him. “What was the name of the company?”
“Living Science Productions.”
“Any disgruntled former employees who were slighted by the move?”
“Probably not,” the officer said. “They were open to remote work for the people who weren’t needed on set, and they offered generous relocation packages for the ones who were moving. I don’t remember hearing anything bad about it in the news.”
“Well anyway,” Farrow said. “How was he killed?”
They reached the front porch. The officer stopped at the threshold and the easy professionalism went out of his face. “It’s not pretty.”
He led Farrow through the foyer and into the kitchen at the back of the house, and Farrow stopped just inside the doorway and took in the scene without speaking. A length of steel wire had been strung from one wall of the room to the other, drawn taut at a height of several feet, and the body of Joseph Byrne had been suspended from it. His throat had been cut. Both of his eyes had been removed from their sockets. Every piece of cutlery the man had owned, the knives and the forks and the long serving pieces, had been driven into his chest and stood out from it at every angle, so that what had been a person was now an arrangement, something assembled rather than killed.
“Jesus Christ,” Farrow said. “Who would do this?”
He crossed the floor toward the body, careful of where he placed his feet, and stood looking up at it. There was no sign of a struggle in the room, no overturned furniture, nothing to suggest that Byrne had been able to fight. The kitchen was otherwise immaculate.
“Was there any sign of forced entry?” he asked.
“No,” the officer said. “No fingerprints anywhere in the kitchen, either. Well, besides his of course. Whoever came in did it without leaving a trace.”
“Did anyone ask the neighbors if they saw anything?”
“I spoke to Patricia Olsen, the woman who lives next door. She reported hearing a loud scream that she said bordered on inhuman, coming from his house. It jolted her awake. She ran to her window and saw a bright red light coming from the kitchen.”
Farrow turned his head toward the window over the sink. From it he could see the side of the neighboring house and a single second-floor window with the curtains parted. “Any vehicles?” he asked.
“Not that she mentioned.”
Farrow reached into the inside pocket of his coat and took out a slim case of business cards. He did not open it. He simply held it while he thought, turning the small weight of it over in his fingers. “Tell her to meet me down at the precinct once everyone is awake and lucid,” he said. “I’d like to ask her a few questions myself.”
“Do you have any idea what this could be?”
Farrow surveyed the room one more time. He took in the wire and the cutlery and the careful, deliberate horror of the whole arrangement, the work of someone who had not been in a hurry and had not been afraid of being heard. He turned back to the officer.
“Unfortunately, not in the slightest,” he said. “Not until we can get a full lab report on the victim and on whatever was used to do this.”
He looked to the body one last time, to the two dark hollows where the man’s eyes had been.
“And do a complete search of the house,” he said. “I want to know what happened to this man’s eyes. Finding them could lead us somewhere.”