Faith held out the phone so he could check for himself.
‘Uh-uh.’ He held up his finger, like he needed a moment to decide. ‘Okay, it passed.’
‘You sure?’ His face was the color of an envelope.
‘No.’ He walked over to the kitchen sink and turned on the faucet. He had to move a stack of dishes so he could stick his head under the tap. He gurgled, then spat into the sink, which was disgusting but Faith had a feeling that Harding had done worse things in that sink.
‘Officers?’
Faith had forgotten about Violet.
‘Good Lord, it smells like ammonia and trash in here.’ The woman stood just outside the doorway. She pinched her nose closed. ‘Is everything all right?’
‘There’s a rat up there,’ Collier said. ‘Big one. Maybe pregnant.’
‘Is he gray with white ears?’
Faith showed her the paused video on her phone.
‘I’ll be damned.’ Violet shook her head. ‘Barb’s grandson brought his rat over last weekend. He swore up and down that he put the top back on the cage. They looked everywhere for that stupid thing.’
‘I’m pretty sure this isn’t a pet.’ Collier waved away a fly. ‘I mean, it’s huge. Like, unnatural.’
Violet offered, ‘I can show you the MISSING poster Barb posted on the message board.’
Collier clamped his mouth shut and shook his head.
Faith thought about the package of ground beef near the attic stairs. ‘Was the rat inside Barb’s house when it went missing?’
‘No. The kid put the cage on Barb’s screened porch for about half an hour. Apparently they like fresh air. He came back and the top was pushed up and the rat was gone.’ Violet frowned as she took in the room. ‘I’m sure Mr Nimh was more comfortable in this squalor.’
Faith asked, ‘Is Barb home much?’
‘Now that you say that, she normally is. She’ll be devastated she missed all this action. Bit of a busybody.’
Faith loved busybodies. She handed Violet her business card. ‘Could you have Barb call me? I’d just like a general idea of Harding.’
‘I’m not sure she can tell you much beyond what a bully he was.’
‘You’d be surprised what people can remember.’
Violet tucked the card into her bra strap. ‘As I said before, just slip the key back through the mail slot in my office door when you’re finished.’
Faith listened to her flip-flop her way down the sidewalk.
‘A pet.’ Collier waved away another fly.
‘That explains why it wasn’t scared of us.’
‘I still want it to die. Like, immediately. With fire.’
‘Look for a key,’ she told him. ‘We need to get into that closet.’
‘We need to call animal control,’ he countered. ‘Dude kept a rat in his attic. No telling what’s in that closet.’
Faith wasn’t going to wait for animal control. She took in the filthy living room and kitchen, wondering where somebody like Harding would hide a key. Nothing jumped out except an overwhelming sense of disgust. Squalor was a word that seemed custom-made for the way Harding lived. There were Styrofoam plates and cups all over the open-concept living/dining/kitchen area. The moist-looking brown velvet couch and scarred coffee table were overflowing with abandoned KFC takeout bowls. Gnawed chicken bones with green mold, cups of Coke with thick skins on the surface, browned sporks where he hadn’t gotten off all the mashed potatoes.
Then there was the smell, which suddenly hit her like a hammer to the bridge of her nose. Not just ammonia, but rot, likely from Dale Harding’s bad habits, if Sara’s assessment of his final days proved to be correct. Faith hadn’t noticed the stench when they broke down the front door. Adrenaline had a way of focusing your priorities, and her main priority had been not to get killed. Now that her terror had abated, her other senses had returned, and they were immediately assaulted by the stink.
And flies, because there were at least two dozen of them taking advantage of all the trash.
Faith said, ‘In this heat, maggots can hatch in eight to twenty hours. It takes about three to five days for them to pupate.’
Collier guffawed. ‘Sorry, pupate is a funny word.’
‘I’m saying that it tracks that the meat was put in the attic this weekend, probably to feed the rat. Or keep him up there.’ Faith forced open one of the windows to help dissipate the smell. Then she pushed out the screen to take care of the flies.
Collier belched loudly, then asked, ‘You got any breath mints?’
‘Nope.’
Faith turned away from Collier. She thought about the breath mints in her car, and how nice it would be to go outside and take a five-minute break from Harding’s greasy, disgusting house. Her sense of smell had definitely returned. The rancid odor was biting into the back of her mouth and nose. She would’ve bet her life savings that the rotting meat in the attic was nothing compared to what was underneath the piles of wet-looking newspapers and magazines Harding had scattered around the floor. Violet was right. The trash was born of sheer laziness. If Harding had finished eating a bowl of macaroni and cheese when he came through the front door, he just dropped the bowl where he was standing and moved on.
‘It’s weird, right?’ Collier was watching her. ‘The way freaking out takes away your sense of smell?’
‘How can you not smell this?’ Faith opened another window. She wasn’t going to bond with this jackass. ‘Where’s the TV?’
Collier ran his finger along a low console table, separating the dust like the Red Sea. ‘There was a TV here, but it’s gone. Looks like it was big.’
‘No computer.’ Faith opened a drawer in the table beside the couch. She used her pen to poke around the takeout menus. ‘No iPad. No laptop.’ She opened another drawer. More crap. No key to open the closet.
Collier said, ‘Harding strikes me as a paperwork kind of guy.’
Faith coughed as a new smell infiltrated her nostrils. She pushed open another window. ‘There were charging cables beside the bed in the master.’
‘I’m detecting that was for his phones.’ Collier had his arms crossed again. He stood with his feet wide apart, probably because he was used to carrying fifty pounds of equipment around his hips during his patrol days. He said, ‘So, this thing you’ve got going on with Trent. Are you his work wife, or do you got something else on the side?’
Faith watched an Atlanta police cruiser pull up behind her Mini. They had probably been en route when Collier canceled the call for backup and decided to come check it out anyway. The two men looked young and eager. Their necks craned as they stared at the house. The driver rolled down his window.
Faith waved them off, calling out the window, ‘We’re fine.’
The driver put the gear in park anyway.
‘Lemons into lemonade,’ Collier said. ‘We’ll send one of the unis into the attic for the boxes, don’t mention the rat, and see what happens.’
‘Two weeks of rabies shots is what happens.’ Which she knew was exactly what Dale Harding was hoping for when he shoved the boxes up into the attic with the packet of ground beef and some weird kid’s stolen rat. Just one more way for the guy to wipe his ass on the toilet paper of his life. Harding knew that he was weeks away from death, whether by someone else’s hand or his own shitty life choices. He also knew that someone would have to empty his house, and that they would likely get a face full of rat in the process.