The Husband

brother, and he was heavy.
    Dragging him across the polished wood floor of the kitchen and into the laundry room proved harder than Mitch expected. Hoisting him into the chair was one door away from impossible, but Mitch got it done.
    The upholstered panel on the back of the chair fit between two steel verticals. Between each side of that padded panel and the frame was an open space.
    He pulled Anson's hands through those gaps. With the handcuffs that he himself had worn earlier, he shackled his brother's wrists behind the chair.
    Among the items in a utility drawer were three spare electrical extension cords. A thick orange cord was about forty feet long.
    After weaving it through the chair's legs and stretcher bars, Mitch tied it around the washing machine. Far less flexible than rope, the rubber cord would allow only loose knots, so he tied three.
    Although Anson might be able to rise into a half crouch, he would have to lift the chair with him. But anchored to the washer, he could not go anywhere.
    The blow with the pistol had cut his ear. He was bleeding but not heavily.
    His pulse was slow but steady. He might come around quickly.
    Leaving the overhead light on, Mitch went upstairs to the master bedroom. He saw what he expected: two small night-lights plugged into wall outlets, neither switched on at the moment.
    As a child, Anson had slept with a lamp on low As a teenager, he had settled for a night-light similar to these. In every room of this house, as preparation for a power failure, he kept a flashlight that received fresh batteries four times a year.
    Downstairs again, Mitch glanced in the laundry room. Anson remained unconscious in the chair.
    Mitch searched the kitchen drawers until he found where Anson kept keys. He plucked out a spare house key. He also took the keys for three different cars, including his Honda, and left the house by the back door.
    He doubted that the neighbors could have heard the shot—or, having heard it, could have recognized it for what it was—after it had been filtered through the boom and cry of the wind at war with itself. Nevertheless, he was relieved to see no lights in the houses to either side.
    He climbed the stairs to the condo above the garages and tried the door, which was locked. As he expected, the key to Anson's house also opened this one.
    Inside, he found Anson's home office occupying space that would normally be a living room and dining area. The nautical paintings were by some of the artists featured in the front condo.
    Four computer workstations were served by a single wheeled office chair. The size of the logic units, far larger than anything ordinarily seen in a home, suggested his work required rapid multitiered computation and massive data storage.
    Mitch wasn't a computer maven. He had no illusions that he could boot up these machines—if boot up was even a term in use anymore—and discover the nature of the work that had made his brother rich.
    Besides, Anson would have layers of security, passwords and procedures, to keep out even serious hackers. He had always been delighted by the elaborate codes and arcane symbolism of the maps that pirates drew to their caches of treasure in those tales that enthralled him as a boy.
    Mitch left, locked the door, and went down to the first of the garages. Here were the Expedition that he had driven to Campbell's estate in Rancho Santa Fe and the 1947 Buick Super Woody Wagon.
    In the other two-car garage were an empty stall and Mitch's Honda, which he had left on the street.
    Perhaps Anson had stored it here after driving it to Orange and taking two of Mitch's garden tools as well as some of his clothes, to Daniel and Kathy's place to murder them, and then to Mitch's again to plant the incriminating evidence.
    Mitch opened the trunk. John Knox's body remained wrapped in the weathered canvas tarp.
    The accident in the loft seemed to have happened in a long-ago time, in another life.
    He returned to the first garage, started the Expedition, and moved it to the empty stall in the second garage.
    After moving his Honda to park it beside the Buick wagon, he closed the big roll-up door on that garage.
    Grimly, he wrestled the recalcitrant body from the trunk of the Honda. While it lay on the garage floor, he rolled the corpse out of the tarp.
    Serious putrescence had not set in yet. The dead man had a sinister sweet-and-sour smell, however, that Mitch was eager to get away from.
    The wind keened at the small high