“Well, I guess you got one thing right,” Kellen noted, pulling a small flashlight out of his pocket. He trained it into the darkness.
Everything glittered.
Everything.
The floor, the walls, every moldy basement object sparkled like a certain Disney fairy had exploded.
“This place looks like a strip club that gives out staph infections,” she said.
In the corner was a worn couch that sagged in the middle from excessive amounts of well-proportioned ass. It faced a large TV on a crappy faux wood console. The doors were open, revealing a tangled mess of wires, a few remotes, and loose batteries but nothing else of consequence.
Next to it was a rumpled twin bed. Posters of greased-up women in bikinis sitting on sports cars adorned the walls.
There was a phone charger plugged into an extension cord next to a twin mattress covered with rumpled, sparkly sheets. Small mountains of dirty laundry landscaped the concrete floor between similar mounds of trash. Riley counted fourteen shipping boxes in just one corner.
It all sparkled.
“This doesn’t look like the room of a guy who likes to craft,” she said, taking the gloves Kellen handed her.
“What do your spirit guides think a moldy basement bombed with glitter has to do with our DB across the river?” the detective wondered.
Bombed with glitter.
The cotton candy clouds lit up like Times Square, and Riley thought she heard the sound of slot machines spitting out their bounty.
“Holy shit. I think I’ve got something,” she said.
“What? A tetanus infection?” Kellen asked.
She jogged to the stairs and took them two at a time, her legs screaming from that morning’s aerobic torture. By the time she made it to the main floor, she was out of breath and barely able to stand.
She found Mrs. Strubinger in the kitchen pouring whiskey into a large mug of coffee and eating a piece of cold pizza.
“Sticks, did your son get glitter bombed?”
Sticks rolled her eyes heavenward. “It came in the mail, and the idiot opened it, thinking it was something he drunk ordered. I told him to clean it up. Every stupid sparkle. It looked like a craft store and a nudie bar exploded. But no, Titus just left it like that. He’d been leaving a trail of sparkly crap everywhere he went for two weeks like a middle-aged, cross-dressing Disney fairy with diabetes.”
Kellen joined them in the kitchen.
“Titus got a glitter bomb in the mail two weeks ago,” Riley explained.
“A glitter bomb?” He frowned.
“There were a few flakes of glitter in Bianca Hornberger’s closet.”
He shot her a look that said she was reaching. But she pointed at him. “Call Bianca’s husband and ask him if she got a similar package.”
With a shrug, Kellen excused himself.
“What’s all this about?” Sticks asked over the rim of her mug.
“Is there a possibility that your son didn’t die of a heart attack?” Riley asked.
The woman shrugged. “How the hell should I know? I’m no doctor. He had high blood pressure, high cholesterol, uncontrolled diabetes, and a bad fucking attitude. Between you and me, he hated anyone who wasn’t a middle-aged white guy that felt wronged by the world.”
“That’s a lot of people to hate,” Riley observed.
“Titus was an opinionated asshole. Someone always had it better or easier than him. Or someone was trying to take what was rightfully his. Got that from his father,” she said. “I mean, who hates shortbread cookies and Tom Hanks?”
