The Timer Game. Susan Smith Arnout

flipping his mask off his face so it dangled on the front of his Tyvek suit. Plodding down the steps, he looked like a scowling Pillsbury Dough Boy. He gripped a cage covered in tight mesh wiring and held it as far away from his body as possible. A large snake banged against the wire, fangs bared. You sometimes get to interact with nature.

      ‘Show’s over. That’s it. It’s done.’ Lewin handed the cage to a uniform who stowed it in the back of a patrol car.

      Lewin was in his midforties, with graying hair and a permanent crease between his eyes, made more pronounced by his scowl. Grace had worked with him maybe a dozen times, and the combative edge he carried into every conversation made her instantly tense.

      ‘Dr. D. Takes forty minutes to get here.’

      Grace took a slow, irritable breath. ‘Thirty-nine. I clocked it.’

      ‘I expected Larry.’

      ‘Yeah, well, I had better things to do, too, Vince, but they rescheduled my kidney dialysis so I could come.’

      ‘You’re kidding, right?’

      She pulled on her Tyvek suit and looked past him toward the house. ‘What’d you find?’

      ‘A shitload of nasty. Two pit bulls, assault rifles, six snakes – big ones.’ He gestured toward the cage. ‘That guy was booby-trapped to the kitchen cabinet. Missed him the first time around.’

      ‘That inspires confidence.’

      ‘I’m not paid to hold your hand, Grace.’ He was still grumpy about the dialysis joke. Too late, she remembered his mother-in-law had died of renal failure.

      A balding man in his midtwenties detached from an assistant DA in the crowd and trotted over. He was wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a Tyvek suit in a muddy tan color that signaled he worked for the DEA. Agents apparently hadn’t gotten the memo about looking spiffy. The suit looked a size too small.

      ‘You guys met? The new DEA chemist Chip Page; Chip, Dr. D.’

      ‘Grace Descanso,’ she corrected pleasantly. She pulled on a bootee.

      ‘Yeah, fine. Grace Descanso. She’s been a police forensic biologist for – I don’t know, what?’

      ‘Five.’

      ‘Five years. Sol retired early and moved to Florida so we got Chip,’ Lewin answered her unasked question and tapped his clipboard, as if the small effort at pleasantry exhausted him. ‘Set to live here the next few days?’

      ‘Sure,’ Grace lied.

      ‘Then welcome to amateur hour. These guys didn’t go to the Cordon Bleu.’

      A taco van turned onto the street and the driver grinned at Grace and gave a jaunty thumbs-up as if he knew her. She took a good look at him as she pulled on the other bootee.

      He had a narrow face and glassy eyes and a thatch of black hair and seemed to be about her age, thirty-two. The taco van veered – he’d been staring at her rather than the road ahead – and the uniform on crowd control bellowed at him to move it along. Things could be worse. She could be driving a rancid food truck, trying to stay one step ahead of the Department of Environmental Health.

      ‘Heard some bozo blew up a trailer park in Reno drying down acetone in an oven.’ Lewin pulled on a second set of gloves and passed the box to Chip. ‘They found body parts in trees. Chip, any questions, ask. Don’t want to send you home in a box. Several.’

      Chip blanched and Lewin looked away, satisfied. Grace smiled at Chip in what she hoped was a reassuring way.

      ‘You were really a doctor?’ Chip asked. It was a blurt. ‘What happened?’

      ‘Double glove, Chip.’ Grace passed him the box again, her good humor gone.

      The crowd drifted off and stationed themselves in nearby yards, talking quietly. Vince Lewin turned back to Grace and Chip, all business.

      ‘Chip, you got residue but nothing exciting, no pounds of product. Grace, work your magic. There are enough spatters in there to keep a busload of Rorschach head shrinks happy for a year. The house is sealed and it’s going to stay that way. We’re clear on phosgene. We’re gonna dust, collect. Be smart and stay alive. Ready?’

      Grace cinched the hood of her suit and attached her bug mask – an air-purifying respirator – and followed him up the stairs, Chip lagging behind her. Grace let him go past her through the door. An armed patrol officer stood at the door, feet spread, another one at the perimeter, and Grace remembered hearing how they’d once busted somebody who’d wandered into a meth house after the task force had secured it. He’d come to do a buy, realizing too late that Joe and Jim and Rudy were already downtown rolling their fingers across ink pads and that the nice man inside with the wide smile wasn’t selling anything except a felony conviction.

      The interior was dark, windows covered in duct tape and sheets, and it took a moment for her eyes to adjust. A dark stain saturated a sliver of ratty carpet and spattered a nearby wall.

      ‘Chip, don’t come near this, okay?’

      She squatted down carefully out of reach of the stain and roved her flashlight beam over the wall. The drops curled like exclamation marks in a hurry, which meant that whoever was bleeding had been moving. Or blood had scattered from a weapon that was moving. Or maybe it had been an earthquake and the wall had been moving. Something had moved, and whatever it was, it meant work on her end, and a lot of it.

      ‘Lovely.’ She’d never see Katie again.

      Grace stood up. Already her arms inside the Tyvek were damp as boiled hot dogs. The suit sealed her like a deli chicken. Too bad she hadn’t wrapped herself first in secret herbs and cellophane; she could lose six inches in an hour. She wondered if women losing inches in a spa wrap suddenly exploded like a hot sausage the instant they drank a glass of water. She had to stop thinking about food.

      ‘Any ideas?’ Lewin stood at her elbow.

      ‘Yeah, Vince, somebody bleeding was in here once.’

      ‘Ha-ha, very funny.’

      She turned her attention to the rest of the living room. The floor was littered with asthma inhalers, so thick it looked like an army of oversized, hard-shelled insects. Bedding lay tangled across a stained mattress. A child’s dump truck climbed a hill of fertilizer. A meth pipe tilted out the toy cab of the truck. Matchbook strips, ripped down to the red phosphorus, were scattered across a table, along with boxes of diet pills and stiffened coffee filters. Red, as if they’d been dipped in blood.

      ‘What do you think?’ Lewin looked at Chip. His voice was tinny in the mask.

      ‘Nazi method,’ Chip said, thinking it was the same cooking the efficient Germans had used during the war, to keep the troops awake and ready.

      Lewin made a buzzer sound. ‘Wrong.’ He looked at Grace.

      ‘Red phosphorus reduction method,’ Grace said. She turned to Chip, shrugging it off. ‘Nazi method’s lithium and ammonia gas; it’s white powder.’

      Lewin looked disappointed that she’d gotten it right. He turned toward the kitchen, motioning them to follow. Under his mask, Chip’s face was a pasty gray and dots of sweat sprouted on his upper lip.

      ‘You okay?’ She stopped walking. ‘Chip?’

      ‘Claustrophobic. Always have been. Even when I was a kid.’ Chip’s voice was muffled in the mask. He shrugged, embarrassed. ‘Don’t tell Sergeant Lewin.’

      She nodded. She could tell by the way his hand kept going to it that Chip carried a gun. Most criminalists opted against it; it was bulky and unnecessary. Police controlled the scene and afforded protection, but occasionally Grace ran across a wannabe cop. They always carried.

      Her bootees made a snicking sound on the filthy floor. Pyrex pans littered the stove, and a jug of what looked like denatured alcohol lay