Barbara had hoped to watch Delgado pick the lock, but he disappointed her by pulling out a key ring.  His fingers cycled through the tightly packed loop, searching some secret system, which would locate the right one for the apartment.  These must be the keys to all their homes.

An odd sensation infused the cells of her body, like a sudden change in altitude.  It was something akin to nerves – a tingling in her joints and a fluttering in her gut. 

He has a key to my house.

The door opened to a dark room.  The air was cold and smelled of Freon.  An ancient air-conditioner rumbled, shaking in its mounting, the fan in overdrive.  The Major switched on the lights, and a scene of death took sudden shape in front of them.

Barbara's focus instantly pulled away from the filthy kitchen directly in front of them to the mess in the living room.  The coffee table was piled with takeout containers.  A half-empty bottle of JD rested on its side.  Beside it a kit was laid out on a kitchen towel and had obviously been used.  The back of the spoon had scorch marks, the baggy was empty, and the syringe's plunger was pushed all the way down.

Tray Cullen lay on the sofa, mouth and eyes wide open, with his belt still around his bicep.  His skin was a pale shade of oatmeal.

"Son-of-a-bitch," Delgado said, more a groan than words.

Barbara was impressed he didn't bother wasting time checking for a pulse.  She could tell from where she stood that he'd been dead for hours, but an amateur might have thought there was still hope.

Barbara Gracie had been going off duty when the alarm had been raised on Cullen.  He was an hour late for his shift and not answering his phone.  She was ready to file his absence under one-more-thing-I-don't-give-a-shit-about when her elevator arrived in the Security Center and she found the Major taking a pistol out of the gun cabinets and slipping it into a shoulder holster.  She was no expert, but from its all-business look, she guessed he was armed with a standard-issue SIG Sauer.

Barbara walked over to him raising her chin a notch.  "And here I thought you'd forgotten about our date."

Delgado chuckled as though she'd been joking.  "Sorry, I'll have to take a rain-check.  I need to look in on an MIA team member."  He slipped on a sports jacket.  It not only hid the pistol but all of his shirts insignias, making him look like a regular citizen, although an overdressed one for the ninety-degree temperature outside.

"You mean that prick, Cullen.  If you're looking for him, I'm going with you."

"That really isn't necessary.  It's my job to take care of things like this, so you don't have to worry about it."

"Tray reports to me.  I'm concerned about what happens to him."  Barbara was fairly certain she didn't sound any more concerned than she actually felt.  So she added, "I want to come."

At least that was the truth.  And it apparently did the trick, because Delgado relented and even held the door of his black Escalade open for her.

Seeing the young man she'd been working with for two weeks dead from an overdose, Barbara found that the only sentiment she could muster was vague curiosity – was it a careless accident or did he want to die?

"Stupid son-of-a-bitch," Delgado said again.  He strode over to the corpse and surveyed the room.  "He'd been testing clean."

"You knew he had a drug problem?"  Why didn't anyone tell her?  She should have known.

"Yeah.  I don't know what was so important about him that they'd take the risk of having someone with his... history on the base.  But yeah, I knew.  I was keeping an eye on him."  Delgado looked around, his muscles twitched like a nervous pit-bull.  He was used to the horrors of the battlefield, not dead junkies sitting in their own piss.  

"Shit.  I'm going to have to call in the cleaner."

Barbara's mind stalled for a second on the thought: is he really worried about the security deposit, until it snapped over to the realization he was talking about a covert disposal service for the body.

She didn't question why he wanted to keep the police out of it.  One of Delgado's chief concerns was to keep people from snooping around Aira.  A detective showing up to ask questions for whatever reason would not be welcomed by the DTAA.

"I'm going to have a look around," she said.

"Knock yourself out."  Delgado sounded tired, as though already exhausted by the weight of the work in front of him.  He got out his phone and scrolled through the contact list.

Barbara moved past the galley kitchen with a glance.  The guy must have been addicted to sugar as much as heroin.  The garbage can was overflowing with chocolate bar wrappers and empty ice-cream cartons. 

Maybe he had chosen to OD to avoid a lifetime of diabetes.

The apartment was much lower-end than the bungalow she'd been given.  The breakfast counter was a scarred, pukey dark brown melamine that must have been installed with the white pressboard cabinets some time in the '80s.  The sofa looked like it had been specifically designed to lay out a dead smack fiend on.

Other than the garbage, there was nothing personal about the room.  There was nothing that didn't look like it had come with the place.

The bathroom smelt of mildewed towels.  It hadn't been cleaned since Tray had started living there a few weeks before.  Soap had left a layer of scum in the basin.  There were hard blobs of toothpaste next to the tube on the vanity.  The only thing in the medicine cabinet was a razor, a can of shaving gel, and deodorant. 

Not even a bottle of Aspirin.

The bedroom floor was covered in dirty clothes.  How could men live like such pigs?  Was Delgado's bedroom like this?  If she were in his bedroom and it was like this, would it matter?

There was that strange feeling again.  Was it excitement?  She had felt desire for men before.  There was nothing particularly exciting about it.  What was different about Delgado?

Barbara gave a cursory glance in the closet and looked through the dresser drawers.  She used a pen to push aside the clothes she didn't want to touch. 

A photo in a cheap frame sat on top of the nightstand.  It was of Tray with some thin girl sitting on a park bench.  They looked like a couple of drug-ravaged lovebirds, pressed shoulder to shoulder and forcing toothy grins.

Did he have some ex-girlfriend he was sentimental about?  Had the DTAA forced him to leave someone back home?

She picked it up and scanned the image, moving through the details in a grid pattern.  It wasn't taken at a park.  It was at a hospital.  He was seated on a bench, but she was in a wheelchair next to it.  The chair's handle by her right shoulder was easy to overlook.  She had almost missed it.

An ambulance parked in the background confirmed her suspicion. 

She reassessed the face of the girl.  Whoever she was, she was sick.  Barbara had initially assumed they had shared addiction as well as affection.  But now, she saw the all too familiar face of illness staring back at her. 

She returned it to its spot and opened the nightstand's only drawer.  It was empty except for a claim ticket from a pawnbroker in Chicago.  She picked it up and held it close to her nose to try and make out the smeared scrawl.  It was dated January 3rd, 2012.  Less than six months ago.  The item Tray had hocked might still be there waiting for him.

The timing was interesting.  The beginning of the year was usually the time of resolutions when simple-minded people tried to improve themselves.  What was Tray trying to improve upon?

She shut it back in the drawer and turned her attention to the bed.  With a deep breath, she drew back the covers expecting a horrid odor.  But there was only a stale smell.  Whatever Tray had been up to, at least he hadn't soiled the bed.  She inspected the pillow and the sheet for drops of dried blood. 

Nothing.

If he'd been using for any period of time, the track marks would have bled.  So he hadn't been fooling the drug tests.  He had been clean, as Delgado had said.  Something happened recently to push him back to his old ways.  Again she wondered: was he just trying to get high, or was this his chosen method of suicide?  It certainly wasn't the worst way to leave this world.

At the threshold of the room, she stopped.  Things weren't adding up.  The man who lived here wasn't the same person she had known in the Music Box.  There was only a shadow of the real Tray Cullen left in the world.  Once Delgado's cleaners got here, it would be as though he had never existed.

Barbara rushed back to the nightstand and slipped the photo and the claim stub into her purse.  These were the only truly personal possession he had – the only link to who he'd been before the DTAA created this life for him.  They were likely the only clues to determine his motivation for going off the wagon and his death.

Why it puzzled her so much, she couldn't say.  In certain circumstances, she would have had no problems killing him herself.  And the fact that it had been at his own hand should have made it even less remarkable.

When she stepped back into the living room, Delgado came over to her with his car keys in his outstretched hand.  "I want you to take my car and get out of here before they arrive.  I can get someone to pick me up.  I'm going to stick around and make sure everything is done properly."

Barbara ignored him.  Her eyes were fixed on the dingy desk where unopened mail and flyers sat.  There was a rectangular void.  She glanced under and sure enough, a laptop adaptor lay on the floor.  She hadn't seen a computer anywhere in the apartment.  Everything she had seen since entering began to shuffle around her mind, reordering into a more coherent picture.

"Did you hear me?"  Delgado's voice rose in urgency.  "There will be problems if you're still here when they show up."

She went over to Tray, pulling in every element of the tableaux on the couch and the coffee table.  It was perfect. 

If I wanted him dead.  This is exactly the way I'd stage it.

A recovered addict – who would question it? 

Delgado sensed something from her expression.  "What are you thinking?"

"This was no accident."

The stench of necrosis was beginning to waft into the chilled air.  The rigor in Tray's muscles gave him a funhouse dummy appearance.  A fly lingered at the corner of his left eye.

Someone had killed him.  The most likely culprit was the people he worked for.

The people I work for.  If him, why not me?

Could the Major be involved? 

No.  They didn't even let him in on what went on in the bunker.  They had left this mess for him, expecting him to scrub away every trace of wrongdoing without ever guessing.  They sent a soldier here instead of the police.  And if he'd come alone, they would have gotten away with it.  Then who would be next?

Of course, it might not be the DTAA.  Perhaps Cullen had enemies – people who had tracked him down, or someone he'd just met.  Whoever was behind it, Delgado and Barbara were now going to be linked together by this artful crime.

The Major licked the dryness off his lips.  "No accident?  What does that mean?"

"It means that as first dates go," Barbara said.  "This isn't my worst."

***

Author's Note:

So what do you think of Barbara now?

Thank you all for reaching the end of chapter 5.  If you enjoyed it, please vote and comment.  Voting helps the book get noticed on Wattpad.  And commenting helps me craft a better story for you.

Next week Chapter 6, "Digging in the Dirt" begins.  Barbara begins to ask questions and starts to find out a lot more than just what happened to Tray.

Note on the end chapter music: I thought of a lot of different songs to pair with this chapter and had almost settled on Anna Kendrick's You're Going to Miss Me When I'm Gone. But then I came across this wonderful unreleased track by Kristin Diable. I'm a big fan of hers and knew I wanted to use one of her songs at some point, and this one just seemed perfect.

If you're curious about the progress of this book here's a little updated—

 As of today (Sept. 26, 2014), all of chapter 5 is posted, and I'm into chapter 8 in rough drafting.  The big news is that I have all of section one ("In Anticipation of the End of the World") outlined.  I don't usually do much outlining, but I wanted to make sure I got everything in that needed to be there before its end. 

Now, when I first planned out this book, I laid it out as a novel in three sections.  Well, section one is going to be long – very long.  A total of thirteen chapters.  And with each chapter weighing in at approximately 10k words, it is almost unwieldy.  So I have decided to turn it into three books instead.  This should mean very little to you as the reader except that this is going to be going on for a long time. 

 And to think I used to get criticized for rushing my stories.