My hand flew to my mouth.
Oh God, was it Savannah? She could be lying dead on the next stairwell, waiting for us to find her.
Shoving down the sick feeling in my stomach, I hurried my steps, pushing my aching legs faster up the steep steps.
I stopped at the next set of stairs and peered up.
Something was there.
Someone.
Blood pooled beside them, it had already started to trickle down the stairs.
Drip.
Drip.
It pooled at the end of a tread before dripping down to the next.
"If you don't want to look—" Forrest started.
"I need to see," I said. "I need to know if it's Savannah."
I'd seen dead bodies before, a whole two times. I'd handled the first two. I could handle this.
In theory.
Counting the steps, I gripped the rail and pulled myself up. One, two, three, four, five.
I stopped.
"That's not Savannah."
For one thing, Savannah wasn't a six-foot-tall man with black hair. From the look of him, he'd landed at the base of the stairs, hitting his head on the concrete floor.
The knife sticking out of his chest also suggested things hadn't gone his way.
"Is that anyone you know?" Forrest stood on the step beside me, his hand on my shoulder.
"I was going to ask you the same thing," I said. "He's not familiar."
"Sucks to be him," Leif remarked. "Wild guess, he's dead."
"What makes you think that?" Woody said sarcastically. "Is it the amount of blood loss? Or the blade right through his heart?"
Leif raised his hand, turning it this way and that. "A little bit of both."
Woody grunted. "This asshole have anything to do with your friend?"
"I don't know," I said. "Her apartment is on the next floor up."
Woody grumbled something about 'we could have taken the elevator,' but stepped past the corpse and out into the corridor on floor eight.
Like on the street, nothing looked out of place. There wasn't a row of dead bodies waiting to greet us. Nor the man's killer, ready to have us join him in the afterlife, or whatever happened after we died.
What we found was an empty, quiet corridor with carpet that looked like it should have been replaced a decade ago.
"This place has potential," Leif remarked.