Hometown Homicide

by C. K. Crigger

  The silence from next door continued. Shine’s whole body quivered. Both dogs’ agitated panting filled Frankie’s ears, even over the pounding of her heart. Damn it. Damn it! Unless the pounding on her door had been a ruse, whoever had invaded Howie’s house had gone. But Howie was there. Dead. She knew it sure as she knew her own name.

  Except hope remains in the face of doubt. Frankie had lots of experience with the concept.

  Gently, she set the dogs aside.

  “Stay here.” Her voice whispered and shook in the quiet dark. Banner nosed Shine and sat.

  She went to Howie’s front door, tapping first, and then trying the knob. The door was locked, and although she figured her key with the pink yarn string would’ve opened it, she couldn’t bring herself to do so. Tampering with the evidence. That’s what Gabe would say.

  “Cart, horse. Horse, cart.” The inane words drifted through her mind as she returned to her own apartment and went out the rear. Banner construed her passage as a release from stay. He followed her and, glad of the company, she didn’t reprimand him. Shine, on three legs, hobbled after them.

  She found Howie’s back door gaping open; the screen ripped from its hinges. Light flickered beyond the dark kitchen, coming from the living room where a movie played on the television, its audio muted.

  Frankie took a couple steps inside and stopped, scenes straight out of Afghanistan flashing through her mind.

  She shook her head. No one was in there waiting to shoot her. She knew that, didn’t she?

  Forcing herself forward, a few more steps allowed a glimpse into Howie’s messy living room where his old recliner lay on its side. A flash of bright eyes showed the gray cat huddled under a table, its fur bristling.

  The unmistakable smell of blood and feces rose up and caught in her nose.

  Oh, God. Her worst fears confirmed. But she had to see, had to be sure.

  Craning her neck, she made out the figure of a man sprawled on the dirty carpet. He was facing her, as though he’d been trying to run. Blood pooled beneath him. An arm wearing a dirty cast had splashed drops in a bow-tie pattern.

  Howie.

  She went just far enough into the room to touch his wrist below the cast. No pulse. She’d known, of course, there wouldn’t be. Not with the way—

  Frankie backed out of the room, fumbling her phone from her pocket. Dialed nine-one-one, in a steady voice, told Benton enough to get things rolling. There’d been a murder.

  Not, she felt certain, the first.

  Before help arrived, Frankie gathered the dogs and put them in her pickup. She put herself in the pickup, too, and locked the doors and started the engine, just in case the murderer came back for a whack at her and she had to peel out fast.

  Only then did she notice her shaking hands and heard the funny catch in the in-and-out expulsion of breath coming from her mouth.

  She was left alone with her fear until Lew drove up with the siren silenced. Caught in the glow of the ambulance’s headlights, Frankie killed the Ranger’s engine and, leaving the animals inside the cab, got out to meet him.

  “You okay?” Lew strode toward her.

  “Yes. No. But Howie—”

  Gabe, also sans flashing lights and siren, wheeled up only seconds behind Lew, brakes squealing as he ground his Tahoe to a halt.

  Frankie made a mental note, meaning to suggest he get his rig in for maintenance.

  He’d been roused from bed and was out of uniform, his dark hair mussed, but with hazel eyes sharp and alert.

  He asked the same question as Lew. “You okay?”

  She nodded.

  “Benton said there’d been a murder. He said Howie St. James is dead.”

  “Yes.”

  “You found him?”

  “I…yes. I guess so.”

  “You guess so?” Gabe was in full deputy mode, forceful, stern.

  Frankie, with her mind still whirling, felt as if she should be apologizing for doing something wrong.

  Well, she had. She’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Shuddering, she drew herself tighter. She was not some puling little civvie, after all, but a combat veteran who’d seen about every kind of havoc humans can wreak upon each other. Trouble is, she’d thought she left all that behind in Afghanistan. Hawkesford was no war zone. Violent death here was out of place. It didn’t belong.

  “I wouldn’t say ‘found’ is the exact word,” she retorted. “I came home on my break to check on the dogs. When I got here, they were having a fit—barking and crying. They quieted right down when I got inside, which is when I heard a bunch of thuds and bumps coming from Howie’s side of the duplex. Then I heard a shot, and someone ran out the back. He slugged my door as he went past. On foot, by the way. I didn’t hear a car.”

  “Good observation.” Gabe’s approval encouraged her.

  She took a breath. “A little later, I got up my nerve to see about Howie.”

  “How much later?”

  Her brain fuzzed, then cleared. “I don’t know. A minute maybe. I didn’t look at my watch. The dogs,” she added, “were pretty freaked.”

  As if guessing they hadn’t been the only ones, Gabe’s expression softened. “Did you see who it was?”

  Frankie shook her head. “Just heard him. I wasn’t about to confront him, you know. He had a gun, and I didn’t.”

  “Wise of you.” He looked like he meant it. “You said him. Tell me why.”

  “Why?”

  “Impressions, Frankie. Anything you can remember.”

  From down on the main road running through town, a siren began wailing. Gabe winced as, answering the siren’s call, dogs around the neighborhood began howling. A minute later, Rudy Swallowtail’s cruiser screeched—literally—to a halt behind Gabe’s SUV.

  Rudy, a stocky man more than three-quarters Coeur d’Alene Indian, strode quickly toward them. “Heard the news over the scanner. Murder?”

  “Afraid so,” Gabe answered.

  From the closest house, a door slammed. A man called out, “What the hell’s going on over there?”

  Gabe sighed. “Somebody’ll have to quiet him down.”

  “I’ll go,” Lew said. “That’s Jerry Honicker’s place. He’s a nosy bastard.”

  Frankie couldn’t help thinking any normal person would be curious if the cops and an ambulance showed up in their neighborhood in the middle of the night, especially one with a klaxon blaring.

  Gabe nodded his thanks and turned back to Frankie. “Did you go inside St. James’s unit?”

  “Yes. Just far enough to see if there was anything I could do for him.” She shuddered. “There wasn’t. The only thing I touched was his wrist.”

  “All right.” Gabe jerked his head at Rudy Swallowtail. “C’mon. Let’s see what we’ve got.”

  The two policemen, big flashlights throwing a bright beam ahead of them, started off toward the front.

  “That’s locked,” Frankie said. “You need to go around back. Through my unit is closest.”

  But Gabe nixed that suggestion. Taking the lead, he and Swallowtail slowly circled the duplex, examining the ground with minute care before they stepped ahead, through the gate, and skirting the propane tank. Frankie followed, not because she wanted to revisit the crime scene, but because she didn’t want to be left alone.

  Gabe stopped. “Walk where we walk. In case our perp left any sign, I don’t want it disturbed.”

  Her nod went unseen as the men pressed on.

  Lew, running up behind them to join the group, made her jump.

  Eagle-eyed, Rudy Swallowtail spied a partial footprint on the porch steps. Blood still glistened in the heavy tread. Grunting, he pointed it out, shining his light straight down.

  Gabe used his phone camera to shoot a picture. “Watch that,” he said to no one in particular.

  Lew and Frankie shied away like wild horses from a lasso, although she squinted at the print on her way past.

  “Cabela’s,” s
he said. “Just like the one we found in my house.”

  “Looks like.” Gabe unsnapped the latch over his Beretta. “We’ll see if it’s a match.”

  At the door, the screen creaking eerily on ruined hinges, he held up his hand, indicating Frankie and Lew should stay back. Drawing his weapon, Rudy Swallowtail led the way into the kitchen, his shoes squeaking on the dirty vinyl floor.

  Frankie, with Lew peering over her shoulder, watched the flashlight beam bounce off the living room walls, back and forth, slowly working its way to the floor. The beam touched on Howie’s body. Leaped crazily. Sank again.

  The two police officers murmured. Gabe’s voice became louder as he opened his phone and called for back-up, the M.E., the CS techs, detectives.

  “You got it.” Voice hushed, he spoke into the phone. “Same address as yesterday. And get Boyd Holliday and Freak out here. We’ve got a blood trail.”

  “Freak?” Swallowtail sounded pale.

  Frankie cocked an eyebrow at Lew. Sure he’d know what Gabe meant.

  Sure enough, Lew nodded. “Bloodhound and his handler.”

  “Good plan.” Swallowtail, given a minute, gained confidence. “I’ll get Sam McAllister over to guard that print until the dog gets here, make sure nobody wanders over the top of it. Sam’s in Plummer. Take maybe fifteen minutes to get here.”

  “That’ll help.”

  That’s when Gabe—or it might’ve been Swallowtail—flipped the overhead light on. Behind her, Lew sucked in a sharp breath. “Jesus, Frankie, you could’ve warned me. Let’s get out of here and let these guys work.”

  He—they—had finally seen what Frankie hadn’t wanted to mention. What her brain wanted to deny. Howie’s head, thanks to a high caliber bullet slamming through the base of his throat, had pretty much been separated from his body.

  Gabe escorted Frankie and Lew back to her side of the duplex. “I’ll want to talk to you,” he told her before he left them with a warning to stay inside. “Why don’t you make a pot of coffee? Make it strong. We’ll all need some before this night is over.”

  “I’d sooner have a straight shot of Maker’s Mark.” Lew plopped heavily onto a kitchen chair. “Or three or four.”

  Mute, Frankie nodded, even though booze of any kind didn’t agree with her nowadays. The meds she was on, one of which helped anxiety, the other for headaches, were bad enough by themselves, let alone mixed with alcohol.

  She was running water into the coffeemaker when Rudy Swallowtail rushed in, asking to use her bathroom. Permission granted. She and Lew exchanged a glance as they heard him vomiting as though to wring his stomach into a knot. The toilet flushed, flushed again. Water ran in the sink.

  After a while, he came out, looking pale as an Indian possibly can. “Something I ate,” he said, refusing to meet their eyes. She and Lew nodded as though they knew a bad food virus had been going around and affecting lots of people’s stomachs, not just his. Frankie hoped he was properly grateful for the fallacy.

  She waited until he went back to join Gabe in the other apartment, out of earshot. “How long has he been a cop? I don’t remember him from when I lived here.”

  “He’s been around a couple years. College boy. Graduate of the police academy. This is his first murder if I’m not mistaken. Been a while since the last around here.” He inspected a torn fingernail. “There’s always a different slant on death when it’s murder.”

  “As opposed to plain old dying?”

  “That’s the way it looks to me.”

  Yeah. It did to her, too. And it was true. There was something different about murder.

  Ten minutes later, twelve cups of coffee had dripped through the filter and filled the carafe. She and Lew had both downed a cup and poured a second before they heard a car drive up. Well, they heard tires crunch on the gravel. The engine had that quiet hum that, in Frankie’s book, meant the car was expensive. Lew went to the door, standing open to the night air, to see who it was.

  Inside the pickup, Banner was standing in the driver’s seat and baying at the newcomers.

  A few seconds later a short, thin Asian woman who looked a lot like Vera Wang, the clothing designer—only Frankie doubted Ms. Wang would be caught dead wearing those baggy navy coveralls—stalked past. An identically dressed young blond guy followed a few feet behind, trying to keep up under his burden of a large black bag. The blond guy hammered on Howie’s front door. It opened, and they went inside.

  “Dr. Beth Huong, the medical examiner,” Lew informed Frankie over his shoulder. “Detectives should be here soon.”

  With the words no more than out of his mouth, both his and Frankie’s pagers went off, making Frankie jump yet again.

  “Accident north on Highway 95,” Benton reported from the station. “Deer versus car. Multiple injuries.”

  “That’s us.” Lew headed for the ambulance. “Saddle up.”

  A deer lying half-on, half-off the road, appeared in the ambulance headlights. No question it was dead. Lew braked, dodging a scattering of broken glass.

  The wrecked car, an anonymous gray sedan, had rolled a couple times, coming to rest nose-first in a deep ditch a hundred feet beyond the deer carcass. The pair of twenty-somethings who’d stopped and called in the accident were waiting for them, standing by the wrecked car fidgeting like they had bugs up their butts. An old Honda Civic sat on the verge, its stereo playing a bass heart-pounder, its emergency flashers blinking.

  Lew pulled the bus in behind the wreck’s rear-end, which stuck out on the highway.

  “Jeez, guys!” One of the guys took the role of spokesman, greeting Lew and Frankie with undisguised relief as they climbed out of the rig. “What took you so long? I was beginning to think you’d piled up somewhere.”

  It had been seven minutes, thirty seconds since they’d slammed the doors shut at Frankie’s house. She’d clocked their time.

  “Not us.” Lew made a chopping motion toward their old car. “Kill that noise.”

  One of the guys leaped to obey. The resulting quiet allowed Frankie to hear a series of soft moans. At least one man was alive in the wreckage.

  Lew slid down the side of the ditch on his heels. She followed, grabbing the branch of a slippery-leaved bush as her bad foot slid on dry grass. The other men stayed on the road—a wise decision.

  The aroma of beer and pizza coming from the young guy’s car couldn’t quite overpower the smell of hot metal, blood, and a field full of ripe wheat on the other side of the ditch.

  Lew turned his powerful flashlight into the sedan’s interior. “This isn’t good.”

  The comment, especially coming from Lew, as hard-bitten and emotionless as they come, struck Frankie as being out of character, even if the people in the wreck were fatalities. “What’s up?”

  He reached into the car, felt for the driver’s pulse. “These men are the sheriff’s department’s detectives. I expect they were on the way to Howie’s.” He huffed out a breath. “This is sure as hell going to put a damper on the investigation. And you know what they say.”

  “What?” Frankie opened the medical bag and handed Lew a pair of latex gloves before donning her own.

  “That every hour after the first twenty-four, chances of catching a killer start to fade.”

  The good news was that the detectives weren’t dead.

  Chapter 12

  The more Frankie thought about Lew’s comment regarding the time factor in a murder investigation, the more disturbed she became. What if he was right in his guess about the effect two injured detectives would have on solving Howie’s murder?

  One of the detectives, his name already forgotten—which was beginning to seem normal for her nowadays—had a concussion and internal injuries. The other, Detective Armbuster, whose name she remembered solely because it struck her as appropriate in the circumstances, suffered cracked ribs and a shattered ulna. Neither would be on the job for a few weeks, leaving the police department shorthanded.

  Or so went the les
s than optimistic diagnosis by an emergency room doctor when they arrived at Kootenai Medical Center. In Frankie’s opinion, he came across as positively macabre with his hearty bedside manner.

  His exact words to the detectives were, “Looks like you guys won’t be chasing crooks for a month or two.”

  “How many detectives does Kootenai County have?” she asked Lew in a whisper as they helped transfer Armbuster to a hospital bed.

  Apparently, this wasn’t far from the detective’s own thoughts. He, the one with the concussion answered. “Not enough. Damn all budget cuts.” He groaned as an orderly wheeled him away to the operating room.

  This met Frankie’s worst expectations. Great. More delays with Lew’s twenty-four-hour time frame ticking away. And it meant Gabe would be in charge.

  She couldn’t help fretting. “I wonder if Gabe and Officer Swallowtail have heard about the detectives’ accident?”

  “If they haven’t by now, they soon will. Don’t worry. Gabe is an able cop.” Lew was more prosaic and not as anxious as she was. But then, he hadn’t been a thin wall away when Howie’s murder took place. He hadn’t slept in a bloodstained bed. “You take care of the paperwork for this run, Frankie, and I’ll restock the ambulance. Let’s get this show on the road.”

  Lew went off to replenish their supply of splints and IV solutions, among other items, leaving Frankie at the counter to fill in the necessary computer forms. As she prepared to sign off, a vaguely familiar voice caught her attention. Looking up, she spied the physician from the dock accident escorting an elderly gentleman into the emergency room. The old fellow wore an oxygen tube in his nose and sat hunched in a wheelchair. He looked stunned and sick, and, although rail thin, the slippered feet poking from beneath a lap robe were grossly swollen.

  “Mr. Shenker is here for his dialysis treatment,” Dr. Muncie told the receptionist. “I’ll wheel him back myself.” Without waiting for the receptionist’s go ahead, he pushed off with an impatient jerk, causing his patient to grunt with the effort of staying upright in his chair.

  Frankie wondered if the old fella was the doctor’s friend? Nobody else got personal service from a physician. She never had, that’s for sure. But then, army doctors were constantly in rotation, so she never had the same one more than twice, never got to know one well. Many had been brusque to the point she dreaded facing them.