Bound for Magic (The Tortie Kitten Mystery Trilogy Series Book 1)

by Constance Barker

  The medical examiner’s van bulled through traffic and angled black-and-whites. Sheila Brandt, assistant ME, trundled out with a diener at her side. She stopped short of the site.

  “Holy smokes.” She set down her doctor’s bag, pulled out some plastic booties and put them over her shoes. Telling her assistant to hang back, she beckoned to me.

  One of Burl’s techs let his SLR camera hang. “I’m done here, Doc,” he said.

  Sheila nodded. “Help me turn her, Inspector.”

  Together, we angled the victim on her side. Sort of. I won’t go into the awful floppiness. A purse was beneath her. “Photos,” the AME said.

  The tech clicked a few shots. She nodded to me and I pulled the little handbag to the side. Sheila did her thing with a liver probe. When it beeped, she checked the reading.

  “Ninety-eight point five.” She made a quasi-musical series of lip noises, calculating. “Sixty-two degrees current temp. I’m putting the time of death at fourteen-forty hours.”

  About an hour ago. I was about to let the body down, when Sheila pointed. “That’s weird.”

  The back of the woman’s blouse was torn. Beneath, a bruise was visible.

  “Get a picture of this, will you? I want a clear view before lividity starts to set in.”

  Sheila pulled the tear wide. I could see a crescent shaped bruise from shoulder to shoulder. The skin looked unbroken. The tech acquiesced, camera flashing.

  Burl stood off to the side. “We’re good here if you want to move her.”

  I took the opportunity to go through her purse. Cash, credit cards, a bunch of loose change, little packet of tissues, candy mints and a wallet. I flipped it open. “Jane Smith,” I read off her driver’s license.

  There was a collective groan from the gathered law enforcement. The most cliché of aliases. But it was a legitimate CDL.

  “Address in Bear Brook,” I shrugged.

  More cops arrived, the traffic sergeant taking them in hand. Sheila Brandt called for a stretcher from the van. The techs measured and photographed. Jane Smith was heading for the morgue. Shen and I were heading to the Bear Brook neighborhood.

  AS FAR AS NEIGHBORHOODS in Delta Vista, they didn’t get much better than Bear Brook on the northwest fringe of the city. Beyond the cul-de-sac developments, farmland spread out as far as the eye could see, sectioned off by the waterways of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers. It was idyllic, not quite suburb, not quite urb, a mix of buildings around the center of the neighborhood—a big branch library, a quaint shopping center, barber shops with old-timey poles, and the Victorian splendor of the main post office building stood on streets lined with mature trees. We crossed the arched Bear Brook Bridge over Bear Brook itself and into the residential area.

  “You think this is a wild goose chase?” Shen asked. “I mean, Jane Smith?”

  I had the MDC booted while he drove. I entered the name and CDL number. The Mobile Data Computer kicked back information almost immediately. “Jacinth ‘Jane’ Galatas Smith, arrived on a student visa, obtained residency status, divorced, two children. She’s got a rap sheet.”

  Shen did his best to navigate the walled streets, each turn bringing an identical view. “What did she get busted for?”

  “Assault, drunk and disorderly, ADW, two 51-50s a few years back,” I read.

  “Involuntary commitment, huh? What kind of crazy was she?”

  Medical information was protected, Shen knew. “Seventy-two hour holds, both terminated early, released into the custody of her then-husband. Nothing within the past two years.”

  “I guess she cleaned up her act,” Shen found the right road.

  “Maybe so: but maybe too late. Two kids.” I sighed, shaking my head. There were parts of this job that totally sucked. We pulled into a driveway about to perform the worst duty you could pull.

  Shen parked next to an SUV. I could hear the engine ticking as it cooled—just arrived home. Giggling and excited screams sounded from around the side of the house.

  “Okay, out of those school clothes before horseplay. You know the rule, guys.” A deep male voice admonished.

  The family of three stopped short, staring at our approach. Shen flipped out his badge, and I opened my windbreaker to show the one on my belt. “Errol Smith?”

  He was medium height, tie loose, suit coat thrown over one shoulder. Dimpled chin, deep green eyes, crooked nose, I took in, maybe ten years older than me, but looking in good physical shape. “Go in the house, girls. Get changed. El, help your sister.”

  The little girls looked at each other with big dark eyes. Both had manes of curly black hair. The older one whispered something to the younger, and they silently fled around back.

  “I know I left the courtroom a little abruptly,” Smith said once his daughters were out of earshot. “Anyone could understand my frustration. I don’t care what her lawyer says, Jane isn’t a fit parent.”

  Shen caught on before I did. “We’re not with the sheriff, Mr. Smith, we’re Delta Vista Metro. Inspectors Shen and Garcia, Crimes Against Persons.”

  Errol looked between us, confusion drawing his features inward. I took out my phone. Doing my best to tighten the shot on only Jane Smith’s face, I showed him. “Is this your ex-wife, Mr. Smith?”

  He squinted at the phone; then made big eyes at me. “That’s Jane. Is she all right? Is she in trouble again?”

  Shen held back. The chicken. “She’s dead, Mr. Smith. I’m sorry. This must be a shock.”

  “Shock.” Smith blinked fast. “What happened to her?”

  “We’re trying to figure that out,” I said. “When was the last time you saw her?”

  Blinking increased, as well as Smith’s breathing. “Eleven o’clock.”

  “This morning?”

  He nodded. “In court. She’s suing for partial custody of Electra and Ophelia.”

  Shen shot his eyes at me. It sounded like motive. “It’s unusual that a mother doesn’t have any custody rights,” I said.

  “Then you don’t know Jane,” Smith said. “I love her. I do. She’s kind, she’s loving, she loves our girls. But she has fits, violent fits, out of the blue. She used to disappear for days and come home covered in filth and blood. I hadn’t heard a word from her in two years, since the divorce.”

  “Was she on any medication, or under a doctor’s care?” I asked.

  “You’re talking about the involuntary commitments. No. No diagnosis. Jane would go from raving animal to sweet as pie in a heartbeat. I wanted to help her. Everyone wanted to help her. But they could never find anything wrong. Not physically. Therapy didn’t seem to work, either. Jane didn’t have a trigger. There was nothing that set her off. One minute, she’d be watching TV, or walking the dog, or working. The next she was raving, raging, unrecognizable. It was so random. I couldn’t have that around my girls.”

  I could tell that Shen took that last sentence down in his mental notes.

  “What did she do for work?” I changed tack to keep him off balance.

  “Construction.” Hurt and confusion were swept away by a sad smile. Dimples lined his face, and his eyes lit up. “You wouldn’t know from looking at her.”

  I had only seen Jane’s remains, but she was small, slender.

  “High steel,” Smith said, still smiling. “Skyscrapers. She’s so graceful and fearless up there. Was. She was.”

  His face underwent several sharp contortions, like he was being stabbed. Instinctively, I reached out and took his hands.

  Shen hid a scowl. “Where were you at two-thirty, Mr. Smith?”

  From the contact, I could read Errol Smith’s thoughts. His shock was real, sorrow mixed with relief, and a little guilt. But just a little. The guilt stemmed from the fact that he hadn’t been able to help his ex-wife...remorse that he would never have the chance.

  “At work,” Smith said. “After I heard how great Jane was doing from her lawyer, I stormed out of the courtroom and went back to work. I picked up the girls f
rom their afterschool programs at four and drove home.”

  He was telling the truth. Still, I kept his hands in mine. “We’ll need a statement from you,” I said.

  Gently, he pulled his hands away and looked toward the house. “I’ll have to find someone to watch the girls. Maybe their Aunt Nysa. I’ll try to call her. Jane’s sister.”

  “Tomorrow,” I said. “We can get your statement tomorrow, Mr. Smith.”

  His eyes brimmed, but a spark of gratitude shone. “Errol. Call me Errol. And thanks. I’m not sure how I’m going to tell the girls. Not sure how to process this.”

  He turned and followed his daughters’ path around back. Shen and I turned back toward the car.

  “Man’s got motive,” Shen said.

  “And an alibi.”

  My partner rolled his eyes. “You like him.”

  I did. I also knew, without a doubt, that he was innocent. “Let’s go start the paperwork.”

  Chapter 5

  Crimes Against Persons, my unit, was housed on the second floor of Delta Vista Metro’s headquarters on Adams and Center streets. Unlike my prior job in Florida, DVMP had no specified homicide unit. CAP inspectors worked out of a bullpen, partners’ desks pushed facing each other. The only paperwork on my desk consisted of uninteresting surveillance reports from the old Navy base. As the police paper machine kicked into high gear, it would soon be flooded with thick file folders from other divisions.

  “Black or orange?” Shen sat across from me, holding up two three-inch binders.

  “Whatever,” I said. “You pick.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Oh, I forget, you haven’t worked here that long. Black for homicide, orange for suicide.”

  “I thought CAP just used blue.”

  “We do, except for death investigations.”

  I looked around the bullpen. Inspectors were talking on phones. On shelves in the short cubicles, I saw other binders. Nearly all of them were blue. A few black ones sat among them. Open cases, I supposed.

  “We don’t have anything from the ME yet,” I said. “As far as I know, this case is just bizarre.”

  “Ah.” Shen set the binders aside and came up with a purple one.

  Purple binders—I’d seen them someplace in the department. I couldn’t remember where. “Why purple?”

  “Highly unusual cases, weird ones, get the purple binder.”

  It was hard to believe that Metro had enough strange cases to need a specific color binder. I knew that Narcotics used red binders, Sex Crimes used green. “What other unit uses purple binders?”

  “All of them. If they have something really unusual.”

  I shook my head. “Like what?”

  “Like a jumper without a tall building,” Shen said. “C’mon, Mare, you grew up in DV.”

  While this was true, I had also grown up thinking it was my family who were the strange ones. Maybe everybody thought like that. Well, not everybody had a family of psychics. “Can we change binders if this turns out to be less than strange?”

  He shrugged. “Sure, I guess. Never seen it happen.”

  The animal attack entered my mind. At the time, it hadn’t occurred to me that both the sheriff’s investigators and the federal Fish and Wildlife cowboys had taken the attack in stride. Unknown, ferocious animal, large enough to carry off a human body—that wasn’t normal. This was farm country, not the deep woods. There were no wolves, bears or cougars around here. Were there?

  I thought it over as I typed up the initial report for the chronology. For the first time, it struck me that there was a check box on the computer form for Unusual right along with Homicide, Assault, Robbery, Burglary and so on. I stopped typing and looked up at Shen.

  “How often have you run across Unusual?”

  Shen went through some folders on his desk. “Not that often. Maybe once or twice a month.”

  A month? “Give me an example of an Unusual case.”

  “Let’s see,” Shen was interrupted by a member of the support staff dumping a bunch of folders on his desk. “CSU stuff, crime scene photos.”

  “Gimme a weird case,” I prompted.

  Shen sorted through the folders. “Okay, here’s one. I worked it with Mattings. He’s a floater now, works graveyard.”

  CAP had five teams of partners and three floaters to handle overnights, when an inspector might be needed. One of the five teams was also on overnights, as Shen and I had been when we staked out the Navy base. Darrel Mattings was a few years my senior, which was unusual in the department. Most of the cops were younger guys, without a lot of experience. It made it easy for me to get a job here.

  “It was a homicide, homeless guy. He was stabbed with a broken broom handle over in Playtown.”

  Playtown was the unofficial name of the easternmost (and worst) part of City Center. I knew the homeless encampment beneath the Golden State Highway overpass at the interchange with the Crosstown Freeway.

  “No witnesses, of course. No suspects. No prints. Not even any blood at the scene. He’d been there a while. Cold, rainy, really not much of a scene left at all. The guy was bundled in rags against the cold. But I noticed his boots. They were worn, but had polish on them. There were buckles, a little tarnished, but you could tell they were silver buckles.”

  He handed me a folder of crime scene photos. I put them in plastic covers after studying each. “Is that all it takes to earn a purple binder?”

  “Oh, it gets weirder. Mattings and me, we figured this was a non-starter. The vic didn’t have prints or DNA in the system. That’s odd for a homeless guy. No public intox, no shoplifting, aggressive panhandling, nothing. No one at the homeless camp said they knew him. None of the local businesses owners recognized him. But then we started getting this.”

  Shen handed me another folder of photos. These were of Jane Smith’s belongings, her purse and its contents, her clothes, shoes. “The homeless vic’s possessions,” I said.

  “The boots were just the start. Below blankets and plastic tarps and stuff, our John Doe was wearing a suit. Black wool, silk tie, silk shirt, cufflinks. The label indicated the suit was handmade in England.”

  “Okay, that’s even weirder, a homeless guy in a bespoke suit. But, I mean, it can happen, even to people with money.”

  “The tailor who made the suit went out of business in 1911.” Shen looked at me. “The boots were also handmade by a shop in Italy. They’re still in business, but they haven’t made shoes by hand there since 1892.”

  I could think of a few scenarios where a guy might be in possession of antique clothing. “This merits a purple binder?”

  “Oh, I haven’t even gotten to that part. Our John Doe, like I said, was stabbed with a broom handle. Like, nearly the whole thing. There was more than a yard of it protruding from his chest. It made it so the body couldn’t fit in a drawer at the morgue. So they photographed the weapon, shot an X-ray and decided to remove it, pending autopsy.” Shen’s brows went up, waiting for me to ask.

  “What did they find in the post?” I asked.

  “Nothing.”

  I shook my head. “What do you mean, nothing? No cause of death?”

  Shen smiled. “They found nothing, because the victim was gone.”

  “His body was stolen?”

  “Nothing on the morgue surveillance cameras. No sign of forced entry. There were two attendants working, and a security guard. Poof. Vanished. Purple binder.”

  I had to admit. “That’s creepy.”

  “This new one we caught,” Shen held up more paperwork. “It has the same ring to it.”

  “What about the incident this morning?” Had it really only been this morning?

  “The animal dragging a body, the shooting?”

  “Does that happen a lot? Is that purple binder material?”

  “You’d have to ask Josephine in Animal Control.” Shen smiled broadly. “I’d be happy to introduce you.”

  “Where’s Animal Control? Public Works? County Complex
?”

  Shen shook his head. “Third floor.”

  “With the command staff?”

  “It’s a sworn position,” Shen said. “We’re not talking the town dog catcher here.”

  I supposed if animals dragging human bodies around, it might be a little more serious a position in Delta Vista. Putting my head down, I typed the Initial Incident Report from my notes. Another support staff cart arrived. Shen got another ream of paper.

  “Is that from CSU?” I asked.

  “From the canvas around the scene,” Shen flipped through the reports. “Doesn’t look like we have a witness.”

  “Fine. Get them in the binder. I’m taking a break.”

  “You’re not going upstairs, are you?”

  Why was Shen so eager to accompany me to the third floor? “Just getting some air. Coffee. Stretching my legs. If there’s anything interesting from the canvas, or the CSU reports come in, give me a call.”

  “Sure.” Shen didn’t believe me. He was right.

  In my short time on the force here, I’d been on the third floor once. My job interview with the chief and investigations captain lasted maybe ten minutes before I was whisked away to HR on the first floor. Command staff were nine-to-fivers, and at this hour, the halls held only silence.

  In my experience, police stations weren’t like hospitals or government buildings. No signs pointed you in the right direction. You either knew your way around, or you were escorted by someone who did. Like on all the other floors, a main hall separated offices north and south. The chief’s office was central, across from the elevators. I was pretty sure the pencil-pushers were to the right, so I went left.

  From the department names on the doors, it seemed like DV Metro was as interested in money and budgets as they were in fighting crime. Toward the end of the hall on the south side of the building, light spilled from an open door. Without the buzz of office workers, I could overhear a conversation.

  “Give me something, Josephine. I know you like somebody for this.” The man’s voice was deep, and I’d heard it somewhere before.