by Lisa Gardner
“You gotta remember to put them in the closet,” Alex said, eyeing the teeth marks.
“I know.”
“She’s going to grow out of it, but not overnight.”
“I know!”
“So who do you think is going to take longer to train, her or you?”
D.D. growled at her husband. He grinned back.
“Roo, roo, roo!” Jack added from across the room. He was now standing on the sofa, springing up and down on the cushions, while Kiko matched him jump for jump from the floor. It had been Alex and Jack’s idea to adopt a dog from the local Humane Society. D.D., as sergeant detective of Boston homicide, had argued they weren’t home enough. To which Alex had ruthlessly replied that she wasn’t home enough. His job teaching crime scene analysis at the academy had set hours, and Jack’s schedule as a kindergartener was hardly grueling. A boy needs a dog, he’d told her.
Which, from what D.D. could tell, seemed to be true. Because God knows Jack and Kiko were already inseparable. The black-and-white-spotted one-year-old pup slept in Jack’s bed. Sat next to his feet at the kitchen table. And did everything the boy did, from leaping across the furniture to racing around the yard.
D.D.’s son was happy. Her husband was happy. In the end, a chewed boot heel seemed a small price to pay. That said, Kiko and Jack were now racing laps around the room.
“I gotta get to work,” D.D. said.
“Take me with you,” Alex tried.
“And rob you of this magic moment?”
“Pretty please?”
“Sorry.” D.D. was already sliding on her damaged boot. “Wife shot and killed her husband last night. She’s been arrested, but I want to check out the crime scene. Clearly, you’d be biased.”
“Woman’s already been charged,” Alex asked, “and you still need to visit the scene?” Following an on-the-job injury two years ago, D.D. had been moved to a supervisory position in homicide. As her fellow detectives would attest—and Alex would agree—D.D. took a much more hands-on approach with her management style than was strictly necessary.
“I have a personal interest in this one.” D.D. made it to the front door, eyed the crystalline sheen to the half-frozen ground outside, and grabbed her black wool coat. A month ago, the air had been crisp but the sun warm. And now this. Welcome to New England.
D.D. spared the twin racing streaks of her son and dog a second glance from the entryway, and despite the chaos—no, because of the chaos—felt the corresponding warmth in her chest. “They really do love each other.”
“Heaven help us,” Alex agreed. He stood close. They’d just had four whole days off together, a rare treat. As always, they both now felt the pull and pang of D.D.’s demanding job. Alex had always respected D.D.’s workaholic ways. But there were times, even for her, when disappearing down the rabbit hole that was a homicide investigation became difficult. Especially lately.
“Why is this case personal?” Alex asked.
D.D. buttoned her coat. “The woman in question, Evelyn Carter, née Hopkins, I investigated her for murder once before.”
“She killed a husband before this one?”
“Nope. She ‘accidentally’ shot her father. But, seriously, how many shootings can one woman be involved with?”
Alex nodded sagely. “You’re going to get her this time.”
D.D. smiled, stepped into her husband’s embrace for a quick kiss, then waved goodbye to her crazy kid and dog. “Totally.”
* * *
—
EVELYN CARTER AND her husband, Conrad, lived in Winthrop, one of the smallest and oldest towns in Massachusetts. Dating back to 1630 and positioned on a peninsula just miles from Logan Airport, the area offered views of the Atlantic for the lucky and up-close-and-personal contact with densely packed homes for everyone else. The Carters’ residence was located on a street of modest, distinctly 1950s Colonials that had probably once been strictly working-class. Now, given property values in Boston, especially this close to the waterfront, God only knew. As it was, D.D. was surprised to see so many of the original homes intact. These days, it felt like every neighborhood in Boston was being gentrified, developers coming in, razing the old, and replacing it with bigger and better. Personally, D.D. preferred a little character in a home, but then again, on a detective’s salary she wouldn’t be living in any of these neighborhoods anytime soon.
Her former squad mate and onetime mentor Phil had contacted her first thing this morning to fill her in on the shooting. Pretty straightforward case, in his opinion. Neighbors had called in reports of shots fired. Uniformed officers had responded to find the wife standing at the top of the stairs, gun still in hand. She had surrendered without incident and been taken to the South Bay House of Correction.
Pregnant, Phil had added. Far enough along to be noticeable, while not yet huge.
D.D. couldn’t yet picture that. The Evie Hopkins she had known had been a sixteen-year-old girl. Thin, dirty-blond hair, huge, doe-like brown eyes as she’d sat at the kitchen table, mere feet from her father’s blood-soaked body, shaking uncontrollably.
She hadn’t cried. D.D., a new detective back then, had thought that odd. But there’d been something to the girl’s flat expression, combined with her hard tremors, that had been compelling. Shock. A sort of delayed reaction to grief that made D.D. believe the girl was honestly in pain, only of such an extreme magnitude she couldn’t comprehend it.
They hadn’t been able to get her out of the kitchen and down to the station for proper processing. At the time, it hadn’t seemed such a big deal. Evie, covered in blood, hadn’t denied anything. The gun had gone off. Yes, she’d shot and killed her father.
And now her legs didn’t seem to work. She couldn’t stand, move. Short of physically picking her up, D.D. and her partner, an older detective, Gary Speirs, couldn’t get the girl out of the kitchen. Speirs had made the judgment call not to push it. He’d been afraid the girl would give over to hysterics, ending their interview once and for all.
So they’d all sat feet from the body, the spattered cabinets, the smeared refrigerator.
The mom had stayed in the front room. An actual parlor, which D.D. had found strangely mesmerizing. She’d heard of such things, but to actually see one . . . The Hopkinses lived in a beautiful historic Colonial in Cambridge, as befitting the father’s position as a Harvard professor. Perfectly tended, everything in its place. Except, of course, for the crime scene in the kitchen.
Had it biased D.D. at the time? The upper-class home? The well-groomed mom? The obviously shell-shocked sixteen-year-old suspect, her thin shoulders shaking?
The mom, interviewed separately in the front parlor, had corroborated everything her daughter had reported. The shotgun had been a recent purchase given a rash of break-ins in the area. The father had been showing it to his daughter. She’d picked it up, had been trying to figure out how to clear the chamber, when the gun had gone off, blasting her father in the chest from mere inches away. A tragic accident. Follow-up interviews revealed no reports of any ongoing rancor between the father and daughter. In fact, the entire family was described as good people, great neighbors. The daughter a gifted pianist. The wife active with literacy causes and aid for battered women. As cases went, it wasn’t even one D.D. had wondered about in all the years since.
Now this.
Yellow crime scene tape roped off the front yard. Several open parking spaces had been secured, probably for the detectives who’d worked most of the night before finally taking off for home in the hours since. Only two official vehicles remained.
All in all, the house appeared quiet. No neighbors lurking outside. No crime scene techs bustling about or uniformed officers working the street. As Phil had said, a straightforward case. A man had been shot and killed. His wife was now sitting in county jail.
D.D. got out of her vehicle. She approached t
he front door, noting the splintered frame and skewed Christmas wreath. The police had had to force their way in. Interesting.
She entered. Like a lot of the homes hastily constructed postwar to accommodate the boom in young families, the house had a simple layout. Narrow staircase leading straight up against the wall to the left. Front-facing family room to the right. Tight hallway leading to a modest eat-in kitchen. Downstairs bath to the right. Mudroom area and garage access off the kitchen to the left.
The kitchen showed signs of recent updating. Fresh-painted pale-gray cabinets. New, solid-surface dark-flecked countertops. Stainless steel appliances. The hallway, on the other hand, with its ripped yellow wallpaper and scuffed wooden floors, was deeply in need of care.
Clearly a fixer-upper, though given modern tastes for open-area living, a tough one at that. Had the Carters been doing the work themselves?
Had they already started in on the nursery?
D.D. found herself with her hand resting on her belly. Hastily, she dropped it. Lately, she’d been thinking too much about the days she’d been pregnant with Jack. A child she’d never expected to have. Her greatest miracle and deepest love. Usually . . .
“Hey, there you are.”
D.D. turned to find Detective Carol Manley standing in the hallway behind her. The petite investigator, just over five feet tall and barely a hundred pounds soaking wet, had taken D.D.’s place on her squad after D.D.’s injury. Manley was a perfectly good detective. Both Phil and Neil seemed to like her and accept her as part of their three-person team. D.D., on the other hand, still didn’t trust any cop named Carol.
Completely unreasonable, but there it was.
Now D.D. carefully schooled her features and reminded herself that part of her job was to play well with others. It was the part of her job she was worst at, but hey.
“Body was found upstairs,” Carol was saying now. “Looks like she shot him sitting at his desk. Then shot up his laptop as well.”
“Do we know motive?” D.D. fell in step behind Carol as the woman headed for the stairs.
“Wife isn’t talking. Phil said you knew her.”
“I questioned her regarding another shooting sixteen years ago. That one was ruled accidental. Though now I wonder.”
“Watch the bannister,” Carol commented as she headed up. “It’s pretty loose. One of those things they must not have gotten around to fixing yet.”
D.D. gave the wooden bannister an experimental shake; yep, it was definitely less than stable. “Don’t suppose murder weapon was a shotgun?” D.D. asked.
“Nah. Sig Sauer P-two-two-six, registered to the vic, Conrad Carter. Looks like he kept the nine-mil in the top drawer of his nightstand.”
“Where anyone could grab it.”
“Ah, but the ammo was in a shoebox in the closet.”
“Because clearly that provides security. Love ‘smart’ gun owners.”
“And yet where would our job be without them?”
D.D. conceded the point. They arrived at the top. The landing was tiny. Only three doors to pick from. Two bedrooms and a bath, most likely. But D.D. didn’t need to inspect all three to find the scene of the crime. Smell directed her enough.
Conrad had converted the smaller bedroom into a personal office. Massive executive-style black leather chair, the back now smeared with dark splotches of gore. A wall of waist-high laminate filing cabinets, covered in piles of paperwork and stacks of what appeared to be catalogues. Across from the filing cabinets, the room held a massive oak desk, currently riddled with enough bullet holes and metallic rubble to qualify it as a war vet.
Small space, D.D. thought, huge carnage. Clearly, the wife hadn’t been messing around.
“The remains of the laptop?” D.D. asked, gesturing to the debris-strewn desk.
“Yep. Techs have it. Woman closed it up, then emptied her clip into it. Not a huge target, meaning our gal knew what she was doing.”
“What do the techs think?”
“They need time to take the laptop apart and inspect the damage. There’s a lot going on inside a laptop—battery, RAM, motherboard, Wi-Fi card, hard drive, thin hard drive, et cetera. So lots of things to hit, but in theory, also some things that could’ve been missed. Unfortunately, a dozen forty-caliber rounds to a target that small . . .”
D.D. arched a brow. “How many bullets to the husband?”
“Three.”
The Sig P226 held fifteen rounds. Meaning: “Three to the husband, twelve into the computer? If we view the laptop as a second victim, certainly seems she hated the computer more.”
“Or was a woman with something to hide.”
“Trying to eradicate something on the laptop,” D.D. followed. “Do we know if it was strictly the husband’s computer, or did both of them share it?”
“Don’t know.”
“And she didn’t say anything to the police when they arrived? No ‘I had to do it,’ ‘he started it,’ ‘the voices in my head . . . ’ Anything?”
“She wanted to know if she could plan her husband’s funeral.”
D.D. shook her head. “What about her demeanor? Did the arresting officer describe her as appearing shocky, grief-stricken, relieved?”
“Calm and cooperative. Allowed herself to be cuffed and led to the patrol car. Was taken to the station and charged without incident.”
D.D. frowned, still not sure what to think. She studied the blood-smeared chair, the spatter across the far wall. “What did the husband do?”
“Sales. Worked for one of those custom window companies.” Carol pointed to the pile of catalogues on the filing cabinets. “According to the neighbors, he was on the road a fair amount, speccing out jobs, that sort of thing. But when he wasn’t traveling, he worked out of this office.”
“The contents of the filing cabinets?”
“Phil went through them. Seem to be customer files. Nothing out of the ordinary.”
D.D. nodded, returned to studying the damage. She should’ve brought Alex, she thought. This was how they’d met, analyzing spatter at the scene of a brutal family annihilation. What did it say about her life that studying a crime scene made her miss her husband?
“And Evie?” D.D. asked. “Her occupation?”
“Evelyn? She teaches algebra at the local high school.”
D.D. had to smile. “Her father was a prof at Harvard. Some kind of mathematical genius who taught classes where the names alone hurt my head.”
“She’s pregnant. Five months along.”
“Were they close to their neighbors? Get any good dirt?”
Carol shrugged. “People on the block had nothing bad to report. Couple bought the house four years ago. Been working on fixing it up as time allowed. Apparently in the summer, Evelyn liked to work in the yard. She’d wave when neighbors walked by but wasn’t exactly the chatty sort. Quiet was the word people used a lot. Conrad, on the other hand, was the social half of the pair. Much more likely to stop, hold court. But then again, uniforms couldn’t find any neighbors who’d been invited over for dinners, barbecues, drinks, whatever. Neighbors didn’t seem to take it personally as much as there was an assumption the Carters were a young, busy couple.”
“So by all appearances, a happy couple?”
“No reports of domestic disturbance calls or loud arguments.”
“And Evelyn, when she was arrested, bore no signs of a physical confrontation between her and the husband?”
“Not a mark on her.”
“Rules out self-defense.”
“But not battered woman’s syndrome,” Carol pointed out. “Some guys know how to hit where it doesn’t show, and if it was ongoing . . .”
“Never know what goes on behind closed doors,” D.D. agreed, thinking of that first crime scene, the stately Cambridge Colonial, the impeccably decorated front parlor. Aga
in, had she, a rookie detective, let herself see only what outsiders were meant to see?
She gestured now to the gory wall before her. “Tell me about the husband’s body. Three shots fired?”
“Two to the chest, one to the head. Torso shots lodged somewhere inside, probably ricocheted around his ribs. Head shot was a through and through.”
Which would explain the far wall and the ongoing stench in the room.
“Close range?” D.D. asked.
“We’re still working on the trajectories, but yes, stipling around the entry wounds suggest a distance of less than two feet.”
D.D. considered the room, number of feet between the doorway and the desk chair. “Chair had to be facing the door, right?”
“Yep.”
“No defensive wounds on his hands, any sign of a previous altercation?”
“Negative.”
“Evelyn retrieves the gun from the bedroom,” D.D. thought out loud. “Loads it using the ammo from the closet.”
“We found the shoe box with ammo open on the bed, loose slugs next to it.”
“Walks into the office, maybe calls her husband’s name.”
“He turns around in his chair,” Carol filled in.
“She steps closer, opens fire. Quick. Has to be, for him to never even get a hand up. Just, ‘Hey, honey,’ then, boom, boom, boom.”
“Or, ‘You bastard,’ boom, boom, boom.”
“Something like that,” D.D. agreed. “Three shots. Enough to make sure she definitely got the job done, but not so much that it’s a crime of passion. That, she saved for the laptop.” D.D. frowned. “I’d really like to know what was on that computer.”
Carol shrugged. “What would motivate a wife to kill her husband? Porn? E-mails from a girlfriend? Online gambling addiction? Plenty of things out there that would justify shooting up a husband and his laptop. Hell, maybe he was just that into video games, or she was just that hormonal from her pregnancy.”
D.D. gave the childless detective a look. “If pregnancy hormones led to homicide, there wouldn’t be a husband left alive. Plus, you said it yourself. Evelyn knew what she was doing during the shooting, and she was calm and cooperative afterwards. That’s not a woman on a rampage. There’s something else going on here. Something more.”
