I looked at it, chewing at the inside of my mouth and wondering if that didn’t sound threatening. “I have your gun” wouldn’t be any better. I got out another business card and tried again. “Have you been trying to reach me? Robin Starling.” Better, though it might look to the state bar as if I were soliciting clients. Certainly I could use a client or two.
I strode back up the walk, my head bent against the freshening wind, opened the storm door, and stuck the card into the crack between the door and jamb. I was halfway down the sidewalk when a small Ford slid up against the curb.
The woman who got out was wearing a bright yellow puff-jacket. She looked at me over the roof of her car, then opened her rear door and leaned into the car. When she straightened, she had a small boy on her hip, a purse on her shoulder, and a couple of grocery bags in one hand.
“Anything I can help with?” I said, approaching her.
“I doubt it.” Her voice had a hoarse quality to it, was almost a smoker’s voice. She closed the car door with her knee and came around the vehicle.
“I’m Robin Starling.”
“Reporter or police?” She barely glanced at me as she passed me on the sidewalk, but her little boy held out a pudgy hand, opening and closing his fingers.
“Hey, there, buddy,” I said, waving back at him. “What’s your name?”
“Caden Wooruff,” he said. “Two burfdays.” He indicated the number by extending his index and little fingers.
“Reporter or police?” the woman said more sharply, trying to shift the boy away from me, but hampered by her groceries.
“I’m looking for Christopher Woodruff.”
“That’s a new one.” She stepped onto the stoop and pulled open the storm door, stepping into it and putting down her shopping bags to fumble one-handed in her purse for her keys. I stepped up beside her and held the storm door off her. She glanced again at me as she fitted a key to the lock. The skin around her eyes had a bruised look.
“Why would I be a reporter or police?” I asked.
“Why are you here then?” She pushed open the door and bent for her packages, still balancing the toddler on her hip.
“I guess it wouldn’t do any good to repeat that I was looking for Christopher Woodruff.” I took the plastic bags from her, and she let me.
“Chris is dead.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“Sorry doesn’t begin to cover it.”
“Was he ill?”
“He killed himself.”
“Wow.”
“The police say it’s murder, unfortunately. They couldn’t find a gun, and they seem to think I should be able to produce one. Why should I be able to find a gun if they can’t?”
If he’d died of a gunshot wound, the absence of a gun at the scene did seem to put the kibosh on her suicide theory, though I didn’t like to say so. “I’m Robin Starling,” I said again, following her through a living room and dining room with worn wood floors into a kitchen bright with new black-and-white linoleum.
“Yes, you said that. I’m sorry, the name doesn’t mean anything to me.” She put down her boy, and he clung to her leg.
“You didn’t send me a package?”
“I did not.” She squared off to face me, her hands on her hips. She was a head shorter than I was and slender, with very pale skin and black hair that swept down over one eye. “What package?” she said, looking up at me. “What’s this about?”
I took a breath. “I got a gun in the mail this morning, a small Smith & Wesson semiautomatic. It was purchased by Christopher Woodruff, who listed this address on his registration form.”
She continued to look at me, but now her expression was blank.
“Did your husband have a gun?”
She nodded.
“I seem to have it now,” I said. “It came in a Priority Mail flat-rate box.”
“When? Today?”
I nodded. “It came in the mail.”
“How well do you know Chris?”
“I never heard the name before today. I’m a lawyer.”
“Who sent you Chris’s gun?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why did they send you Chris’s gun?”
I shrugged. “No idea.”
The fire in her face faded abruptly. She swayed and caught herself on the jamb of the kitchen door. Her boy, looking up at her, had the fabric of her pants leg twisted in his two small fists. I put a hand to her elbow. “Let’s go sit down. Can I get you a glass of water?”
She shook her head, but let me lead her into the living room, where she dropped onto the couch and her son clambered onto her lap. “I don’t know what to do,” she said.
“You could tell me your name,” I suggested. “Are you Mrs. Woodruff?”
“Willow Woodruff.” She had a tiny mole just off the corner of her mouth, a Marilyn-Monroe-style beauty mark
“Alliterative,” I said.
“It’s a terrible name. Willow Wendell was bad enough. Willow Woodruff is terrible. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“What happened to your husband?”
“He shot himself in our bed Friday morning. Shot himself or was shot.”
“Where were you?”
“At work. I’m a COTA at Sheltering Arms. Certified Occupational Therapy Assistant.”
“Where was Caden?” I gestured at her son. “Did I get that right? Is your name Caden?”
He nodded. “Caden Wooruff. Two burfdays,” he said again.
“Caden was at daycare,” Willow said. “I left the house right at seven, dropped him off on my way to work. Chris was still in bed.”
“What does he do for a living?”
“Teaches economics at J. Sargeant Reynolds. He’d had a night class the night before, didn’t have a class until eleven on Friday. He often sleeps late on Fridays.” We were both talking about him in the present tense.
“When did you find out something was wrong?” I asked.
“His dean called me just before noon, his dean’s secretary. Chris hadn’t shown up for class, and he wasn’t answering his cell. He’d given them my cell as a contact for emergencies, evidently. I tried to call him myself, but of course there was no answer. I thought. . .” She swallowed. “I went home at lunch. The Sheltering Arms is on the Southside, and the drive back and forth was going to take most of my lunch hour, but I thought. . .” Again she broke off without articulating her thought.
“Chris had some health problems?” I prompted. “You were concerned?”
She shook her head. “He’d been having an affair. I was concerned, yes.”
When she didn’t go on, I said, “You were thinking that he might have resumed the affair? Or might not have broken it off in the first place?”
No response, just a stricken, far-away look.
“Who had he been having the affair with?”
Her tongue appeared between her lips. She swallowed and started to speak, but had to stop to clear her throat. “Peyton,” she said finally. “Peyton Shilling.” She sat breathing. “She was in his night class last fall, I think. One morning he ran into her in the weight room at Gold’s Gym, and things developed from there. He moved in with her just before the Thanksgiving holiday. It got ugly.”
“But he’d moved back home? When?”
“About a month ago. Right after Spring Break, I think. A day or two after.”
Sometime in the middle of March then.
“So you went home for lunch and found him in the bed?”
She nodded, miserably. “He was cold. And there was blood, so much. . .”
I was calculating. Seven to noon might have dropped the body temperature only six or seven degrees, but compared to what you’d expect when you touch someone, the difference would be shocking. “How long had he been dead? Did the police say?”
“About five hours. I got home just before twelve-thirty. They think he died sometime between seven and eight.”
“How many times had he been shot?
”
“Just the once.” She flared briefly. “Nobody shoots himself in the head multiple times.”
“No, they don’t,” I agreed. Most people didn’t kill themselves and dispose of the gun afterwards. “Did you see anyone when you left the house that morning?”
“No.”
“A car idling across the street maybe?”
“Nothing like that.”
“Did Chris have any enemies that you know of?”
She shook her head. “Everybody likes Chris. Liked him.” She gave a bitter laugh. “It’s me they usually can’t stand.”
“What’s wrong with you?”
“I don’t know. I wish I did.”
“Do the police have any suspects, other than you?”
“Not that I know of. I told them about Peyton Shilling, of course, but if they followed up on it, they didn’t tell me.”
“Even if he killed himself, it wasn’t just a suicide. Someone was here. Someone picked up the gun and mailed it to me, either after discovering the body or . . .” I shrugged.
“Or after killing him. So you’re thinking you’ve got the murder weapon.”
“I have no way of knowing. It’s a heck of a coincidence, if it isn’t.”
“Nothing coincidental about it. Someone’s set this up deliberately.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “Any idea who?”
“No idea.”
“You’d almost think it had to be someone who knows both of us—you and me, or maybe Chris and me.”
“I sure don’t know you.”
“No. I guess you do Facebook?”
“Facebook? Sure.”
“I don’t, much,” I said. “I think I’ve got fourteen friends.”
She snorted. “Fourteen friends. I don’t believe that.”
“You have more than that?”
“Hundreds.”
“If I send you a friend request, will you accept it? I’d like to scroll through your Facebook friends, see if anyone jumps out at me. If I don’t recognize anyone, maybe we could try Twitter or Instagram or whatever other social media you keep up with.”
“You said you’re a lawyer, didn’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you. . .help people in situations like this?”
“Sometimes.”
“I can’t pay you.”
“Did your husband have life insurance?”
“Some.”
“Then you can pay me. You may not need me, though. Maybe the police will find whoever did this and leave you alone.”
I saw in her face that she didn’t think so. “Someone told me. . .” She cleared her throat and started again. “Someone told me that if I’m convicted of killing Chris, I can’t. . .”
“Can’t collect anything on the insurance? That’s true, but Caden could collect. His finances would be managed by a conservator until he’s eighteen—and you’re a long way from being convicted of anything.”
She took a big breath and let it out slowly. “We’ll see.”
Caden, activated perhaps by the mention of his name, tugged at his mother’s sleeve, and she bent her head toward him.
“Have ’nana?” he whispered in a clearly audible voice.
Willow smiled down into his questioning face. “Sure, honey. You can have a banana.”
I followed them into the kitchen, and we talked about who might have a key to their house. There didn’t seem to be anyone. As far as she knew, there were just the two keys, Chris’s and the one she carried.
“Could I see the bedroom where you found your husband?”
“I guess.” She moved toward the door, but Caden squealed and held up his hands to her, one of them clutching the half-peeled banana. She picked him up.
There was a short hall off the living room, at one end of it a bedroom with a full-size bed and a bare mattress.
“This is your bedroom?”
“It was.”
“Where do you sleep now?”
She turned and I followed her past a bathroom that might not have been renovated since the house was built in the 1940’s or 50’s. In a room with a Noah’s-ark border around the ceiling, on the floor in the corner opposite a crib, was a twin-sized mattress neatly made up with pin-striped sheets and a navy comforter.
“I see,” I said.
“I couldn’t bear to sleep in the other room after. . .” She moved her head, and I nodded.
Before I left, she showed me the only room in the house I hadn’t seen, the closed-in porch on the opposite end of the house. Chris had used it as his study. He had a V-shaped computer table in the corner with a computer on it and a two-drawer filing cabinet at one end.
“Maybe at some point I should come back and look through things,” I suggested.
“Sure.”
“But I guess that’s everything right now.”
“What are you going to do with the gun?”
“I have to turn it over to the police,” I said apologetically. “Does it have your fingerprints on it, do you think?”
“Maybe. When we went to the shooting range, we weren’t always particular about who was using whose gun. How long do fingerprints last?”
“Wait. What do you mean, ‘who was using whose gun’? Is there another gun?”
“We got matching guns several years ago and went through some kind of course and everything. That was before Caden was born.”
“Could I see your gun?”
She shook her head. “I seem to have lost track of it somehow. The police searched the place, and they couldn’t find it either.”
Chapter 2
The pistol in my desk drawer had gone from being a curiosity to being a potential murder weapon in a homicide investigation. I considered the implications as I headed back downtown with Brooke’s car. What I had was a ticking time-bomb, and I didn’t know when it was going to go off.
I was going the wrong way. Instead of driving down Chamberlayne Avenue toward downtown Richmond, I should have been kicking out to I-64 and heading home to get the spare key to my VW Beetle. I was distracted enough that I didn’t think of that until I was parking Brooke’s car along the curb on Jefferson, almost under the giant policeman’s head that protruded from the big gray edifice that was police headquarters. Ah, well. I pushed through the revolving doors into the building, put my purse on the conveyor belt to go through the x-ray machine, and walked through the metal detector. Once through, I took the elevator to the fifth floor where the homicide division was located.
The desks were arranged in three rows. A single detective was typing on a computer in a back corner, but he wasn’t anyone I knew, and he didn’t look up. I stood watching him for maybe half-a-minute, then I stepped back out into the hall. I fished my cellphone out of my purse and found “Jordan”—that would be Police Detective James Jordan—in my list of contacts. My thumb hovered over the screen as I thought about what I was doing. If what I had turned out to be the murder weapon, I could hardly pretend I didn’t know whose it was and why the police might be interested in it. In fact, now that I had visited Willow Woodruff, I would never be able to convince anyone the gun hadn’t come from her. Keeping the gun was not an option, but turning it over to the police wasn’t much better.
The alternative was to do something devious that would put the gun in the police’s hands without letting them know it came from me. I punched the button for the elevator while I considered possible options, but unfortunately nothing very clever came to mind. I was a bystander, I told myself. I didn’t even have a client, and there was nothing to be gained from taking risks.
The elevator doors opened on an empty elevator, and I stepped on as I tapped Jordan’s name. Jordan’s name and face filled the screen—close-clipped, graying hair, biker mustache and all. It wasn’t a photograph I had taken. I’d copied it from a story the Times-Dispatch had run on Jordan when he’d been shot in the line of duty last summer. . .okay, when I’d gotten him shot last summer, but there are details one prefers not t
o dwell on.
“Uh oh” was how he answered the phone.
“Hi, Jordan.”
“This can’t be good.”
I like to think that such pessimism was unjustified, but I said, “I’m calling about Christopher Woodruff. I came by headquarters to see you, but you’re not at your desk.”
There was a silence.
“Have you heard the name? Woodruff isn’t your case, is it?”
“No, it’s not my case. I think it might be Tom McClane’s. What have you got to do with it?”
Tom McClane, an incompetent jerk in my opinion, was not good news. On the plus side, he was at least a known quantity. “I got a Priority Mail package this morning. When I opened the box, a handgun fell out.”
“What kind of handgun? Who sent it?”
The elevator doors opened on the ground floor, and I walked out through the lobby. “A Smith & Wesson of some kind. No idea who sent it. There was no return address, nothing else in the box except a bunch of styrofoam peanuts. Rodney Burns checked on the gun for me—you remember Rodney—and it turned out to be registered to Christopher Woodruff.”
“Sounds like you put your foot in it again.”
“I didn’t put my foot in anything. I opened my mail.”
“Of course you did.”
My phone beeped, and I glanced at the screen. Brooke Marshall was calling. “Well, I’ll try to get hold of McClane,” I said.
“I’d do it quickly. You don’t want to sit on evidence in a murder case.”
“That’s why I came straight to police headquarters. It’s why I’m calling you.”
“Just saying,” he said.
“Thanks for the warning.”
By the time I signed off, I was out on the sidewalk beside Brooke’s car and I’d missed her call. I got into the CR-V and touched her name.
“Robin,” she said as she answered.
“Hey, Brooke.” I pulled away from the curb. “I haven’t been home yet. Do you need your car now, or do I still have time to go get my spare key?”
“Forget it. Carly found your keys. They were in the kitchen next to the coffee maker. You’ve got bigger problems. The police have been here.”
Gone Ballistic (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery) Page 2
