by John Douglas
Jerry, oblivious to the commotion behind him, shuffled through his pages. “His clothing was brand-new, never been worn. The fabric still contained a large amount of formaldehyde”—he glanced up—“which, as you know, manufacturers use to make cotton wrinkle-resistant.
“There were pine needles and dirt from the trail on the front of his jogging suit, but the back was relatively clean, except for the blood. There were no bullet holes, front or back. This indicates that the victim was either naked when killed or was dressed in other clothes, stripped, then dressed in the jogging suit. Gina did find some fibers…”
“Gina?” said Katie.
“Dr. Plessy,” Jerry said, blushing again. “Dr. Plessy is looking at the fibers, and some hair we found on the clothing, but that’s it.”
“His hair or someone else’s?”
Jerry looked through his notes again. “We think it’s dog hair.”
“Huh. Dog hair. Do we know what breed?”
“Not yet, but a guy from the NC State veterinary school is taking a look today.”
“Oh, and there was also semen found in the underwear, which would match with Dom’s findings. Gina, uh, Dr. Plessy, is doing a DNA match.”
“So the guy got his flagpole waxed and his heart shattered, all in the same night,” Katie said.
“It happens to the best of us,” Trevor said.
“Don’t forget head shots,” Dom said. “Even though he was already dead, the two shots inflicted significant trauma.”
“Brains for breakfast,” Trevor said.
All alone at the table next door, Dad tried not to look too closely at his scrambled eggs. When his imagination got the better of him, he pushed away from the table and started moving toward the elevators, but not before he stopped and said, “Mr. Donovan, I’m a big fan. I’ve read all your books.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I’m sorry we drove your family away. We tend to forget that our shoptalk isn’t exactly suitable for families.”
Dad patted the air with his hands. “No, no, it’s okay. I think it’s fascinating what you guys do.” He smiled an apology. “But my wife doesn’t share my same appreciation for law enforcement.”
“Neither does mine,” I said.
For an awkward moment Dad stood there, clearing his throat, looking for more to say and coming up blank, while I waited for him to either say something else or leave, and Dad shifted from foot to foot and finally said, “I guess I better catch up to them.”
“Okay, sure.”
“It was a pleasure. I’m sorry to interrupt.”
“Not a problem.”
Dad eased away, and I asked, “Anything else?”
“The shoes were brand-new,” Jerry said. “So were his jogging suit, socks, and underwear.”
Dom said, “If this guy jogged, it was only to the refrigerator and back. He was a heavy smoker plus his liver indicated daily alcohol abuse.”
“Abuse or use?”
“Jake, more than one a day is abuse.”
“Remind me to buy a bigger glass,” I said.
Dom raised an eyebrow, then looked back at his computer screen. “The only other thing of interest I found was this. Mixed in with the blood were traces of a gritty powder all along the victim’s back, his buttocks, thighs, calves, and the soles of his feet. We sent it over to Jerry for a look-see.”
Jerry shuffled through more paper. “Here it is: calcium carbonate, sodium carbonate, fragrance, and sodium dichlorotriazinetrione dyhydrate.”
“What the hell’s that?”
“Cleanser. We haven’t narrowed it down to brand, but we’re working on it.”
Dom said, “So he was lying in a tub, and one that had just been cleaned, but not completely rinsed. That’s my guess.”
“Someone in a hurry,” Trevor said.
Katie nodded. “Maybe a housekeeper or a maid?”
I shook my head. “That’s a leap. It could just as easily be a bachelor, like our victim, or a busy mother.”
“Bachelors never bother,” Katie said. “Have you ever seen a single man’s bathtub? You’d get more fungus than cleanser.”
Jerry blushed and Dom bristled. “Young lady, that is a sexist stereotype.” He gave Katie a slight bow.
“Anything else?”
Jerry smiled, a rare event, meaning he’d found something he knew we’d find interesting. “The shoe. The suspect’s shoe. The one he was supposed to have worn when he made this track.”
I pulled my file and found the photos of the print and the casting. “This one?”
“Yes.”
“You say ‘supposed to have worn.’ The shoe doesn’t match?”
Jerry nodded his head. “Oh, yeah, Jake, they match. If you look at the soles you’ll see twelve identifying accidental characteristics, like this cut here and here.” Jerry pointed a forkful of grits at matching points on the photos. “And this anomaly in the tread.”
“So the killer was wearing this shoe, is that right?”
Jerry shoveled the grits into his mouth. “No, Jake, he wasn’t.” We waited while Jerry swallowed. “Someone might have been wearing this shoe at the murder scene, but it wasn’t our suspect.”
“Why not?” Trevor asked.
“The police are looking for the husband, right? The guy this shoe belongs to. And by all accounts he’s a big guy, six-five, two-forty, wears a size fourteen.”
“You know what they say, Katie.”
“No, Trevor, what do they say?”
“Big feet—”
“Big shoes,” I said. “Go on, Jerry.”
“Thank you, Jake. So the guy’s got big feet, and he’s heavy. Now, I want you to look at this cast.” Jerry pointed a slice of bacon at the impression taken from the trail. “Gina and I went out there last night and did some soil tests.”
“Moonlight on the murder scene,” Katie said.
“Very romantic,” Trevor said.
Jerry ignored them. “Now, we could be wrong here, but we don’t think a two-hundred-forty-pound man made this print. We’re guessing the person who made this print wasn’t wearing this shoe at all. We think he pressed it into the soil with his hand. The weight isn’t anywhere close to two-forty, and the distribution is too even. You know how when a person walks, the main weight is in the heel, then the ball of the foot. Well, there’s no flex in this impression.”
“Man,” Trevor said, “someone wanted the husband to take the heat for this real bad.”
“It’s more than that. It’s like the killer’s playing games with us,” Katie said.
I took the check from the waitress and signed my name and room number. The team waited. When the waitress was gone, I handed out assignments. “Trevor, you go talk to the victim’s colleagues, shake the tree a bit, and see what falls out.”
“Okay.”
A cell phone rang and we all reached for our belts. It was mine. “Donovan.”
“Weller here.”
“You’re up early.”
“I investigate homicides. And it’s the only exercise I get since my wife left and the dog died. I got something you might want to see.”
“What’s that?”
“Place I think our tech boy was murdered. Interested?”
8
The motel was located north of town just off the interstate. It wasn’t the cheapest place a man could spend his last night, but it was a world away from the Four Seasons. A windowed lobby of plastic furniture and dusty ficus separated the rooms from the parking lot so that anyone entering a guest room had to first walk past the lobby.
On the second floor walkway, people in summer clothes crowded around one room’s door, trying to see past a uniformed officer who did his best to keep them back. If the lobby had had postcards of the murder scene, they would have sold out.
Katie, Jerry, and I got out of the rental. I was relieved to have Jerry in the car with us, because I didn’t know what I could say to Katie. Few humans are more pathetic than a man trying to navigate his broken emotions.
Weller and Snead met us in the parking lot. Two TV crews had set up, and when they saw us, they shouted questions.
“Is this a federal case?”
“Is this connected to the assassination attempt?”
Once we were past the reporters, I asked, “Who found it?”
“Chambermaid,” Weller said. “We’re waiting for one of our bilingual officers to question her.”
“You’d think they’d learn the fucking language,” Snead said.
Katie cut her eyes at Snead in a way that would have shamed an ordinary man, but Snead was not an ordinary man.
“We get a lot of Mexicans,” Weller said. “They come up here for the good life.” He put his hands in his pockets and looked over the motel. “If this is the good life, I’d hate to see how they live back home.”
“I can talk to her, if you don’t mind,” Katie said.
Weller shrugged, “Fine. Snead, go with her. She’s in the lobby.”
On the second floor I let Weller clear a path through the walkway gawkers. As Jerry and I pulled on latex gloves, I heard a man whisper, “That’s Jake Donovan, the profiler guy.” His wife, a large woman in an Elvis T-shirt, whispered, “Who?”
The room was dark except for the pool of light from the bedside lamp. The heavy curtains were drawn against the sun and to block out the curious. Two crime scene techs were working the room while a supervisor, a pale woman with short, orange hair and small, black-framed glasses, took notes.
I introduced myself and said, “You must be Dr. Plessy. Jerry here has been very impressed with your work.”
Jerry blushed and shuffled.
Dr. Plessy didn’t shake hands, but her coloring changed, too. “It’s an honor to work with Dr. Carruthers,” she said, giving Jerry the bright lights, “his thinking is so”—she crinkled her nose, looking for the right adjective—“unorthodox.”
“Yes, it is.” I nodded toward the bed. “Was it slept in?”
Plessy pulled her gaze away from Jerry. “Uh, it’s hard to tell. Semen showed up under the UV, so there was something going on, but I wouldn’t call it sleep-related.”
“Could it have been solitary?”
“You mean was our Jedi knight polishing his light saber? I doubt it.” She looked at her notes. “We’ve found two sets of pubic hair—one blond, probably bleached, and one brown.”
“Bleached pubic hair?”
“Some women like to have the carpet match the curtains. So unless our guy’s gone two-tone, I’ll bet we get epithelials mixed in with the semen.” Epithelial cells are shed by a woman during sex. Finding these cells in the semen would mean that our man hadn’t spent his last night alone.
The covers on one of the double beds were pulled back. One of the crime scene techs carefully slipped the sheets into separate paper bags.
“We’ve got great prints,” Plessy said. “A thumbprint on the bed frame. A full set on a glass.” She held up a tumbler in a plastic bag.
“We used to have a set of those exact glasses,” I said.
“I think the manufacturer limited the run to a few zillion,” Plessy said.
“Jerry told me you were good. He didn’t tell me you had a sense of humor.”
She smiled. “It’s a vital part of our tool kit, Mr. Donovan. I don’t think we’d survive without it. As for being good, my people can spot the hair on a gnat’s behind from across the room.”
“Speaking of hair, have you figured out what kind of dog our boy was playing with?”
“John thinks it’s a Maltese.”
“We have a Maltese.” I laughed. “My glass and my dog, maybe I did this.”
Plessy straightened from the nick she’d been examining on the credenza and said, “You have your dog with you, Mr. Donovan, we can check his fur against the fur we found, just to rule you out as a suspect.”
“My ex-wife got custody.”
“Too bad. My ex-boyfriend got the dog in our breakup, the incontinent son of a bitch.”
“I hope you’re talking about the dog.”
“Hope all you want,” she said. “You ready to take a look in here?”
From the bathroom came the flash and whir of a photographer snapping pictures. “That the main event?”
Dr. Plessy nodded. “Oh, yeah.”
“Lead the way.”
We went back to the bathroom. The photographer was taking pictures of the tub. At one end, opposite the faucet, the porcelain was shattered. Inside, the bottom of the tub was a dark mass of congealed blood, almost black.
“This is why there was no blood on the trail,” I said.
The rings on the shower rod were bare. “Looks like they used the curtain to wrap the body,” Weller said, “and mopped the floor with a towel.”
“We’ll get in here next,” Plessy said, “after the photographer’s finished.”
“Ready to see some movies, Jake?”
“You’ve got tape on this?”
“This place has been held up so many times the management installed a surveillance camera. A woman rented this room, Jake. The name on the registration is Janice Callahan.”
“The secretary?”
“Yeah. Looks like she rented the room for a little after school action with the boss, the husband catches them engaged in water sports, and bango, there you go.”
“But the tub was dry,” I said.
Weller nodded. “So my euphemism isn’t quite accurate.”
“Can I see the tape?”
“Sure. Let’s go down to the lobby.”
We left Jerry to follow Dr. Plessy around the crime scene, puppylike, and made our way back through the gawkers and gauntlet of reporters.
“What about yesterday morning? If the victim was killed Thursday night and dumped on the trail early Friday morning, wouldn’t the maid have cleaned up the room yesterday?”
“Let’s find out,” Weller said.
Katie was speaking to a Latina whose face was wet with tears. Standing behind her with his arms crossed was a pinched little man in a polyester tie and a vest, the motel’s logo embroidered over his tiny heart. Katie introduced me and said, “Mariposa went in to clean this morning and found the blood in the tub. Mr. Mook here is the night manager.”
“Did she take her cart into the room?”
Katie asked the maid and she nodded yes.
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. I didn’t like anything coming into the crime scene, but once in, I wanted it to stay there.
Katie picked up on it. She gave the night manager a hard look and said, “Mariposa told me she was afraid to leave the cart, afraid someone might steal her supplies.”
“Her supplies?”
Mook wouldn’t look anyone in the eye.
“Apparently,” Katie said, “Mook here sells the supplies to the maids.”
Mook started to sweat.
“I hope you’ve skimmed enough to hire a lawyer,” I said, my voice flat. I was trying to hold in my disgust. In my career, I’ve spent more time with criminals than, in retrospect, anyone should, and Mook here was cut from the same predatory cloth as most of them, different only in degree.
“I didn’t do anything illegal,” Mook said.
“And I’m sure you declared that income on your ten-forty.”
Mook tried to divert this line of questioning by appealing to Weller: “I need to clean that room.”
Weller shook his head. “It’ll be a while. We have to take the tub and a section of the wall.”
“What?”
“It’s going to be a few days, at best, until the crime scene people are through with it.”
“But we need the room. We’re booked full.”
I looked out the window at people packing their cars. “You’ll have plenty of rooms in a minute, Mr. Mook. Murder tends to create vacancies, in more ways than one.”
Mook looked as if he’d found a bug in his arugula. “Corporate’s not going to like this. This isn’t good. This isn’t good at all.”
I sat down next to the chambermaid and, through Katie, asked if she was all right, if she needed anything. She shook her head no.
Katie said, “She’s pretty shaken up. She says she wants to leave.”
“We’ll let you go home soon,” Weller hollered.
“She’s not deaf,” Katie said.
“Lo siento,”he hollered. To Katie he said, “Tell her she can go home soon, okay?”
Katie translated and Mariposa said, hope in her eyes,“A México?”
“No,” Katie said,“a su casa aquí.”
Mariposa sobbed in disappointment.
“Did you see anyone in that room?” I asked, and Katie translated. Mariposa shook her head no. “What about yesterday morning, when you went to clean the room?”
Mariposa, in between sobs that convulsed her body, told us that a note was on the door.
“What was in the note?”
She looked at the night manager before answering,“Dinero.” In English she said, “One hundred dollars.”
“And the note, do you still have the note?”
“Sí, yes.” Mariposa pulled an envelope from her apron pocket.
Still wearing gloves, I carefully opened the note and slid it into a plastic evidence bag.
The note was written in Spanish and Katie translated, “Please do not disturb as my wife is very ill. You may clean up the room tomorrow.”
“And you never saw who wrote this?”
Mariposa shook her head no.
“Give that to Dr. Plessy and see if she can raise some prints,” I told Katie.
Beyond the lobby desk was a nineteen-inch TV on a rolling cart. Balanced on top of the set was a VCR.
I asked Weller, “The surveillance tape in?”
Weller nodded, picked up the remote, and soon the screen was filled with the grainy black-and-white image of a woman in a large hat and dark glasses filling out the registration.
“Is that her?”
“Callahan?” Weller said. “Can’t be sure, not with this, but if it’s not her, it’s her sister. Who else would it be?”
“Have you checked her signature?”
“We got a copy from the DMV. They matched.”
“This doesn’t look good.” I was trying to figure out a way to break the news to Mrs. De Vries when I spotted something on the screen. “Pause that.”
