by Blake Pierce
“The agency sent a cleaning woman to do a quick sweep of the place two hours before a scheduled showing. The cleaning lady found her and called the police.”
“Have you spoken to her?”
“No. Sheriff Armstrong has, though.”
Kate nodded, looking down onto the first floor and the bloodstained rug. She was thinking about the quilt and water bottle they had found at the house on Hammermill Street, wondering if there were nooks and crannies within this home that might allow a squatter to hide away rather easily.
“How old is this house?” Kate asked.
“Not sure. But it’s been on the market for the better part of a month. Records show that it had been shown eighteen times, with six potential buyers. Only one of the potential buyers was a local.”
Kate and DeMarco walked through the house, their footfalls echoing in the empty rooms. Kate thought it was an eerie feeling, actually—the feel of a house that held the memories and lives of people she would never meet. She’d always been vaguely interested in ghosts and found it entirely possible that every house had the potential to be haunted by the memories and motions of the families who had lived within it.
They checked the large space that Kate assumed served as the living room area, and then the kitchen. Being that there were no belongings of any kind in the place, it was quite easy to determine that nothing had been taken. They then made their way upstairs. Kate was looking for some sort of easy access to an attic or even little eaves spaces. But there was nothing of the sort. The house did not have an attic, which, to Kate, meant it likely had a basement of some kind. No one built houses in communities like these anymore without at least some form of extra storage space.
They headed back downstairs and headed for the first door along the main hallway. It led down to a finished basement that was just as vacant and desolate as the rest of the home. To the back, there was a set of double doors that presumably led outside. Kate went to them, opened the doors, and indeed found herself looking out onto a gorgeously green backyard. She stepped out, DeMarco following behind her, onto a patio that was the shape of a half oval. To the right was slightly raised brick wall that contained a flower bed. To the left was a small unstructured space beneath a set of wooden stairs that led up to the back porch. The space she assumed was to install something like a small storage shed for a lawnmower, mulch bags, and things of that nature.
Going on a hunch, she walked to the unfinished space. The dirt underneath it was hard packed and dry, levelled out from the landscaping prior to the house being built. She knelt down and checked the ground over, not sure what she was looking for. She nearly came away with nothing, but just before she pulled back, she caught sight of something in the back far corner immediately to her left, almost completely out of her sight.
Grunting a bit from the amount of stretching she had to do to see back into it, she saw what looked to be several old shop rags. They were bundled into something that resembled a pile, one on top of the other. A few feet down from the cloths, she saw what looked like scuff marks in the dirt.
“Anything?” DeMarco asked.
“Maybe. Why don’t you have a look and tell me what you see…just to make sure I’m not jumping to conclusions.”
The women switched places and Kate watched as DeMarco hunched her much younger back over so that her body was almost in an L-shape. She scurried into the unfinished space and looked around for a moment before saying anything.
“Shop rags,” she called out from within the space. “Seems like a weird thing to leave behind in this space, right? And…yeah, and a few scuffs and indentations in the ground here. It’s dry but I’m pretty sure some amount of weight was placed here sometime recently.”
DeMarco came back out, stretching her back. “The cloths,” she said. “You think someone used them as a pillow or something?”
“I do.”
“Another squatter? Seems like a stretch. But yes, those slight marks on the ground could have been the bending of a knee or the placement of a foot, I guess.” She eyed them once more and added: “And recently, too.”
“It does seem like a desperate stretch to make,” Kate agreed. “Especially given that the heap of old cloths could easily be nothing more than lazy clean-up by the construction crew.”
“I’d like to speak to the cleaning lady,” DeMarco said.
“That’s a good idea—the next logical step, I think.”
“I’ll call the real estate company to see if I can get an address. If not, I’m sure Sheriff Armstrong would help us out.”
DeMarco turned her back to do just that, walking to the edge of the concrete patio and looking out over the backyard. As she spoke, Kate looked back into the unfinished space beneath the stairs and the side of the house. She tried bending like DeMarco but simply did not have that kind of flexibility anymore. She got to her knees and waddled into the space, looking for anything else they might have missed. She found nothing new, but the more she looked at the pile of rags and the slight disturbances to the ground, the more certain she became that someone had been resting there within the past few days. She made a mental note to bag up the rags to check for hair fibers.
As she was coming back out of the little space under the stairs, DeMarco was pocketing her phone.
“Get an address?” Kate asked.
“Even better. Turns out she’s been called to the police station. Armstrong called her in for additional questioning. I just spoke to Armstrong and she said she’s fine if we come by to take part.”
“Sounds good to me,” Kate said, trying to hide the grimace of pain that crept across her face as she once again righted herself after coming out of the small space.
As she followed behind DeMarco while they cut around the house through the yard, she couldn’t help but smile. DeMarco had really taken control of the case and was managing to continue making it her own even after Kate had been called in. Smiling, Kate found that she was too proud of DeMarco to feel the least bit slighted.
***
When they arrived at the station, just a quarter of a mile away from the still waters of Fallows Lake, Sheriff Armstrong was in the front lobby, waiting to greet them. She looked rather relieved to see them, not quite smiling at them but certainly pleased. She appeared to be in her early fifties and had a bit of heft to her, but was far from being considered overweight. She had a plain face that was likely pretty when her hair was up and some makeup was applied. What Kate liked the most about her, though, was that she had a serious glint in her eyes…the look of a woman who took her job and her duties very seriously.
“I was very happy to hear you were headed over,” Armstrong said. “I have Ms. Seibert in the back. She’s starting to get very defensive. I have no reason to believe she had anything to do with the murders, but she thinks we see her as a suspect just because we called her back in.”
“I wonder if there’s a history of crime in her family,” Kate said. She then grinned when Armstrong looked at her, puzzled. “Sorry,” Kate said. “Agent Kate Wise. Pleased to meet you.”
“Same here,” Armstrong said. “As for your question, I honestly don’t know.”
“It happens a lot,” Kate explained. “If she’s seen a family member or two in problems with the authorities, the chances are very good she’s going to be defensive no matter how nicely she’s treated.”
“Well, I’ve given her five minutes to cool down. I told her someone else might step in to ask some questions and she wasn’t too keen on that.”
“You mind if we take over?” DeMarco asked.
“Not at all. Down the hallway, third room on the left.”
Kate and DeMarco headed in that direction. Kate noticed that she had somehow stepped in front but did not want to go out of her way to correct it. When they reached the door Armstrong had indicated, Kate gave a brief knock, waited two seconds, and then opened the door.
There was only a table and a few chairs occupying the room. The woman sitting at the tabl
e looked to be in her late fifties, maybe early sixties. She was a Caucasian woman with stringy hair that poked up in little frazzles here and there. She eyed Kate and DeMarco suspiciously, her eyes darting back and forth between them.
“You’re Mary Siebert?” DeMarco asked.
Mary only nodded. Kate saw right away that Armstrong had been right; the woman looked like she was expecting the absolute worst.
“We’re Agents DeMarco and Wise, with the FBI. We were hoping to ask you some questions about your discovery of the body of Bea Faraday.”
Again, Mary said nothing. She sat a little more rigidly in her chair but other than that, she remained mostly unchanged.
“Ms. Seibert,” DeMarco went on, “Sheriff Armstrong tells us that you feel like you’re a suspect. We’re here to tell you that as of right now, that’s just not the case. We have such an interest in you because you were the first one on the scene. And also because with your profession, we are hoping you might have seen or heard something lately that could help us on the case. Nothing more. We’d like to speak to you so we can work towards trying to determine how long the body had been there before you arrived, maybe if you saw anything else odd, things like that.”
Mary started to loosen up a bit. Kate marveled at how well DeMarco was doing. She had not only worked to ease Mary’s fears, but she had also subtly made the woman feel like what she had to contribute was very important—which it was.
“No, there was just the body,” Mary said. “And all that blood.”
“Did you know Ms. Faraday at all?” Kate asked.
“No. Although later, when I saw pictures of her, I recognized her face. I’d seen her around the town, you know? It’s a beautiful town, but not very big.”
“And you were alone, right?” DeMarco asked.
“Yes, it was just me.”
“How many others work for the cleaning company?”
“There are five of us. But because this house had been stripped of most of the furniture and hadn’t seen much foot traffic in a while, I was the only one that went. It was to be a simple mop and dust job. The windows hadn’t even gotten any smears or grime on them yet.”
DeMarco flipped through the file folder on the table. “And you arrived at two fifteen in the afternoon, correct?”
“Yes. I had one other house to visit that day. But I obviously didn’t make it.”
“This might sound like a disturbing question,” Kate said, “but do you happen to recall if the blood was still wet?”
“Oh, sure. It was still wet. There was still blood dripping from the body. As weird as it seems…that’s the thing that keeps me from sleeping at night. It’s not the poor woman’s face or even the gross scene itself; it’s the sound that fresh blood made when it splattered on the floor—that dripping sound.”
“So, Ms. Siebert…who makes the calls requesting you come out to clean the house?”
“The real estate agency.”
“And which agency was this house with?” DeMarco asked.
“Davis and Hopper Realty.”
“Have they been a client of yours for very long?” Kate asked.
“Maybe two years. They pay well and the agents working over there are some of the nicest people you’ll ever meet.”
There was silence in the room for a moment as Kate and DeMarco both worked out their own trains of thought in their head. Meanwhile, Mary Seibert seemed quite relaxed—a far cry from the woman Sheriff Armstrong had described to them less than ten minutes ago. It was Kate who eventually broke the silence. She had decided there was no way Mary Seibert had killed Bea Faraday, hauled her up the stairs, and then tossed her limp body at least six feet across the open air from the second-floor rail. There was just no way.
“Ms. Seibert, had you ever been in the house before?”
“No, this was the first time.”
“And while you were there,” DeMarco said, “did you happen to see anything else? Maybe some kind of sign someone else might have been there?”
“Like I said…all I saw was the body. Well, I saw the blood on the floor first, right when I walked into the house, and then I saw her body up there on the chandelier. I sort of went blank for a few seconds, I think. I remember finding it very hard to breathe and then, when I could breathe, I screamed. I ran outside and called the police. They asked me to wait in my car, so that’s what I did.”
DeMarco glanced over at Kate. Kate gave her a nod at the same time she flashed Mary Seibert a smile. DeMarco was the first to head for the door, giving Mary her own smile as she did so.
“How long have you been cleaning homes in the area?” Kate asked.
“About eight or nine years.”
“In all of that time, have you ever happened upon anything even remotely like this before?”
“Oh, every now and then we’ll come to a home that has very clearly been used. Usually it’s just teenagers looking for a place to party. Every now and then we’ll find evidence of people sleeping on the floors. I had a friend one time that walked into a house one morning and found a homeless man sleeping in the back closet of a bedroom.”
“That was here in Estes?” DeMarco asked.
“No, somewhere out near New Castle.”
Kate and DeMarco shared a glance, one that they had both come to know and understand from the other during their time together. It was a look that said: “This interview is over.”
“Thank you so much for your time, Ms. Seibert. Unless Sheriff Armstrong needs anything from you, I’d say you’re free to go. We appreciate your cooperation.”
Mary stood up, obviously ready to make her way out. “I hear there’s been another one. Is that right?”
“We can’t give explicit details just yet,” DeMarco said. She started through the door but then paused, turned back, and added: “But I’d suggest staying away from any houses that are currently for sale until you hear otherwise.”
“We may also be passing along the same warning to all real estate employees in the area,” Kate said.
Mary nodded, looking to the table as if she wasn’t sure what to think. Kate had seen the expression many times before. It was the look of a woman who loved the little town she called home, but was starting to understand that it was no longer as safe as she had once thought.
CHAPTER FIVE
Kate discovered very quickly that she liked Sheriff Armstrong quite a lot. She was a well-grounded woman who did not take her job too seriously. When she sat down with Kate and DeMarco at a small conference room in the back of the building fifteen minutes after Mary Seibert had been excused, she did so with the gait of a stressed teenage kid. The woman was likely somewhere between fifty and fifty-five years of age, but the uncertain look on her face made her look much younger. She was pretty in a plain way, taking in both agents with a pair of radiant green eyes.
“You know,” she said, holding a cup of coffee with both hands as she reclined back in her chair, “I really wish you two could have visited the area for other reasons. Have either of you ever been to Estes or anywhere else around the area?”
Kate and DeMarco both answered in the negative. Kate was sipping from her own cup of coffee that Armstrong had offered, running the few facts of the case over in her mind. She studied the room closely as she did so, as she assumed this would likely serve as their primary hub of operations until this case was closed.
There was a large map of the area on the far wall, directly beside a dry-erase board. The board looked as if it wasn’t used very often, the most incriminating piece of evidence coming from a scrawled date that had only been partially erased in the right upper corner from almost an entire year ago.
“Well, I’m here to serve,” Armstrong said. “Other than these two murders, we’ve been pretty quiet around here lately. It’s sort of a cushy job. Even when the summer brings in the tourists, it remains a mostly quiet town. A few speeding tickets and bar brawls on Saturday nights, but that’s about it. So obviously, everything this week has been…”
She trailed off here, as if not even wanting to attempt to find the appropriate word to finish the statement.
DeMarco looked to Kate, hitching her thumb back toward Armstrong. “She and a few officers already have just about everything we could need here—files, reports, sales listings, things like that. I’ve worked with her a bit but not much—just an hour or so yesterday.”
“Do you happen to have a current list of all of the houses for sale in the area?” she asked.
“I do,” Armstrong said. “It came through this morning after I got on the line and demanded every real estate company in the area provide their listings ASAP. The list is in my office, but I can email it to you as well.”
“How long is it?”
“In the town of Estes, there are currently sixteen homes for sale and five for rent. If you venture out of Estes and go all the way out to the lake, the number gets much larger. Forty-one for sale, nineteen for rent.”
Kate got to her feet and went to the map on the wall. She glanced it over for a few seconds and found Estes near the top right corner of the map. “Where on here is Hammermill Street?”
“Oh God, you’ll go blind using that.” She leaned in her chair, closer to the door, and yelled: “Hey, Jimmy! Get me the topographical map of Estes!”
An obedient “On it!” boomed out from elsewhere in the office. The whole exchange was funny and, in a strange way, a bit refreshing for Kate. She’d always had a warm feeling toward small-town police forces, and Estes was no exception.
“I’ve thought of that, too,” Armstrong said. “The neighborhoods are pretty similar. The houses, too, I guess—only one was brand new and the other not so much. Different agencies, which makes me think the agencies won’t be a link.”
“Stairs were used in both murders,” DeMarco pointed out. “It makes me think the killer had to know where the stairs would be before entering the homes in order to pull it off.”
“We also think there might have been a squatter in both properties,” Kate said. “We’re not one hundred percent certain yet, but there’s enough there to seriously pursue it.”
