Joe looked at his phone while I read the report. “Hey, I’ll be right back. I just got a call that relates to the investigation.”
When Nick arrived, Joe was gone.
“Where the hell did he go this time?” Nick placed the coffee down a little too hard, and it sloshed onto the table. He didn’t look like he had any plans to clean it up.
I’ll admit the spilled coffee distracted me from my reading. I gave it about a minute before I got up and asked, “Paper towels?”
Nick was mid-sip and pointed with his other hand. When he finished swallowing, he said, “Bathroom.”
I left the report on the table, walked into the men’s room, and put my hand under the sensor to get the dispenser to dole out some brown paper that passed for a paper towel. I ripped off the first offering, then put my hand under the sensor two more times for extra helpings.
I walked back to the table, picked up the cup of coffee, and wiped off the table. Before placing the cup back on the table, I used the smallest section of towel to wipe down the sides of the cup, so it didn’t leave a new ring on the table.
Call me OCD, but things like that drove me crazy.
Nick looked at me like I was nuts from where he sat on the chair next to mine. He’d been reading the report, too. When I tossed the dirty towels in the garbage can along the wall, he went back to reading.
“Where’s your partner today?” I’d just realized Gabe was nowhere to be found.
Nick smirked. “He took a few last-minute vacation days.”
“They let you do that?”
“Actually, it was personal days. I didn’t ask questions when my boss told me. I’d already gotten a text from Gabe saying he was taking the day off. In all honesty, I’m glad. Can you imagine having to work with him all day, after last night?”
“He was looking pretty bad when we got to your house. Did he puke all over your guest room?”
Nick chuckled. “If he did, he cleaned it up. I’d have hated to call his wife and have her come take care of it.”
“I’d puke having to clean that up,” I said.
“Mimi was pissed. She said we should have dropped him at home for Cortnie to take care of him. She got up in the middle of the night and put some aspirin, water, and Pepto on the nightstand. She said he didn’t even stir when she turned on the light.”
“Yeah, for some reason he felt the need to let loose. Didn’t really seem like him, you know?” I leaned in, like I hadn’t read the page he’d been looking at. “What do you think?”
Nick pulled a pen from his shirt pocket. He underlined part of a paragraph. “It looks like Hector needs an alibi.”
“What do you mean? He was found with the body.” I turned the page and read the report again.
Whoa. I’d been right. Zhen was dead long before Hector got home. Not that he didn’t kill her earlier in the day, then came back and say he’d found her. But then, why would he go back to the house if he was guilty? Wouldn’t it have been better for him to stay away?
Nick scanned further down the page. “Get the photos back out.”
I pulled the photos from the murder book.
Nick pushed the photos out on the table, spreading them so we could see all of them. “Whoever killed her knew what they were doing. The temperature in the house was fifty-five degrees. Someone turned off the furnace.”
It’d been colder than normal for December in Salinas. Mimi had been complaining for weeks. The nights were so cold there was frost on the lawn and windshields by morning. Not the windshield of my car though, because mine was in a warm garage.
“There,” Nick pulled one of the photos close. “See that?”
He’d placed his finger next to the bedroom window. It was wide open.
“What time did Hector say he got home?” I said aloud, but was really talking to myself.
Nick scrambled through the paperwork. “Where the hell is it?”
Joe walked up and asked, “Where is what?”
Nick looked up. “What time did you get the call at the Varga house?”
Joe picked up his coffee and took a sip as he thought about it. “It’s in the report, but I think it was somewhere around six in the morning. The suspect had gotten home a few hours earlier, but passed out in the yard, or so he said, then found the victim around six. At least that’s when the call came in.”
Nick looked at me. “This girl was dead long before she was found. The colder temps preserved the body a little.”
Joe sat. “That’s right. The house was freezing cold. I even went to check the heater, to see if it was broken. It was turned off.”
“Did you get fingerprints off the regulator? Was it analog or digital?” I asked.
Joe’s mind worked as he drank more coffee. “I’m not sure. No, wait, it was digital. As for prints, I’m not sure.” He leaned forward and pulled the murder book toward him.
I leaned close to Nick, who didn’t seem to mind that I was looking over his shoulder.
So many red flags were there.
“Time of death estimated between two and five o’clock?” I asked. “What the hell was she doing in bed, in her pajamas in the middle of the afternoon?”
Nick asked, “Didn’t she have a job?”
Joe said, “She worked for a lab. No one missed her because she only worked three-twelves. That’s three days a week for twelve hour days. I checked with her employer. She was at the beginning of four days off.” He pointed to the folder. “It’s in there.”
“You realize if she died between two and five in the afternoon, my client is cleared,” I said.
“According to this, her last meal was rice, beans and flour tortillas.” Nick flipped back and forth between pages. “The original timeline is all wrong. The original TOD was based on body temperature, but the open window and colder temps, along with her being half covered by heavy blankets, may have skewed it.”
I wanted to jump up and run out of the police station, but the people I needed were in the room with me. They were the ones who needed to release my client. “Hector didn’t do it,” I said.
Joe held up both hands. “Wait a minute. This doesn’t mean he didn’t do it. It just means he didn’t do it between two and six in the morning.”
Joe was right. Hector wasn’t off the hook.
“I need to talk to him again. I asked for a play by play of the days before the murder, but I didn’t ask for hourly details. Now, what happened that day is more important.”
Joe looked through the murder book, scanning, as if he was looking for something. “There weren’t any fingerprints taken off the temperature regulator in the house. I’ll get a crew back out there and have them dust.”
“Another thing, Hector told me he had a small security camera up in the house, but he’d taken it down a few days before the murder because he and Zhen had a huge fight over it. He’d apparently seen Mario coming and going from the house a few times, and he flipped out. Then she got pissed off because he’d put the camera up without telling her.”
“How does this help us?” Joe asked.
“We can canvas the neighbors within sight of Hector’s house. See if they have any security cameras at the front of their property. I looked at the footage on Hector’s through the website that stores the video. I could see the street from the angle Hector had. He could see someone pull up to the curb.”
“We?” Joe said.
I shook it off. “We, as in the cops, not as in me. Maybe there are other points of view of Hector’s house so we can see who may have been at the house that day.”
Nick said, “Awfully convenient that he took the camera down right before his fiancée was murdered in the house.”
I agreed, but I had no reason not to believe Hector’s story. Not yet anyway.
“I’ll get a crew on it and have them dust for prints,” Joe said.
Fingerprints had come a long way since the days of dirty black dust, but it still worked. I wondered if he meant “dust for prints” as a
saying, or they really still dusted.
“What about Zhen’s phone?” I asked.
“What about it?” Joe said.
“Do you have it in evidence?”
Joe shook his head. “There wasn’t a landline in the house, and we didn’t see a cell phone anywhere.”
“Do you have cell phone records?” Nick asked.
“I do.” Joe shuffled through paperwork. He looked at the paperwork before saying. “This doesn’t jive with time of death, though.” He handed Nick the page.
“What the hell?” Nick scanned it, then handed it to me.
According to the phone company’s records, Hector and Zhen had been texting each other until around eleven in the evening on the night of her death. “How does a dead woman text?”
“How many pages of records do you have?” Nick asked.
Joe handed him several more sheets of paper.
Again, Nick spread the pages across the table, this time over the photos of the victim. He scanned them. “See anything that stands out?”
I looked. I didn’t see anything. I looked at Nick. “What?”
“Look at the texts. Start at the beginning. Just read a few, then go to the last page,” Nick said, turning the pages toward me.
I read the first few pages, just scanning. Then I read the last few. It was so obvious. “You’re a genius.”
I could have kissed Nick right there in the cop shop.
Joe stood and leaned over, looking at the sheets he’d handed us. “What makes Nick a genius?”
The texts on the first pages were text shorthand and lots of silly emojis. The kind of texts you see from people extremely familiar with texting, and who were comfortable with smartphones. The last page, which happened to be the ones texted in the last hours before Hector had been arrested were full sentences, at least on Zhen’s end. No emojis. A few LOLs, though.
Sounding almost stunned, Joe said, “Someone was responding to Hector’s texts after our vic was dead.”
Nick and I nodded in unison.
“Do you think the killer ditched the phone already?” I asked.
“Hard to know,” Nick said.
I looked at Joe. “You need to do what you have to in order to get Hector out of jail. He didn’t kill this girl. I can’t believe he didn’t notice the difference in her texts.”
“He was at the bar that night, right?” Nick said. “Many of these texts are ones sent during the time he said he was drinking with friends.”
Joe still felt the need to defend his arrest. “Hector could have had access to both phones. He kills the girl, takes her phone, then has a conversation with her via text to throw us off.”
“Then why would he come back to the house? He’d been staying at his mom’s. He’d go back there. It would have looked totally normal.” I had to defend my client.
Joe stabbed the page with his finger. “Look at that. It’s a reconciliation. She’s asking him to come home.”
Damn it! He was right. The texts were makeup texts. All was well, and he would have gone home. But… “If they’d been making up, why would he have killed her?”
“He could have come home, and they fought again. This time, he was in a drunken rage.”
“Still doesn’t fit the timeline of the coroner’s report. It would have fit until this.” Nick sided with me.
“You got me there,” Joe said.
Butch came through the door of Homicide like there was an emergency alert. “Joe, did you read the coroner’s report yet?” he called across the room as he approached us.
Joe looked up. “We’re going over it now. This throws a huge wrench in our investigation.”
Butch towered over us, looking at the jumble of papers on the table. “It’s a mess.”
Joe stood. “We need to talk to CSU and get them back out to the crime scene.”
Nick pulled the pages into a pile and began arranging them in the proper order, in stacks.
“Before you leave, I want my client released,” I called after Joe and Butch.
They continued to walk away, but Joe waved back at me like he understood. He’d better understand because I was going to have a chat with Memo and Hector.
Before he disappeared around the corner, he said, “You know we would have figured this all out on our own, right? We just now got the coroner’s report.” He didn’t wait for an answer as he kept walking.
“Who do you think did it?” I asked Nick.
“Call me in a few hours. I want to go over this in a more orderly fashion,” he said, still organizing the pages.
“Will do. I have to talk to my client before visiting hours are over.”
“Call his attorney, he can get you in at any time,” Nick said absently as he started reading the murder book from the beginning.
Fifteen
MIMI
Charles walked in through the sliding glass door off the kitchen. He held a stack of pizzas in one hand and a twelve-pack of beer in the other.
“Case closed, did Nick tell you?” he asked. “At least our end of it.”
“I haven’t seen or talked to Nick all day. It’s been a busy one for me, and I heard Gabe took a few days off, so it must’ve been busy for him, too.” I’d been standing at the sink, peeling the skins off the zucchini for our dinner. Nick didn’t like the skin of zucchini, but I loved it, so I only peeled half of the amount I’d planned to use.
“Put your peeler down. I’ve come bearing gifts.” He held up the pizza and beer.
By this time, Lola had made her way into the kitchen. She would already be under my feet if I was working with meat, but Lola wasn’t a girl for fruits and vegetables, not even if they were slathered in butter. She’d lick the butter off and leave the rest.
“I was just starting dinner, in case Nick actually makes it home tonight.”
“Are you two gossiping about me?” Nick asked as he walked in the door behind Charles. “Dude, we weren’t born in barns around here. We close the door behind us.”
Charles put the boxes of pizza and the container of beer on the table. “You ingrate, I was headed back outside to grab your delicious San Pellegrino water.”
Nick stepped aside, then opened the door wider. “Then, by all means.”
Charles blew Nick a kiss as he walked by, and Nick wiped his cheek like the dog had just licked him. Those two were secretly in love with each other, I knew it. I should probably keep a closer eye on them, or be jealous, but I didn’t have the time or energy.
“How was your day, dear?” I asked in a Honeymooner’s voice.
“Not over yet.” He showed me the file he had under his arm.
“Murder book?” I asked.
“It’s a copy of Zhen Franks’ murder book.” He placed it on the table next to the pizza boxes then walked to the cabinet and started pulling down plates.
I grabbed silverware from the drawer and handed it to him. “Thanks. I’ll put a roll of paper towels on the table, so don’t bother with napkins.”
Charles came back in with Lola tailing behind him. “I brought her a treat, too.” He pulled a ham bone out of a plastic bag and handed it to her.
Lola took it from him with the delicacy of a princess reaching for a scone. Then she bolted into the other room.
“She won’t be begging at the dinner table,” I said.
Once we were all settled at the dinner table, pizza boxes opened and plates at the ready, the conversation immediately turned to the case.
I usually had a no business policy at the dinner table, but I had a feeling Charles brought the pizza for that very reason.
“I went to see Memo. He’d been informed Hector was still a person of interest, but no longer the prime suspect in the Franks murder. I was immediately dismissed by him. ‘You’ve done your job and earned your money, so your services are no longer needed,’ he said.”
“So grateful for all we’ve done,” I said.
Charles grimaced. “We didn’t really do that much. All the work was do
ne by the police. We just happened to jump the gun on the investigation. The detectives hadn’t closed the file, they were still waiting for more evidence, lab reports, and most especially, the coroner’s report.”
“We did ask questions,” I said, feeling defensive.
“We did. But I don’t think we got much for our efforts,” Charles said.
I grabbed a piece of pizza from the box and picked up my knife and fork. I began cutting it into pieces, starting at the small end. I didn’t feel like eating with my hands. “I think I learned a few things.”
“Anything that might add to the investigation?” Nick asked.
“Maybe. I’m not sure. It’s more about what they actually thought of Zhen. Maybe it’s all in the book already. Both Carmen and Ester said Zhen cheated on Mario when they were dating.” I looked at Nick specifically and said, “Mario is Hector’s brother.”
Nick nodded. “I’m up to date on the case. I’ve been through the murder book already.”
“Okay, well, neither would say who she was cheating with. And they said they liked her, but there was a coldness to them. That Ester is one hard ass woman. There were dozens of family photos on one of the walls in her house, and she wasn’t smiling in any of them. Oh, and no photos of Zhen. None of her with Hector or Mario. Nothing. She’d been around for years, and not one single photo of her on that wall.”
“According to the file, they all liked her fine. They were looking forward to Hector and Zhen announcing a wedding date,” Nick said.
“I didn’t get that vibe at all.” And I didn’t. But it wasn’t quite a sinister vibe, either.
“And we still have no explanation why she was in bed in the middle of the afternoon,” Nick said.
“That’s weird. Maybe she was feeling sick,” I said.
“Maybe it was her normal time to sleep? Maybe she worked a graveyard shift.” Charles chased his pizza with a long sip of beer.
“Could be. She had her afternoon meal, then went to…” he trailed off. “No, look at this.”
He pushed the coroner’s report at Charles.
“Opiates? She had heroin in her system?” Charles put his pizza down and looked closer at the page. He handed it back.
The Knife Before Christmas Page 13
