Murder One

by Robert Dugoni

  “How did she react when you opened the box?” Cerrabone asked.

  Rowe had kept his focus on Reid when Crosswhite opened the gun box, revealing the Styrofoam cutout where the gun should have been. Reid’s eyes had widened, and she brought up a hand to cover her mouth.

  “Not much. She looked more confused than concerned. She didn’t panic,” Rowe said.

  “Does she look like the panicking type?” Crosswhite asked.

  Rowe and Cerrabone considered Reid again. She sat with her legs crossed, cleaning the ink from her fingertips with an alcohol wipe. She looked as if she’d just painted her nails and was waiting for the polish to dry. Rowe had interrogated a lot of witnesses, and few looked as calm as Reid did at that moment—even the few who turned out to be completely innocent.

  After opening the box, Rowe had handed Reid a search warrant he’d procured from Judge O’Neil to search her house and to impound her car. Rowe was interested in determining if they might find sand or water in the carpet.

  “She didn’t ask for an attorney?” Cerrabone scratched the back of his neck behind the ear. With bloodshot eyes, dark bags, and sagging cheeks, he resembled a basset hound scratching at a flea. “Didn’t want to call anyone?”

  “She had an attorney with her,” Crosswhite said. “A good one. David Sloane.”

  When Crosswhite mentioned the name, Cerrabone stopped scratching. “Why do I know that name?”

  “He’s the attorney whose wife was murdered last year,” Cross-white said.

  “His wife was murdered?” Rowe asked.

  She shook her head. “Do you listen to anything I say? I already told you that.”

  Rowe made a note in the spiral notebook. “I’ll check with Bernie,” he said, referring to Bernie Hamilton, the detective assigned to the cold-cases unit.

  “I already have,” Crosswhite said.

  Cerrabone said, “Sloane also handled that matter involving Argus a few years back—the one on the National Guardsman. And didn’t he have that magnet case against Kendall Toys last year?” Cerrabone didn’t wait for an answer. He nodded, answering his own question. “He did. In fact, if my memory serves me . . .” He stopped and looked at Reid. “She was the attorney for Kendall.”

  “Strange bedfellows,” Rowe said.

  Cerrabone looked at him. “Figure of speech?”

  Rowe shrugged. “Their hair was wet and the bed looked like someone just gave it a good workout.”

  “Why would he let her come down here without him?” Cerrabone asked, though they all knew that technically, there wasn’t much Sloane could have done. Rowe had another search warrant in his pocket for Reid to provide her fingerprints and the DNA swab had she refused to voluntarily provide them, and Sloane had no right to be in the interrogation room unless she requested he act as her attorney.

  “He advised against it,” Rowe said. “He told her not to say anything.”

  “What did she say?” Cerrabone asked, nervousness sneaking into his voice. “Did you write it down?”

  Crosswhite flipped the pages of her notebook. “She said she wanted to quote, ‘cooperate,’ end quote, and quote, ‘get to the bottom of the matter,’ end quote. She told him she would call him later. Then she asked if she could change her clothes.”

  “Ask her again,” Cerrabone said. “Get it on tape.”

  “Look where she sat,” Crosswhite said. Reid had taken a seat on the side of the table with two chairs rather than the side with just the one chair. “Why would she sit there?”

  Rowe shook his head. He’d never had anyone do that either. Seemed everyone understood the etiquette of an interrogation was to take the hot seat.

  Rowe looked to Crosswhite. “How do you want to play it?”

  Normally, they interviewed witnesses together, though one or the other might leave to run up information on something the suspect said. Sometimes they agreed upon a ruse—the “good cop, bad cop” routine or the “we know more than you do” ruse. But Rowe was not inclined to try to outsmart the name partner of a Seattle law firm.

  Crosswhite said, “Why don’t you handle it.”

  “I was going to suggest you handle it. You know, woman-to-woman–type thing.”

  Crosswhite spoke to the glass. “I don’t think so. Women like her sometimes feel the need to prove themselves to another professional woman, show them how competent they are, how smart. I think you’d do better without me. If I think of something, I’ll come in.”

  Cerrabone agreed with the strategy and told Rowe to play it straight up. “She has a lot of contacts,” he said, “including the governor.”

  THREE TREE POINT

  BURIEN, WASHINGTON

  Sloane turned off the engine and sat back, staring at the overgrown laurel hedge. He wondered if, subconsciously, he’d deliberately let the hedge grow, like the bamboo inside Barclay’s fence, his own way of further isolating himself from the world.

  Every instinct told him Barclay should have declined to talk voluntarily to the police without a lawyer present, but she had refused his advice.

  He stepped from the car but did not push through the gate, instead walking down the easement to the bulkhead. With the tide in, only a sliver of rocks remained between the water’s edge and the cement wall on which he stood. He considered an evening sky painted hues of colors man seemed incapable of duplicating. A breeze from the southwest caused rippled waves and rocked the boats tied to the buoys. The heat and humidity that had brought the thunderstorms seemed to have finally passed.

  If I had known he was going to walk, I would have just put a bullet in him and been done with it.

  Sloane had dismissed her words as rhetoric, the type of thing someone says when angry but would never actually do.

  If I had known he was going to walk, I would have just put a bullet in him and been done with it.

  Most people never had the chance to do it, to kill someone.

  Sloane had, and he knew how close he had come to squeezing the trigger. Ultimately, he had refrained from shooting Anthony Stenopolos, but he could not deny that he had felt the primal urge for revenge, and it had been as strong as any he’d ever had, though not as strong as his instinct to protect Jake. And that was what had ultimately stopped him. It had not been his conscience or some burst of morality, good triumphing over evil. No, the reason he had not pulled the trigger had been something much more practical than divine. About to shoot, he had thought of Jake and the promise he had made to Tina that he would always care for their son.

  Barclay had no such concern.

  She had no such obligation.

  Vasiliev had taken that from her.

  What did it do to a mother to lose a child?

  If I had known he was going to walk, I would have just put a bullet in him and been done with it.

  Tina had been his wife, perhaps his soul mate, the person with whom he had chosen to spend the rest of his life. But she was not of him. She did not have his blood, his genes, his chromosomes. He had not carried her inside his body for nine months, given her life, nurtured her, watched her grow, guided her. That was a bond no man could ever truly understand. That was a bond only mothers knew. Sloane had come to realize something of it with Jake, whom he truly believed he loved as much as any father could, and still he knew it was a fraction of the love Tina had for her child.

  What does it do to have that bond severed, to have your child killed?

  If I had known he was going to walk, I would have just put a bullet in him and been done with it.

  What does it do to a person?

  Sloane turned from the view and walked back up the easement, pushing through the wooden gate to the back porch. He pulled open the screen door, about to unlock the Dutch door, when he noticed light on the staircase leading to the second floor. He left two lights on timers—one in his study and one in the kitchen. The light in the study could be seen from the front and the south sides of the house. The light in the kitchen, the room where he normally entered, could be
seen from the west and north sides. There was no timer for an upstairs light, and he wouldn’t have left a light on.

  He unlocked the door, pressed a hand on the glass to keep it from rattling, and nudged the wood from the frame, stepping in. At first he heard nothing but the creaks and moans of an empty house with which he had become all too familiar. Then the floorboards overhead creaked, the seventy-year-old wood unforgiving, someone walking upstairs. His bedroom.

  He stepped from the kitchen into the living room, maneuvering around the sofa and coffee table to his study, hearing the person or persons moving through the rooms overhead. In his study, he slid open the desk drawer and removed the .38.

  As he started from the office, he heard the person at the top of the stairs. He put his left foot forward, legs shoulder width, body turned at a 30-degree angle, bent his knees and leaned slightly forward, left elbow bent.

  The person descended, revealing more with each step: black boots, jeans, the bottom of a black leather coat—the kind Vasiliev’s two escorts had worn. Sloane slid his finger from the barrel to the trigger. When he saw the head, he shouted.

  “Freeze!”

  THE JUSTICE CENTER

  SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

  Before entering the room, Rowe paused in the hall to gather his thoughts. His ego hated to admit it, but his sphincter had tightened when he picked up the news article on his desk that mentioned Barclay Reid, and confirmed it to be the same name the caller, Dr. Felix Oberman, had provided. Oberman identified himself as Reid’s ex-husband. He said that two weeks earlier, Reid had told him she’d tired of the legal process and wished she had just put a bullet in the back of Vasiliev’s head. When Rowe met Oberman, the doctor confirmed his ex-wife owned a gun and he believed it to be a .38 revolver.

  Rowe ran Reid’s name through the system and determined she did indeed own a .38 Smith & Wesson J-Frame. Designed to be lightweight—just eleven and a half ounces—the black and gray gun had a shortened barrel that made it a popular choice of civilians who carried concealed weapons or kept guns in bedside stands. The bullet that had killed Vasiliev, a ball round—so named because the tip was rounded and resembled the lead balls fired from muskets during the Civil War—also matched a box of ammunition they found in Reid’s closet. Like the .38, the ball round was popular. Cheap, it was often used as practice rounds. Only a ballistics analysis would confirm the bullet had been fired by a particular gun, and without the gun, that could not happen.

  Rowe blew out a breath, shook his arms, and stepped around the corner, entering as Reid placed the alcohol wipe, blackened with ink, on the table.

  “Sorry,” he said. “We aren’t built for comfort around here.”

  “Not a problem, Detective.” She gestured to the lone chair. “Did you want to switch sides? I didn’t know if Detective Crosswhite would be joining us.”

  “She might, but we’re fine for now.” Rowe took the single chair and grimaced when the pain burned in his hip.

  “Are you all right?” Reid asked.

  “I’m fine.”

  “My knee acts up every once in a while,” she said.

  “We appreciate you coming down to get this straightened out.”

  “I’m happy to oblige. I’d like to know myself what’s going on.” She sounded genuine.

  “Do you want an attorney present?”

  She shook her head. Then she looked toward the one-way glass as if to let all know she was aware that Crosswhite, and likely others, watched. “If you need me to sign something, I’m happy to do so, but as I told you at my house, I don’t need or want an attorney.”

  Rowe flipped through his notes, trying to decide where to start. Though he had kept the door to the room open, the room seemed smaller, warmer. “You said the last time you saw the gun was . . . when?”

  “Actually, you asked me the last time I fired the gun, and I said I hadn’t fired it since I finished a shooting lesson. I’m not sure when I last saw it.”

  “How long ago did you have that lesson?”

  She thought for a moment. “About two months, I think. I’m sure we could get the exact date.”

  “And where was that?”

  “Wade’s gun shop in Bellevue. That’s also where I bought it.”

  “How long ago did you buy it?”

  “I don’t know. It was after my husband and I separated. Ten years.”

  Rowe considered her. “Any particular reason you decided to purchase a weapon?”

  “My ex-husband had become physically and verbally abusive.”

  “Physically?”

  “The divorce file has several police reports leading to a restraining order.”

  Rowe made a mental note to get the file. If Reid’s statement were true—and he doubted she would lie about something so easy to confirm—it cast Oberman’s unsolicited tip in a different light.

  “So why did you take the lessons two months ago?”

  “Because I started to receive threats.”

  “Threats from who, your ex?”

  “No. I don’t know who, exactly. I’m a single woman on a ‘crusade’ against drug dealers. They didn’t leave a name. But if I had to guess, I’d guess people who worked for Vasiliev.”

  “Did you report the threats?”

  “Every one.”

  Rowe made a mental note to also confirm the threats, and knew Crosswhite was writing it down. “Did anyone come out to the house to take a statement?”

  “No.”

  Rowe found his rhythm. “Did you ask them to? Did you ask them to put a wiretap on your phone?”

  “The calls came up on my home phone as private. I doubt very much the person was calling from his home.”

  “It was a man?”

  “It sounded like a man.”

  “Was it the same voice each time? Could you tell?”

  “No. But the person had an eastern European accent.”

  “How many of these calls do you think you received?”

  “You can look it up. I reported perhaps half a dozen. I was also followed.”

  “Followed how?”

  “A car, a silver Mercedes, would appear periodically outside my home and while I was driving, shopping.”

  “Did you ever see the driver?”

  “No. The car had tinted windows.”

  “When’s the last time you saw it?”

  “Monday night.”

  “This past Monday?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you believe these threats were because you are on a ‘crusade,’ as you put it.”

  “I don’t call it a crusade, Detective. The newspaper called it that. After my daughter died, I found out that there is very little the average citizen can do against someone like Vasiliev. I’ve been an advocate for a drug dealer liability act here in Washington.”

  “Which is what?”

  “It allows for civil penalties against drug dealers.”

  “What did the caller say? What were the threats?”

  She turned her head, her gaze on the wall. “ ‘Keep your nose out of other people’s business or your daughter will have company. Keep pushing and you’ll be next.’ That was the gist of it.”

  “Anything else you can remember?”

  “He equated me to a female dog and made explicit reference to one of my body parts.”

  Rowe could guess which one. “So you took the shooting class after you received these threats?”

  She nodded. “I’d also taken classes when I purchased the gun. They offered it, and I decided it was prudent. I hope I never shoot it again.”

  “Why is that?”

  She leaned forward, forearms on the table, hands folded. A cross on a simple gold chain around her neck dangled near the second open buttonhole of her shirt. Before leaving her home, she had changed into blue jeans, a light-blue silk blouse, and flat shoes. Judging by the fragrance Rowe detected when she got into the car, she had also taken the time to put on perfume. Now he realized from the soft contours and the m
ovement of the silk that Reid was not wearing a bra.

  “I didn’t appreciate the power . . . it scared me. Is that a bird?” she asked.

  Rowe lifted his eyes. He couldn’t be certain, but Reid seemed to have the bemused look of a woman who had caught a man’s eyes wandering. “Excuse me?”

  “The tattoo.” Her fingers brushed the ink on the inside of his forearm.

  “It’s a sparrow.”

  She sat back, still making eye contact. “Why a sparrow?”

  Rowe could not recall ever hearing the buzzing noise in the room, like a swarm of invisible insects. “Can I get you a glass of water, cup of coffee?”

  “I’m fine. But if you need a break . . . Is that your nickname? Sparrow?”

  He was certain someone had turned up the thermostat. “And you haven’t touched the gun again?”

  “Again?”

  “Since you brought it home after your final lesson.”

  “Not that I recall. It’s been in the box.”

  “Even after the threats? You never felt the need to take it out, make sure?”

  She shrugged. “It’s in my bedroom closet. I guess I figured I could always get to it if I needed it.”

  “You live alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Anyone else have access to your home? Maid? Cleaning service?”

  “It’s just me, Detective. I can be a slob, but there’s really not much to clean.”

  “What about your ex-husband?”

  “We don’t see each other, for obvious reasons.”

  “So he hasn’t been in your house?”

  “Not that I’m aware of.”

  “When was the last time you had contact with him?”

  Reid’s brow wrinkled. Her middle finger tapped her bottom lip. “Carly’s funeral?” she said. “No, wait . . . I ran into him at a function about two or three weeks ago. I can’t recall the date.”

  “What kind of function?”

  “The symphony, a fund-raiser.”

  “Did you and your ex-husband speak?”