“Anybody else here?” Tal asked the cops as they returned to the main floor.
“No, it’s clean. Neatest house I’ve ever seen. Looks like it was just scrubbed. Weird cleaning the house to kill yourself.”
In the kitchen they found another note, the handwriting just as unsteady as the warning about the gas.
To our friends and family:
We do this with great joy in hearts and with love for everone in our family and everyone we’ve known. Don’t feel any sorrow; weve never been happier.
The letter ended with the name, address and phone number of their attorney. Tal lifted his cell phone from his pocket and called the number.
“Hello.”
“Mr. Wells, please. This is Detective Simms with the county police.”
A hesitation. “Yes, sir?” the voice asked.
The pause was now on Tal’s part. “Mr. Wells?”
“That’s right.”
“You’re the Whitleys’ attorney?”
“That’s right. What’s this about?”
Tal took a deep breath. “I’m sorry to tell you that they’ve…passed away. It was a suicide. We found your name in their note.”
“My God, no…What happened?”
“How, you mean? In their garage. Their car.”
“When?”
“Tonight. A little while ago.”
“No!…Both of them? Not both of them?”
“I’m afraid so,” Tal replied.
There was a long pause. Finally the lawyer, clearly shaken, whispered, “I should’ve guessed.”
“How’s that? Had they talked about it?”
“No, no. But Sam was sick.”
“Sick?”
“His heart. It was pretty serious.”
Just like Don Benson.
More common denominators.
“His wife? Was she sick, too?”
“Oh, Elizabeth. No. She was in pretty good health…Does the daughter know?”
“They have a daughter?” This news instantly made the deaths exponentially more tragic.
“She lives in the area. I’ll call her.” He sighed. “That’s what they pay me for…Well, thank you, Officer…What was your name again?”
“Simms.”
“Thank you.”
Tal put his phone away and started slowly through the house. It reminded him of the Bensons’. Wealthy, tasteful, subdued. Only more so. The Whitleys were, he guessed, much richer.
Glancing at the pictures on the wall, many of which showed a cute little girl who’d grown into a beautiful young woman.
He was grateful that the lawyer would be making the call to their daughter.
Tal walked into the kitchen. No calendars here. Nothing that gave any suggestion they intended to kill themselves.
He looked again at the note.
Joy…Never been happier.
Nearby was another document. He looked it over and frowned. Curious. It was a receipt for the purchase of a restored MG automobile. Whitley’d paid for a deposit on the car earlier but had given the dealer the balance today.
Tal walked to the garage and hesitated before entering. But he steeled up his courage and stepped inside, glanced at the tarps covering the bodies. He located the vehicle identification number. Yes, this was the same car as on the receipt.
Whitley had bought an expensive restored antique vehicle today, driven it home and then killed himself.
Why?
There was motion in the driveway. Tal watched a long, dark gray van pull up outside. Leighey’s Funeral Home was printed on the side. Already? Had the officers called or the lawyer? Two men got out of the hearse and walked up to a uniformed officer. They seemed to know each other.
Then Tal paused. He noticed something familiar. He picked up a book on a table in the den. Making the Final Journey.
The same book the Bensons had.
Too many common denominators. The suicide book, the dangerous but not necessarily terminal heart diseases, spouses also dying.
Tal walked into the living room and found the older trooper filling out a form—not his questionnaire, Tal noticed, though every law enforcer in Westbrook was supposed to have them. Tal asked one of the men from the funeral home, “What’re you doing with the bodies?”
“Instructions were cremation as soon as possible.”
“Can we hold off on that?”
“Hold off?” he asked and glanced at the Hamilton officer. “How do you mean, Detective?”
Tal said, “Get an autopsy?”
“Why?”
“Just wondering if we can.”
“You’re county,” the heavyset officer said. “You’re the boss. Only, I mean, you know—you can’t do it halfway. Either you declare a twenty-one-twenty-four or you don’t.”
Oh, that. He wondered what exactly it was.
A glance at the sports car. “Okay, I’ll do that. I’m declaring a twenty-four-twenty-one.”
“You mean twenty-one-twenty-four.”
“That’s what I meant to say.”
“You sure about this?” the officer asked, looking uncertainly toward the funeral home assistant, who was frowning; even he apparently knew more about the damn 2124 than Tal did.
The statistician looked outside and saw the other man from the funeral home pull a stretcher out of the back of the hearse and walk toward the bodies.
“Yes,” he said firmly. “I’m sure.” And tapped loudly on the window, gesturing for the man to stop.
+ − < = > ÷
THE NEXT MORNING, Monday, Tal saw the head of the Crime Scene Unit walk into the detective pen and head straight toward LaTour’s office. He was carrying a half-dozen folders.
He had a gut feeling that this was the Whitley crime scene report and was out of his office fast, to intercept him. “Hey, how you doing? That about the Whitley case?”
“Yeah. It’s just the preliminary. But there was an expedite on it. Is Greg in? LaTour?”
“I think it’s for me.”
“You’re…”
“Simms.”
“Oh, yeah,” the man said, looking at the request attached to the report. “I didn’t notice. I figured it was LaTour. Being head of Homicide, you know.”
A 2124, it turned out, was a declaration that a death was suspicious. Like hitting a fire alarm button, it set all kinds of activities in motion—getting Crime Scene to search the house, collect evidence, record friction ridge prints and photograph and video the scene; scheduling autopsies; and alerting the prosecutor’s office that a homicide investigation case file had been started. In his five years on the job Tal had never gotten so many calls before ten o’clock as he had this morning.
Tal glanced into the captain’s office then LaTour’s. Nobody seemed to notice that a statistician who’d never issued a parking ticket in his life was clutching crime scene files.
Except Shellee, who subtly blessed herself and winked.
Tal asked the Crime Scene detective, “Preliminary, you said. What else’re you waiting for?”
“Phone records, handwriting confirmation of the note and autopsy results. Hey, I’m really curious. What’d you find that made you think this was suspicious? Fits the classic profile of every suicide I’ve ever worked.”
“Some things.”
“Things,” the seasoned cop said, nodding slowly. “Things. Ah. Got a suspect?”
“Not yet.”
“Ah. Well, good luck. You’ll need it.”
Back in his office Tal carefully filed away the spreadsheet he’d been working on then opened the CSU files. He spread the contents out on his desk.
We begin with inspiration, a theorem, an untested idea: There is a perfect odd number. There is a point at which pi repeats. The universe is infinite.
A mathematician then attempts to construct a proof that shows irrefutably that his position either is correct or cannot be correct.
Tal Simms knew how to create such proofs with numbers.
But to prove
the theorem that there was something suspicious about the deaths of the Bensons and the Whitleys? He was at a loss and stared at the hieroglyphics of the crime scene reports as he grew increasingly discouraged. He had basic academy training, of course, but beyond that he had no investigation skills or experience.
But then he realized that perhaps this wasn’t quite accurate. He did have one talent that might help: the cornerstone of his profession as a mathematician—logic.
He turned his analytical mind to the materials on his desk as he examined each item carefully. He first picked the photos of the Whitleys’ bodies. All in graphic, colorful detail. They troubled him a great deal. Still, he forced himself to examine them carefully, every inch. After some time he decided that nothing suggested that the Whitleys had been forced into the car or had struggled with any assailants.
He set the photos aside and read the documents in the reports themselves. There were no signs of any break-in, though the front door wasn’t locked, so someone might have simply walked in. But with the absence of any foul play this seemed unlikely. And their jewelry, cash and other valuables were untouched.
One clue, though, suggested that all was not as it seemed. The Latents team found that both notes contained, in addition to Sam Whitley’s, Tal’s and the police officers’ prints, smudges that were probably from gloved hands or fingers protected by a cloth or tissue. The team had also found glove prints in the den where the couple had had their last drink, the room where the note had been found, and in the garage. It was, however, impossible to tell if they had been made before or after the deaths.
Gloves? Tal wondered. Curious.
The team had also found fresh tire prints on the driveway. The prints didn’t match the MG, the other cars owned by the victims or the vehicles driven by the police, the medical team or the funeral home. The report concluded that the car had been there within the three hours prior to death. The tread marks were indistinct, so that the brand of tire couldn’t be determined, but the wheelbase meant the vehicle was a small one.
A search of the trace evidence revealed several off-white cotton fibers—one on the body of Elizabeth Whitley and one on the living room couch—that didn’t appear to match what the victims were wearing or any of the clothes in their closets. An inventory of drugs in the medicine cabinets and kitchen revealed no antidepressants. This suggested, even if tenuously, that mood problems and thoughts of suicide might not have been a theme in the Whitley house recently.
Tal rose, walked to his doorway and called Shellee in.
“Hi, boss. How was your weekend?”
“Fine,” he said absently. “I need you to do something for me.”
“Are you—? I mean, you look tired.”
“Yes, yes, I’m fine. It’s just about this case.”
“What case?”
“The suicide.”
“Oh. What—?”
“I need to find out if anybody’s bought a book called Making the Final Journey. Then something about suicide and euthanasia.”
“A book. Sure.”
“I don’t remember exactly. But Making the Journey or Making the Final Journey is the start of the title.”
“Okay. And I’m supposed to check on—?”
“If anybody bought it.”
“I mean, everywhere? There’re probably a lot of—”
“For now, just in Westbrook County. In the last couple of weeks. Bookstores. And all the online booksellers, too.”
“Hey, can I be a cop?”
Tal hesitated. But then he said, “Oh, hell, sure. You want, you can be a detective.”
“Yippee,” she said. “Detective Shellee Bingham.”
“And if they haven’t sold any, give them my name and tell them if they do, call us right away.”
“We need a warrant or anything?” Detective Shellee asked, thoughtful now.
Did they?
“Hmm. I don’t know. Let’s just try it without and see what they say.”
Ten minutes after she left, Tal felt a shadow over him and he looked up to see Captain Ronald Dempsey’s six-foot-three form fill the doorway in his ubiquitous striped shirt, his sleeves ubiquitously rolled up.
The man’s round face smiled pleasantly. But Tal thought immediately: Busted.
“Captain.”
“Hey, Tal.” Dempsey leaned against the doorjamb, looking over the desktop. “Got a minute?”
“Sure do.”
Tal had known that they’d find out about the 2124 and was going to Dempsey with it soon, of course; but he’d hoped to wait until his proof about the suspicious suicide was somewhat further developed.
“Heard about the twenty-one-twenty-four at the Whitleys’.”
“Sure.”
“What’s up with that?”
Tal explained about the two suicides, the common denominators.
Dempsey nodded. “Kind of a coincidence, sure. But you know, Tal, we don’t have a lot of resources for full investigations. Like, we’ve only got one dedicated homicide Crime Scene Unit.”
“Didn’t know that.”
“And there was a shooting in Rolling Hills Estates last night. Two people shot up bad, one died. The unit was late running that scene ’cause you had them in Hamilton.”
“I’m sorry about that, Captain.”
“It’s also expensive. Sending out CS.”
“Expensive? I didn’t think about that.”
“Thousands, I’m talking. Crime Scene bills everything back to us. Every time they go out. Then there’re lab tests and autopsies and everything. The ME, too. You know what an autopsy costs?”
“They bill us?” Tal asked.
“It’s just the more we save for the county the better we look, you know.”
“Right. I guess it would be expensive.”
“You bet.” No longer smiling, the captain adjusted his sleeves. “Other thing is, the way I found out: I heard from their daughter. Sandra Whitley. She was going to make funeral arrangements and then she hears about the autopsy. Phew…she’s pissed off. Threatening to sue…I’m going to have to answer questions. So. Now, what exactly made you twenty-one-twenty-four the scene, Tal?”
He scanned the papers on his desk, uneasy, wondering where to start. “Well, a couple of things. They’d just bought—”
“Hold on there a minute,” the captain said, holding up a finger.
Dempsey leaned out the door and shouted, “LaTour!…Hey, LaTour?”
“What?” came the grumbling baritone.
“Come’re for a minute. I’m with Simms.”
Tal heard the big man make his way toward the Unreal Crimes side of the detective pen. The ruddy, goatee’d face appeared in the office. Ignoring Tal, he listened as the captain explained about the Whitleys’ suicide.
“Another one, huh?”
“Tal declared a twenty-one-twenty-four.”
The homicide cop nodded noncommittally. “Uh-huh. Why?”
The question was directed toward Dempsey, who turned toward Tal.
“Well, I was looking at the Bensons’ deaths and I pulled up the standard statistical profile on suicides in Westbrook County. Now, when you look at all the attributes—”
“Attributes?” LaTour asked, frowning, as if tasting sand.
“Right. The attributes of the Bensons’ death—and the Whitleys’, too, now—they’re way out of the standard range. Their deaths are outliers.”
“Out-liars? The fuck’s that?”
Tal explained. In statistics an outlier was an event significantly different from a group of related events in the same category. He gave a concrete example. “Say you’re analyzing five murderers. Three perps killed a single victim each, one of them killed two victims, and the final man was a serial killer who’d murdered twenty people. To draw any meaningful conclusions from that, you need to treat the last one as an outlier and analyze him separately. Otherwise, your analysis’ll be mathematically correct but misleading. Running the numbers, we see that the mean—the av
erage—number of victims killed by each suspect is five. But that exaggerates the homicidal nature of the first four men, and underplays the last one. See what I mean?”
The frown on LaTour’s face suggested he didn’t. But he said, “So you’re saying these two suicides’re different from most of the others in Westbrook.”
“Significantly different. Fewer than six percent of the population kill themselves when they’re facing a possibly terminal illness. That number drops to two point six percent when the victim has medical insurance and down to point nine when the net worth of the victim is over one million dollars. It drops even further when the victims are married and are in the relatively young category of sixty-five to seventy-five, like these folks. And love-pact deaths are only two percent of suicides nationwide and ninety-one percent of those involve victims under the age of twenty-one…Now, what do you think the odds are that two heart patients would take their own lives, and their wives’, in the space of two days?”
“I don’t really know, Tal,” LaTour said, clearly uninterested. “What else you got? Suspicious, I mean.”
“Okay, the Whitleys’d just bought a car earlier that day. Rare, antique MG. Why do that if you’re going to kill yourself?”
LaTour offered, “They needed a murder weapon. Didn’t want a gun. Probably there was something about the MG that meant something to them. From when they were younger, you know. They wanted to go out that way.”
“Makes sense,” Dempsey said, tugging at a sleeve.
“There’s more,” Tal said and explained about the gloves, the fiber, the tire tread, the smudges on the note. “I’m thinking that somebody else was there around the time they killed themselves. Or just after.”
LaTour said, “Lemme take a look.”
Tal pushed the report toward him. The big cop examined everything closely. Then shook his head. “I just don’t see it,” he said to the captain. “No evidence of a break-in or struggle…The note?” He shrugged. “Looks authentic. I mean, Documents’ll tell us for sure but look—” He held up the Whitleys’ checkbook ledger and the suicide note, side by side. The script was virtually identical. “Smudges from gloves on paper? We see that on every piece of paper we find at a scene. Hell, half the pieces of paper here have smudges on them that look like smeared FRs—”
Trouble in Mind: The Collected Stories, Volume 3 Page 40
