by Roger Johns
One of the houses Wallace had asked MaryBeth about was north of Craig’s place. The other one was a few hundred yards to the south—the direction she was approaching from.
“Let’s check for signs of recent activity,” she said, pulling into the driveway of the southernmost house. She peeked into the mailbox at the street, then approached the front door, while Dennis looked inside the dumpster in the carport.
“Empty,” he called out, and then moved off to check the side yard to the north.
Wallace knocked on the front door and waited several seconds. When no one answered, she walked around to the south side of the house, looking at the windows and letting her eyes comb the ground for fresh cigarette butts and other signs that someone may have been on the property in the last few days.
As she rounded the corner into the backyard, she saw Dennis approaching from the opposite direction.
“Anything.”
“Not a thing. But this is a pretty cool place. The lake, I mean. I’ve never been out here, before. Have you?”
“Years ago.” Wallace stole a quick look northward, toward Craig’s place. Even if anyone had occupied the residence here during the past weekend, they would have been too far away to be of any help. “Let’s move on?”
They returned to her car and cruised slowly up the road. Craig’s house sat about forty feet back from the road. The thick layer of loose white shells that formed the driveway made hollow popping noises under her tires.
The place was at least sixty years old and it looked it. Wallace had been inside a few times and, while the interior was more up-to-date than the exterior, the whole business was rather plain. Craig had told her that he felt nervous about being conspicuous with his money. She knew he could buy the twenty most expensive homes on the lake without breathing hard, but he was the private type. Consequently, his place stayed old and unassuming.
They climbed out of the car. Wallace popped the trunk and Dennis started hauling his cases out. Wallace remained by her open door, one hand on the doorframe and the other on the roof. She looked past the house to the lake beyond.
The breeze blowing off the water carried the faint scent of fish and marsh mud. It was intoxicating. It made her think of all the times she and her family came to the lake during her growing-up summers.
An ancient pickup truck with clattering valves and a collection of grimy junk in the bed trundled by on the road behind her. She listened as the rumble of its engine grew fainter.
“Dennis, let’s do a quick check-around and then I’ll walk to the house just north of here. You wait here for the deputy who’s bringing the search warrant. A key to the front door should be arriving any minute, courtesy of Eddie Pitkin’s lawyer.”
“Got it.” He walked back toward the car.
The shells in the driveway squealed and scraped under her boots as she walked up to the carport. The trash bin was empty.
The carport ended at a storeroom. A breezeway between the storeroom and the house led to a weathered wooden staircase that followed the slope of the yard down to a boardwalk that ended at a floating dock at the edge of the lake. Tubular steel swimming pool ladders disappeared into the water from each end of the dock.
Wallace paused at the top of the stairs and looked across a vacant lot toward the house to the north. The treads of the steps flexed gently beneath her as she descended.
At the bottom, she turned and looked back at Craig’s house. Dennis was scrutinizing the side yard to the south. A big screened porch covered most of the rear of the structure—empty, except for several folding lawn chairs stacked against the wall next to the back door.
The wind picked up, so she took an elastic band from her pocket and pulled her hair into a ponytail to keep it from blowing into her eyes. She walked along the boardwalk toward the dock, then looked north again, toward the neighboring house.
It was a newer structure and parts of its dock looked as if they had been recently replanked. The sight line from where she stood to the back porch of the nearby house was unobstructed. Anyone sitting here would be easily visible to someone on the back porch of the other house. Binoculars would probably be needed in order to make a clear identification.
Wallace waded through the ankle-high grass of the empty lot to the other house. Once upon a time, there had been a building on the lot, but brick footings and a rectangular-shaped bare patch were all that remained.
Normally, Wallace would have trudged back up to the street and knocked on the front door. Lot-to-lot shortcuts were the privilege of little kids and longtime neighbors. Strangers were expected to observe basic lakeside etiquette and approach from the street. But because the house was supposed to be unoccupied, she hiked through the yard to the back porch. She tried the door. It was locked.
A gravel pathway led around to the side of the carport. She lifted the lid on the heavy plastic dumpster that was pushed up against the rear wall. Beer cans and fast-food boxes covered the bottom. The containers were recent enough to still have the smell of their contents.
Wallace wheeled the bin into the carport and pulled on a pair of latex gloves. She dumped the trash onto the concrete and poked through it for some clue as to who had left it. Nothing. She pushed everything back into the dumpster and set it against the wall. Before they left, she would bag the contents and haul it in to have it printed. Maybe she would get lucky.
The carport door and the front door were locked. Pleated sheer curtains blocked her view through the panes in the door. All of the other windows were screened and curtained, as well.
When she looked back toward Craig’s house she saw a blue Range Rover and a gray sheriff’s department SUV with light bars parked out front.
TEN
“Hello, Monte. The investigator business must be pretty good these days.” Wallace nodded in the direction of the Range Rover.
“Not bad. Not bad,” he said distractedly.
Monte was a former East Baton Rouge sheriff’s deputy who now worked exclusively as the investigator for Tasha Kovacovich, the lawyer representing Eddie Pitkin. Wallace had prevailed upon the lawyer to have someone bring a key and the security codes to Craig’s lake house. She could have called a locksmith, but that would change the state of the locks more than a key would and might obscure something she needed to see.
She also could have forced the door open to execute her search warrant, but that too might damage something that could later turn out to be important, so she had asked for the key. She had gone through Eddie’s lawyer to avoid further contact with Craig.
The door from the carport into the house stood open and Dennis was scrolling through the memory on the security system keypad. Monte stood as close to the action as he could without touching the crime-scene tape Dennis had stretched across the threshold, and used his phone to record what the tech was doing with the security system.
“Excuse us, a minute, would you, Monte?” Wallace waited until the investigator moved several paces away. “Have you found anything?” she asked Dennis in a low voice.
“Someone entered and exited several times starting at two o’clock last Friday afternoon, and ending at eight seventeen on Sunday morning. Mostly in and out of the back door. Nothing since then.”
“What about between seven and ten P.M. on Friday?”
“The last exit was at five forty-three P.M., followed by a reentry at seven oh eight P.M. After that, the system was set to Home. Lots of activity on Saturday, ending with a final entry at eight thirty-eight P.M. Nothing after that until eight seventeen Sunday morning, when it was set to Away. That was it until I opened it up just now.”
“Have you checked anything for prints yet?”
“Yeah. The doorknob and this keypad. When I’m done with this,” he pointed at the security system panel, “I’ll dust and tape all the doorknobs, fridge handles, faucet taps—all your basic touch points—then I’ll do the lawn chairs on the back porch. We might get a few clear shots. Who knows? You got a list of people we need to ge
t elimination prints from?”
“I’ll work that up and get it to you. Did you find anything on the keypad buttons?”
“Well, they’ve obviously been touched, because a lot of activity was inputted, but I couldn’t lift anything. That’s the first thing I checked after Monte gave me the key,” Dennis said, scribbling something on a tablet strapped to his right thigh. “But the buttons were either knuckled or the pad might have been wiped, because everything on it is smudged.”
“Well, that’s just lovely.”
Wallace looked toward the gray SUV parked on the street. “I’ll be right back.”
“Hey, Detective,” Monte called out as she passed him. He eyed her quickly, head to toe. “Tasha K wanted me to tell you that she’s happy to play ball on this house-key business because you’re trying to verify an alibi. Anything after this, though, you’re on your own.” He shot her a pained look.
Wallace stared at him like she smelled something bad. She thought about arguing with him, just to set the record straight—that she wasn’t looking to prove or disprove an alibi—but she knew Monte was trying to bait her into an argument to see if he could shake some interesting information loose or goad her into saying something imprudent.
“We didn’t need her help, Monte. I could have used a crowbar to crack the door open, so the way I see it, by having you bustle on over with the key we’re doing you and your client’s brother a favor. Not the other way around.”
He raised his hands in surrender. “Hey, don’t shoot the messenger. You know me. Just call me pushover Monte. But TK? Whoa. I’m actually surprised she rolled over so easy on this. I mean, you know her. A day without making somebody cry is like a day without sunshine.”
“Does she know you say things like that?”
“Yeah. Probably.” He grinned and then looked back over his shoulder to where Dennis was working.
Wallace knew that Monte was telling the truth about how his boss operated. If Tasha ever asked Wallace to return the favor and Wallace balked, a press conference would be called and everyone with a pulse would get an earful about how playing nice with the police, in hopes of getting to the truth, was a fool’s errand. That oppression was the only dividend an investment of goodwill could be expected to pay—or some such nonsense.
In general, Wallace couldn’t stand Tasha. But she didn’t think she would hesitate to call her if she ever needed a lawyer to defend her in a criminal proceeding.
“Good to see you, Monte. Please tell your employer … something nice from me.”
“Yeah, sure. You bet.” He gave her another quick once-over, then went back to hovering around the door.
Wallace walked toward the sheriff’s vehicle. The deputy was sitting inside, with her door open.
“I’m Wallace Hartman. Thank you for bringing the warrant.”
“Not a problem, Detective. I’ll hang around for a bit, and then if you don’t need anything more I’ll head back out on patrol. Here’s my number in case you need me after that.” She handed Wallace a generic contact card with her name and number hand-printed in a blank space.
When Wallace returned to the house, Dennis was coming in from the back porch.
The faint pine scent of household cleaner dampened Wallace’s mood. If Eddie had cleaned away signs of his presence before he vacated the premises, he had done himself no favors.
“Shit.”
“Yeah, really. How unlucky is that?” Dennis said, sniffing and twitching his nose.
Wallace began a slow, methodical tour of the house while Dennis finished his evidence gather.
All of the windows were locked and none looked as if they had been forced open. It was the same for all of the doors. And they were all wired to the security system.
As Dennis packed his gear, Wallace walked out to the front yard and called Glenn Marioneaux. She got his voicemail again and hung up. The man’s unwillingness to participate was becoming irksome.
She grabbed a large evidence bag from her trunk and hustled back to the neighboring house to the north. She emptied the contents of the dumpster into the bag and then returned to her car.
Wallace was beginning to think the search might have been for nothing. It would have been nice to find a newspaper with Eddie’s prints and the relevant dates. Or even a bag of newly purchased slip locks.
The security system showed that someone had been in and out of the house from the Friday before until the Monday after Marioneaux was killed, but without something tying Eddie to the lake house at the critical time or pointing an incriminating finger at him, the whole trip looked like a waste. Maybe the trash from the dumpster next door had been handled by someone whose prints were already on file. Someone who might have seen something useful.
* * *
They were six blocks from the police station in Baton Rouge when her phone buzzed. It was the department’s crime lab.
“Detective Hartman? This is Leola Cassidy. I’m a lab tech in the CSI Division. I wouldn’t normally call directly with test results, but I know this case of yours is real touchy, so I thought you could use this sooner than you might come across it in my formal reports.”
“Leola, this case is radioactive. You’ve got my full attention.”
“We’re still not done examining the victim’s clothing, however, on the exterior of his shirt, on the back and shoulders only, we found a fair number of fine, pale glassy filaments.”
“Fabric filaments?”
“Insulation.”
Wallace pulled into the parking lot of a garden supply store and killed the engine.
“These are relatively short fibers, so I’m thinking it’s blown-in insulation. The type you’d find in an attic, not the longer, straighter variety that comes glued to the paper-backed batts you’d see stapled up between wall studs.”
“If I brought you fibers for comparison?” Wallace’s heart started to race.
“We could determine if the fibers have the same chemical composition and cross-sectional shape, and we could verify the shade and hue of any dyes or pigments that impregnate the fibers. Do you have a source in mind?”
“In fact, I do.”
She speed-dialed LeAnne. The call was picked up after one ring.
“Can you pull off the surveillance of Tonya Lennar?”
“Sure. She’s just making her cleaning rounds.”
“Meet me in Burley’s office as soon as you can.”
ELEVEN
Jason Burley looked up as Wallace and LeAnne filed into his office. He was on the phone, so he motioned for them to sit.
“I’ve been watching the news and I read this morning’s paper,” he said, without preamble, as soon as he ended the call. “I want you in body armor, twenty-four-seven, until this investigation is over.” He pointed at Wallace.
“Even in the shower?” Wallace asked.
“Especially in the shower.”
She took his reaction to her stupid joke as a sign that he wasn’t letting the case get to him.
“We need some help,” she said.
“I’m all ears.”
“We need a warrant to search Eddie Pitkin’s house and cars and we need it really fast. And the lake house on False River will have to be searched again.”
“I’m still all ears.”
Wallace explained Leola Cassidy’s discovery and what she thought it meant.
“So how do you want to divvy this up?” he asked.
“I’ll go back out to the lake house and take Dennis with me. Can you and LeAnne and another tech search the Pitkin house?”
“I don’t need a chaperone,” LeAnne said.
“But you will need someone to run interference for you, because you can bet it’s going to be a media extravaganza,” Burley said. “So, what are we looking for?” He pulled up the warrant affidavit form on his computer.
“Every piece of clothing from his closet and dressers, anything in a laundry basket,” Wallace said, ticking the items off on her fingers. “The lint filte
r from the dryer, the sink and shower traps, and we’ll want the inside of the washing machine swabbed—the filters, the agitator, inner and outer drums, the drain hose, and the standpipe it drains into.”
“We need to check the inside of his car,” LeAnne said. “And his wife’s car, and his eldest daughter’s car, especially the surface of the seat belt that would come into contact with the driver’s clothing.”
Burley gave them a questioning look.
“Plus the trash, inside the house,” LeAnne said. “And in the dumpster, with an eye out for lint-roller tapes, discarded clothing, anything that might pick up stray fibers.” She looked a Wallace.
Wallace shrugged in agreement.
* * *
Wallace hated feeling stupid. She wanted to blame it on all the other things pulling at her—Mason, her mother, the unrest the case was kicking up across Baton Rouge—but maybe she had just missed a trick, plain and simple.
The summer after her junior year in high school, she had worked with her two brothers renovating and restoring older homes in the neighborhoods around LSU. Her elder brother, Martin, had eventually become a home builder and real estate developer. But during those early years, he had stuck to fixing things that were already there, instead of building new things.
Spending all that time with her brothers had been incredible. But the work itself she found frustrating. For the most part, the homeowners they dealt with behaved like spoiled children. They changed their minds every time the wind changed direction, they blamed Martin and his crew for problems that were clearly of their own making, and they pitched a fit over the most inconsequential things.
Martin always handled his clients with a calm, smiling, “Yes, sir,” and, “Yes, ma’am.” When Wallace had volunteered to slap the shit out of a chronically obnoxious whiner, Martin laughed at her and told her she was cute. On days like that, she had wanted to slap the shit out of him too.
