As per the plan they’d worked out, Bennett had come and spoken to Johanna Schmitt just a little while earlier. He’d brought his assistant, Kate, with him to the home and she’d graciously volunteered to welcome visitors and accept casseroles for Mrs. Schmitt while Bennett took the widow out of the house. Donovan didn’t know what Bennett had done to get her out, but he was grateful.
Marshall Bennett was possibly more determined than they were to get the murder solved. He did not like crime marring his perfect town. Curie was his dream, and the death of Marat Rychenkov was his blackest mark.
The door opened and it was Kate who now greeted Eleri and Donovan at the door as though she were the homeowner. It was not a perfect setup, but it had its advantages. Anyone who asked Johanna Schmitt about it would get the answer that yes, Kate was supposed to be there, and she was supposed to let people in.
On the other hand, Donovan still worried that he and Eleri were too recognizable, that they were not good actors, that the residents of Curie were smart enough to figure it all out. As of right now Bennett believed only Mrs. Schmitt and a handful of the police knew Rychenkov had been murdered at all. He desperately wanted to keep it that way. The founder’s willingness to dive in made Donovan think the case wasn’t really NightShade worthy in the first place, but that Bennett had pulled expensive strings to get the FBI undercover in his town.
“Hello, we’re here to check the electrical outlets in the house,” Donovan said to Kate as was their plan.
“Of course, come on in. Mrs. Schmitt isn’t here right now, but I’ll be happy to help out.” Kate stepped back and waved them in with a smile and a gesture grand enough to be seen from across the street. Once they were inside, she turned to them. “Marshall told me I’m to assist you in any way I can. If that means staying out of the way, or stalling people at the door, or cleaning, that’s what I’ll do. Just tell me.”
“Thank you,” Donovan nodded. “But right now, we’re just inspecting.”
He liked Kate, but they’d had to blow their cover with her to get in. However, chances were good that—as she was Bennett's assistant—she'd already known Rychenkov’s death wasn’t an accident and that there were FBI agents in town dealing with the case.
Adding to his mental list, Donovan decided he had to get the names of the people who knew about the murder, or at least the ones who were supposed to. If none of them was the murderer, then there was at least one more person who knew. If he and Eleri could figure that out, they would be miles ahead.
Once inside, as Kate stepped out of the way, Donovan and Eleri got to work. They'd been carrying toolboxes, but now they opened them and carefully laid out the forensic equipment they’d packed inside. They had cameras, rulers, line tapes, levels, fingerprint-lifting kits, an ionic print lifter, and more.
Donovan looked up at Kate and made his request. “I hate to ask this, but if you could go behind us and clean up anything that’s out of the norm, that would give us the opportunity to get more done—and to make a quick escape if they come back unexpectedly.”
“That’s not a problem.” Kate offered a smile, but he couldn’t quite tell if it was genuine or not. “And don’t worry. I’ll know before Marshall gets back. I have him on a tracker.” She held up her phone and Donovan almost laughed at her glee. He wondered if Marshall knew his assistant was tracking him. “As long as Johanna Schmitt doesn’t ditch him and flee home, we’re good.”
Hopefully, the widow Schmitt would not know her home had been inspected by FBI agents.
"This way," Donovan said, and the three of them headed back toward the bedroom. "Has Mrs. Schmitt been sleeping here?" he turned and asked Kate, though Kate had no idea. Of course, she wouldn't. It made no sense that she would, but he felt the need to ask just in case.
"This," Eleri finally spoke up as she pointed to the bed, "was where he was found."
"Okay. Let's figure out how he was tied down first." Donovan went to work, immediately plucking at the covers, looking at the headboard. It was a nice, carved wood, but it was a solid piece. There was no place to tie a victim to, not really.
Eleri looked at Donovan and managed to say what he was thinking. "The livor mortis suggested his hands had been down by his side, his legs probably not spread-eagle. So he wasn't splayed out across the bed, more just tied down so as not to move. Which is weird."
Dropping down on her hands and knees, she immediately began checking under the bed. After shining her flashlight here and there for a moment, she reached a hand up. "Hand me my camera, Donovan, please."
He could only hope she'd found something. He only had to wait a minute.
"Look."
He couldn’t get his larger frame down under the bed quite as easily as she had, but he tried.
Pointing to a mark in the wood, she directed him to look at the slat that ran across the bottom of the mattress frame. "This looks relatively new."
He pointed to a spot where it had a small chunk out of it. "Maybe, but it’s nothing big. It could have been made by somebody running into it.”
"Yeah, but if you ran a human leg into it, you wouldn't do that. This mark would come from something more solid. The gouge doesn't look like it’s from anything sharp." She was examining the damage as she spoke. "I don't see evidence of a corner, but it's small. If we can find anything corresponding, maybe we’ll have something."
"Given how he was tied down, and that there’s nowhere to tie him to, my guess would be a hook," he said. It always felt weird to suggest how he would have tied someone up, slashed their throat, or stabbed them. But Eleri thought nothing of it other than to evaluate the idea itself. Immediately, she got down ever lower, trying to get her head under the edge of the bed. But the gap was too narrow.
"No one's crawling under here to hide out," she said.
"Nope. Hold on." He went into the toolbox and pulled out a small mirror. It took a few minutes to work the logistics, but they did find a corresponding scrape on the underside of the wood slat. All right, maybe she was onto something.
He headed around to the opposite side of the bed and looked there, too. Though he couldn't confirm the two marks were the same, there was another mark. He’d found a small, roundish dent, also on the back side of the wood, and another corresponding divot on the front.
"I don't even know what that would be from," she said.
"I do—the hook from a bungee cord."
"What?"
"They've got small hooks—one inch across?—at the end, usually with a rubber stopper on the end. They're probably about the right size to go around this wood, not entirely, which is why it's got the dot in the back and the rub spot on the front corner."
"Oh. But he wasn't tied up with bungees."
"No, it would mean he was tied up with rope, and then the rope was attached to the bungee, and the bungee hooked to the bed."
"Seems pretty far-fetched."
"I agree, but it's what we've got." As silly as it was, it was clear the vic had been tied up. He’d been restrained enough to damage his skin, so he’d pulled against the rope—which meant the rope was attached enough to not give way. And there was nothing here to tie rope to.
They headed to the foot of the bed and discovered similar markings there. “These marks look like the hooks scooted a little in between tugs…as though he moved his feet around trying to get loose, probably.”
"Wait," Eleri said, and headed back to the side of the bed and pointed downward. "Look. If these are the marks we think they are, then look. Look where they are."
Donovan looked, but he didn't see anything. They were right in the middle of the bed. That's when he understood. “So the perp tied him down with his hands in the middle of the bed, but they looked like they were relatively flat.”
“Right, they weren't up over his head. He wasn't even overly restrained.”
Donovan pushed her aside for a moment. Rychenkov had been relatively tall, thus Donovan was the better stand-in. He laid down on the bed for a moment, wo
ndering what evidence he was leaving behind. Then he had a better thought.
"Wait.” Donovan sat up and called out, “Kate, can you come in here?” Then he motioned for her to take his place. He hated lying in someone else's bed, or asking an assistant to do it, but he needed to see what had happened.
"Are you serious?" Kate asked.
"We're trying to solve a murder."
"All right, then." Bennett’s assistant clearly didn't like it much either, but she lay down on the bed.
"In the middle," Eleri said. It was only a queen, and so the middle wasn’t too far from the sides. Kate lay there for a moment, arms crossed on her chest, until Donovan and Eleri gave her more specific instructions. "Feet here." She was wearing a skirt and seemed a little self-conscious about it. Donovan wanted to mention that he was a doctor but didn't think that would play well.
Still, as he went to the foot of the bed and looked at the marks on the bottom, he had Eleri attempt to line Kate up to the position the body would have been in. When they looked at it, they discovered his arms were indeed down at his side. If the marks were right, that was the only option.
"Who does that?" Eleri said. "Why would his arms be down at his side? That's a terrible restraint method."
"Yeah." Even Kate was getting into it now. "When you tie someone's arms over their head, or tie their wrists together. . . Were his wrists tied together?"
"There's no evidence that they were bound together," Eleri replied. "They appear to be individually wrapped at the wrist."
But Donovan only stood there and stared. There was something about it, something about the hands being at the side and him still not getting loose, that began to touch an idea at the back of his brain.
8
Eleri headed down the front walkway again the next morning. It was a little later today and Donovan was already gone. She hadn’t slept well after their talk last night about the Rychenkov-Schmitt home.
“Did you get anything—any impressions? Images?—as you touched it?” her partner had asked.
And that was the bitch of it. “I touched everything!” she told him. “I left fingerprints all over that room.” She couldn’t get an image through gloves. She needed skin contact … or she had. “I didn’t get anything.”
Donovan had only nodded and turned the conversation to what they had found, but the issue had picked at Eleri all night. Was she broken? She’d thought she was getting better at this. But she hadn’t seen Emmaline since she left New Orleans with her sister’s bones in a box. And now she wasn’t able to get a sensation off of anything. Not even a glimpse of a scene or an emotion from the Rychenkov-Schmitt home.
She hadn’t told Donovan how much it was bothering her, or that it had interfered with her sleep. He’d headed out the door to Lincoln. He would go to the CDC building to take one last look at Rychenkov’s body.
Donovan was supposed to be consulting at the local walk-in clinic; however, he'd left town in hopes that he wouldn't be called. The problem with all their “cover” was pretty much the same: he could say he was at the hospital in Lincoln, but anyone who questioned him would know that he wasn't producing the correct answers.
They had both been through training for this in the FBI. They’d learned how to fake names, provide bad descriptions, look up information that could be confirmed and mix it in with more that couldn’t. In most places, you could make up a name, say you consulted with Dr. So-and-so or went into the office over on that street with the grocery and the laundromat. In most places, an agent could fudge it, even more than a little. Eleri just didn't believe she could put any of that past the residents of Curie.
Every interaction she’d had only solidified that concern. She now pulled the mail out again, having let it sit overnight so she could do exactly this. As she did, she saw Maggie walking up the front steps next door, exactly as she’d hoped. Someone to talk to. Maggie waved at her, only this time, the door opened before she reached it. It was LeDonRic who opened the door first, not making his girlfriend knock.
Before Eleri could even say hello, she realized he had appeared at his front door in a full medieval knight suit of armor.
Eleri felt her mouth fall open as he clanked his way out onto the small landing, sword hanging by his side, face shield raised, a wide grin splashed across his lips. He looked as though he’d just stepped out of the past. If Eleri didn’t recognize him, she might have questioned things. The only really anomaly was the Dalmatian on a leash at his side.
Maggie scurried up the front walk and took the leash from his less-than-reactive fingers. "I've got her. You go, play with your friends, Sir Mix-a-Lot."
“I’m not Sir Mix-A-Lot!” But there was no real anger behind his protest.
Maggie wasn’t even paying attention to him anymore as she turned toward Eleri and waved again briefly before she noticed the look on Eleri's face. Bringing the dog over, she started to make conversation. Eleri tried to close her jaw.
When she was standing by Eleri, with Lady MacBeth sitting quietly by her side—totally unaffected by any of it—she said, "He's larping."
Eleri still had nothing. She shook her head indicating she didn't understand.
"L-A-R-P," Maggie said. "Live action role play. He's meeting up with a bunch of his other friends who will also be dressed in knight-wear."
"Is that legit?" Eleri asked, pointing to the large knight as he clanked his way down the sidewalk.
"It is. You have no idea how long he looked for an actual suit of armor that fit him. Or how much he’s invested in this. He had it re-fitted a little bit to accommodate his height, but he had a historical expert come in and do the adjusting for him."
"And there's a whole group of them?" Eleri asked as the dog sniffed around her ankles and made a circle. Eleri just hoped Lady Macbeth wasn't going to lift her leg and pee on her shoes. Though seriously, the dog seemed the most normal of the three.
"Yes, about ten of them," Maggie said, turning to stand beside Eleri, watching her boyfriend clank down the street. "It's just like that around here. Curie has a golf course, but it's more likely to be used for larpers than golfers."
"So while he’s off fighting foes of yore, you're taking the dog for the day?" Eleri asked, still trying to get her disbelieving ducks in a row.
"Yeah, I take my pig into work sometimes and—"
"You have a pig?" Eleri interrupted, not on her A-game this morning.
"A little miniature."
"I though miniatures weren't a real thing." Eleri frowned. “Something about recessive genes.”
"Right! You can breed them with the possibility of them staying miniature, but it’s still not widely accepted that breeders can guarantee a small pig will stay small," Maggie explained. "But some of them do. I was prepared to have a six-hundred-pound behemoth in my house, but she stayed little."
"That makes sense," Eleri said. She'd heard of such things and the issue with selling online pigs or even in person as miniature when they often didn't stay that way. And she was grateful to sound intelligent in front of Maggie-the-Pot-and-Apple-Botanist.
“Do you want to meet her?" Maggie asked. "I mean, I don't know what you're doing today. But if you want, you can come to work with me."
Eleri was not used to such forward invitations. As an FBI agent, she was usually investigating someone and no one invited her along on outings. "I can just come to work with you?" Eleri asked, as though the day couldn’t get any weirder before ten a.m.
"I can get you a guest pass. You can come on to the grounds. I’ll show off my research and you can ask me questions that will spark new research! I mean, how many times do you get to see legal government-sponsored marijuana fields?”
“It does sound interesting.” And Eleri thought, This is what she had come for. She had no idea if Maggie was the culprit or involved in Rychenkov’s murder in any way. But making friends and getting to know the people who lived in Curie was the best way to gather information. Clearly, they did not expect this murder to b
e solved quickly.
"What do I need? When would we leave?"
Maggie offered up several options and seemed open to anything. Mostly she just seemed more than happy to share her pot-growing expertise with the world at large. After a few minutes working out logistics, Eleri headed back inside the angular house, changed into more sensible shoes, and hopped into her car to follow Maggie and Lady Macbeth out to the pot fields. Apparently, having a dog and a pig on your grant-funded farm was not a big deal.
As Eleri pulled up beside her in the parking lot, Maggie popped out of her car and headed over to the passenger side where she opened the back seat and undid two separate harnesses.
"Oh, my God," Eleri said, "your pig is adorable."
"Eleri meet Atinlay."
"Atinlay?" Eleri asked wanting to be sure she’d heard correctly.
"Give it a minute. You'll get it." Eleri assumed she was right. And as Maggie let both of them down onto the ground, the two animals appeared to be the best of friends. Eleri decided to do what she needed and start asking questions. So she tossed the first one out a softball as she followed Maggie into the building, "So are you and LeDonRic an item?"
"Yes, very much so."
"But you don't live together?"
"No. We should," Maggie said. "We're clearly wasting rent. But I have a Hobbit house in The Shire. I live on Aragorn Way. And I don't know if you've paid much attention to my boyfriend, but he does not fit well into a Hobbit house.”
Eleri was laughing as Maggie opened the front door for her.
But Maggie was still going on. “And I have a Hobbit house! I'm not willing to give it up for some cubist monstrosity. We're going to have to eventually find something that suits us both. But I live in The Shire!"
Eleri laughed again, though she did understand. For someone who was a Lord of the Rings fan, a house in The Shire had to be a huge win. People had gone as far as New Zealand to see Hobbit houses or to stay in one. So having one here in Curie, Nebraska surely was quite the coup. Marshall Bennett had not been wrong picking out his neighborhoods and laying out the geek bait.
The Camelot Gambit Page 5
