In Self Defense

by Susan R. Sloan

  “But it isn’t just my husband who depended on you,” Clare reminded him ruefully. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve come to depend on you, too.”

  “Oh, and you still can,” he declared earnestly. “Any time you need anything. It doesn’t matter where I am. Just call me. Please. Even if you don’t need anything, even if you just feel like talking. I’ll always be available to you.”

  “Why, thank you, James,” Clare responded. “That’s really very sweet of you.”

  “And whenever you’re ready to go back to doing your charity work,” he said in a rush, “I want you to know that my tuxedo will be clean and pressed and waiting, if you need it -- uh -- I mean, need me . . . I mean, need me in it -- to accompany you somewhere.”

  Nina listened to the exchange with interest. James Lilly was such a nice fellow, and he and Clare seemed to get on so well, it was a shame she had to lose him, too. Ripples, she thought. One thing happened that led to something else that led to something else, and it just kept going. Nothing was ever simple. Nothing ever stayed the same.

  “Are you going to be leaving the company right away?” she heard Clare ask.

  “I’ve given my notice,” he said. “I’ve been asked to bring Mr. Potter’s assistant up to speed, which of course I’ll do. But that should only take a few weeks. Meantime, I’m going to be sending out my resume.”

  “I don’t know what to say, James,” Clare said finally. “Except I hate that we’re going to lose you, and I wish you all the luck in the world.”

  “Oh, I don’t need luck,” he drawled with a big grin and a little twinkle in his eye. “I’ve got a glowing recommendation from the new CEO, not to mention most of the rest of senior management.”

  “You know what?” Nina said when he was gone. “I don’t think you’ve seen the last of him.”

  “Really? What makes you say that?”

  “I don’t know,” her friend replied. “Just a feeling, I guess. Or maybe it was something I sensed in his manner that was maybe a little more than just friendly.”

  “Nonsense,” Clare said, even as she blushed.

  “Oh don’t worry, I’m not matchmaking. I just think you’ve become friends, and friends are something you need right now. You know that. And I think James knows it, too.”

  “Really?”

  “Mark my words,” Nina asserted. “If you don’t call him soon, he’ll be calling you.”

  Eight

  Clare stared at the two detectives she knew, and a third man she didn’t know, who stood on the other side of her front door at just past four o’clock on Wednesday afternoon.

  “I don’t understand,” she said with a puzzled frown. “What does this mean?”

  “It means we need to come back into the house,” Erin told her. “We need to take another look at the scene of the shooting. We’ll be looking around outside again as well.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we have some new concerns.”

  “Does this mean the case isn’t closed anymore?”

  “I’m afraid not,” Erin confirmed. “It’s been reopened.”

  “My children are at home,” Clare told them. “I don’t want them to be upset.”

  “We’ll be as quick and as unobtrusive as possible.”

  ***

  They began outside, Erin, Dusty, and Eddie Ridenour, the crime scene investigator, with his black bag in hand, walking around the Tudor mansion, looking at it from all angles.

  “Let’s go back over everything we didn’t see any reason to follow up on the first time around,” Dusty suggested. “What’s the first thing you remember?”

  “We didn’t see a vehicle,” Erin said, replaying that night in her mind’s eye. “The car drove in and didn’t drive back out, but it wasn’t visible when we got up here.”

  “Which we now know was because Richard Durant put it in the garage.”

  “All right, let’s take a look.”

  They walked around to the side of the house. The garage door was closed, but there was a side entrance that was unlocked, and they let themselves in. Richard’s Mercedes sat in one of the three bays, the Plymouth Voyager in another. In the third space, where Clare’s bright red BMW had once sat, was a new dark green Toyota Camry.

  “So he drives in -- and what?” Erin mused.

  “He gets out of his car and goes into the house, just like he always did, I assume,” Dusty said.

  “But the alarm was on. He would have had to disarm it. Which means he had to have been able to do that from out here.”

  The two detectives and the investigator made their way to the door that opened into the house. Sure enough, a small keypad, a duplicate of the one at the front door, was installed beside it. The little red light was off. Eddie opened his bag, snapped on a pair of latex gloves, and began processing the keypad for fingerprints.

  “So he sees the red light, he turns off the alarm, and then he goes into the house, just like he’s done thousands of times before,” Dusty said. “What does that tell us?”

  “It tells us that whoever it was who walked into Clare Durant’s bedroom knew what the code to turn off the alarm was before he came into the house,” Erin replied.

  Her partner nodded. “It also tells us that, not only didn’t we hear the alarm go off, Clare Durant didn’t hear it, either.”

  “Could she have taken the chance, though?” Erin wondered. “Just because she didn’t hear the alarm doesn’t mean the stalker couldn’t have found a way to get in. We’d told her, on any number of occasions, how clever he was. She had no way of knowing whether he could have disabled the system somehow.”

  “True enough,” Dusty agreed.

  “Still,” Erin said, switching sides, as she frequently did when working on cases, “shouldn’t it have given her pause, if just for a second or two? What if it had been her friend Nina coming into her room? Or what if the housekeeper had come back early from her day off, and just wanted to check on her? Doreen is devoted to the family, and under the circumstances, that wouldn’t have been unreasonable. Clare had the gun. She had the element of surprise. Why not determine who it was -- or who it wasn’t -- before pulling the trigger?”

  “Fear does things to people, sometimes, distorts perceptions,” Dusty suggested.

  “Agreed,” Erin murmured. But she was already walking away from the door and back toward the Mercedes. The windows were tinted. She couldn’t see anything of the interior. “Eddie,” she called. “Would you come do your thing here, too?”

  The CSU investigator obliged, ever so carefully picking the prints off every door before finally opening one of the rear ones, and letting her look inside. “Don’t touch,” he cautioned. “Just look.”

  Erin smiled at the admonition, but, while Eddie set about dusting the inside of the car, she just looked. The Mercedes was surprisingly clean. No old drink cups, no used Kleenex, no cigarette butts, no newspaper or notepaper, no trash whatsoever, not even a trash receptacle, nothing that spoke of the vehicle being used for regular commuting. Richard Durant had obviously been a fastidious man. The only thing she found in the black leather interior was a brown leather briefcase, resting just behind the driver’s seat.

  “Pop the trunk for me, please, Eddie, will you?” she requested. He did so, and she glanced inside. Except for a spare tire and some tools, the trunk was empty. She stood there, looking at the car, for a long, thoughtful moment.

  “Maybe that’s what’s been bothering me,” she said finally.

  “What?” Dusty asked.

  “If you’re going out of town for a few days,” she replied, “what do you usually take with you?”

  Dusty thought for a moment. “A suitcase,” he said.

  “Exactly,” Erin said. “So where is it? We didn’t find it with the body. It isn’t in the car. What happened to it?”

  “I don’t know,” Dusty conceded, “but why don’t we go find out?”

  The master bedroom was pristine. No trace remained of the terri
ble tragedy that had occurred less than three weeks earlier. Not a drop of blood, not an errant bullet hole, nothing. Someone had gone to considerable lengths to make it seem as though the gruesome incident of that October night had simply never happened.

  “We’re interested in your husband’s suitcase,” Erin told Clare.

  “His suitcase?” Clare repeated blankly.

  “Yes, the one he took with him on his trip to Vermont. We assume he brought it back.”

  “Oh that,” Clare said. “It’s in the closet.”

  Dusty walked over to the closet and opened the door. The right side of the huge walk-in was completely empty. Not a hangar, not a shoebox, not so much as a handkerchief remained, while the left side was still filled with suits and ties and shirts and shoes that Richard Durant would never wear again. A brown leather suitcase rested on a shelf.

  “Is this the one?” the detective asked. Clare nodded. Dusty snapped on a pair of latex gloves and carefully removed the suitcase from the closet. “How did it get here?” he asked.

  “I must have put it there,” Clare told him.

  “Where was it before you put it in the closet?” Erin asked.

  “I don’t know,” Clare said with a shrug. “I guess it must have been in Richard’s car.”

  “How did it get out of Richard’s car?” the detective pressed.

  “I don’t really remember, things were so crazy there for a while, but I suppose I must have taken it out,” Clare said. “After -- you know. I must have unpacked it, and put his shirts and underwear in the laundry, and sent his suits to the dry cleaner. It was what I always did when he came home from a business trip.”

  Dusty handed the suitcase to Eddie. “We’ll have to take this with us,” he informed her.

  “It had to have been in his car,” Clare offered.

  “The suitcase?”

  “Yes. I must have found it and unpacked it and put it away in the closet.”

  “Where in the car did you find it?” Erin asked. “In the front seat . . . the back seat . . . the trunk?”

  “I don’t really remember,” Clare replied. “Maybe it was on the back seat.”

  “So you think you might have brought your husband’s suitcase into the house, but you left his briefcase. How odd. His suitcase was filled with dirty clothes, but his briefcase might have had important papers in it. Maybe relating to that new product you were talking about. Can you say why you would have done that?”

  Clare shrugged again. “I don’t know. Richard usually brought his own briefcase in. Unless it was late, and he wasn’t going to need it until the next morning. I guess I didn’t think about it.”

  Outside, the sky, which had been heavy and threatening all day, had grown dark. “If you’ll excuse us,” Erin said politely. “We’re going to need this room for a little while.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Nothing damaging, I assure you,” the detective declared. “We just have to check a few things out.”

  “Didn’t you do all this that night?” Clare persisted. “Your people were here for the longest time.”

  “Yes, but sometimes, things come up, and we have to go over what we’ve done before,” Dusty explained. “And on your way out, will you please turn on the light in the hallway -- the one that was on the night your husband was shot.”

  Clare had little choice in the matter. She left the room, snapping on the light as she went down the hall.

  The two detectives and the investigator went into action. Eddie followed Clare out of the bedroom, shut the door, and waited. Erin closed the curtains to block out the remains of the day, and then sat down on the bed, with her back against the headboard, in much the same way as Clare indicated her position was on the night of the shooting. Dusty turned off the overhead light. The room was now in almost total darkness., with only a small strip of light showing beneath the bedroom door.

  “All right,” Erin said. “Now let’s just see what it was that Clare Durant saw when her husband walked in that night.”

  Eddie opened the bedroom door. The light from the hallway was soft, diffuse, but it was more than enough for Erin to see a clear silhouette of the man standing there.

  “I can’t see your face,” she conceded. “But I can certainly see things about you -- the shape of your body, your height, the case you’re carrying.”

  “Do you think it’s enough?” Dusty asked.

  Erin swung herself off the bed. “I don’t know,” she said. “Let’s go find out.”

  Clare was suddenly nowhere to be found. She was with the children, Doreen told them. They were upset. And confused. It didn’t matter. They were done here.

  The housekeeper showed them out, standing in the doorway, watching silently while they climbed into their vehicle and took off down the drive, watching until their taillights faded into the dusk. It was her job to protect this family, and she had always taken her job very seriously. She wondered how much longer it would be before she was called upon to do just that.

  ***

  The lights at the King County crime lab burned late into the night. They ordered dinner in – a pepperoni pizza and a six-pack of root beer. It was almost eleven o’clock before Eddie was ready to talk.

  “I found two sets of fingerprints both on the doors and in the interior of the Mercedes,” the crime scene analyst reported, “Richard Durant’s, and an unidentified.”

  “What do you want to bet the unidentified turns out to belong to Stephanie Burdick?” Erin murmured.

  “There were also two sets of prints on the suitcase,” Eddie continued, “Richard Durant’s and Clare Durant’s.”

  They had taken a set of Richard’s fingerprints at the time of his autopsy, and they had lifted Clare’s from the Beretta.

  “But did she lie about taking the suitcase from the car?” Dusty wondered.

  “We don’t know,” Erin said.

  “Yes, we do,” Eddie told them. “She took it from the carpet beside her husband’s body.”

  Erin looked at him intently. “Are you sure?” she breathed.

  “Yep.” Eddie pulled out one of the photos taken of the scene on the night of the shooting.

  “Take a look,” he said. “You can pretty much determine what happened by examining the blood spatter pattern,” he said, zeroing in on the carpeting beside the body. “We didn’t bother before because we were looking at this as an accidental shooting. But now it clearly shows that Durant was hit nine times, there was a lot of blood, and it was spattered all over the place -- all except for this little area.” Dusty and Erin followed his lead to a patch of gray carpet, just to the right of the body, a patch that was clearly defined by the absence of blood. “Something stopped the blood here. And I think it was the suitcase.”

  “How can you tell?” Erin asked.

  “Aside from the shape of the bag fitting the space perfectly, I found blood on it,” Eddie replied. “Someone obviously tried to wipe it clean, but I used Luminal, and found a couple of really small spots that were missed. We’ll run it through DNA just to be sure.”

  “She stashed it in the closet before we could get up there,” Erin said. “She was hoping we wouldn’t think to look for it, and she was right. It just sat there until we were gone.”

  “But why do that?” Dusty wondered. “And then why lie about it?”

  Erin smiled, a cat-catching-the-canary kind of smile that she reserved for the moment when a case began to come together.

  “She didn’t have a choice,” the detective explained. “When that bedroom door opened, she didn’t see the silhouette of an unknown attacker standing there. She saw what I saw when Eddie opened the door -- a man of familiar height and build, carrying a suitcase. The suitcase alone should have stopped her from firing, or at least made her hesitate. But it didn’t even slow her down. I think because she knew exactly what she was doing, and exactly who was walking into that room. When she turned on the light and saw the suitcase, she realized she couldn’t ver
y well just leave it there. She couldn’t let us see it -- or more importantly -- she couldn’t let us know that she’d seen it.”

  “If that’s how it happened, I think you’re pretty damn close to making the case that she knew she was shooting the husband all along,” Eddie said.

  “It’s beginning to look that way, isn’t it?” Erin concurred.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Dusty murmured.

  ***

  “We were hoping you could help us clear up a few little things,” Dusty said at ten o’clock the following morning when, at his and Erin’s request, Clare agreed to come down to police headquarters for a friendly follow-up chat.

  “I’ll certainly try,” the widow said, settling herself in the chair indicated by the detectives.

  “The night of the shooting,” Dusty began, “do you, by any chance, have any recollection of turning the alarm system on?”

  “Yes, of course I do,” Clare replied. “And I did turn it on. In fact, Nina and I turned it on together. You can ask her. We thought it was going to keep us safe.”

  “Yes, well, that’s sort of the point,” Dusty said. “Because we never heard the alarm go off. Did you?”

  Clare looked puzzled. “Now that you mention it,” she said after a moment, “no I don’t recall hearing the alarm. But under the circumstances, it wasn’t the most important thing on my mind.”

  “No, of course not,” Dusty conceded.

  Erin leaned forward. “But thinking back on it now, how do you suppose an intruder, a stranger, would have been able to get into the house without setting off the alarm?” she asked. “It wasn’t like the flowers, when you hadn’t set the alarm, and a window was left open. No, that night, all the doors and windows were locked and armed. Nina Jacobsen confirmed it. And there you were, asleep in your bed, assuming you were safe, the alarm on and us outside to protect you, and all of a sudden, he was at your bedroom door.”

  “I don’t really know what I was thinking that night,” Clare said. “I don’t think I was thinking too clearly about anything. If I had been, if I had realized that the alarm hadn’t gone off and that it was Richard coming into the room, and not the stalker, a lot of things might have turned out differently.”