Unpunished

by Lisa Black

  Robert Davis, as she had told the detectives earlier, had a number of fibers, hairs, and some dog fur. Most of the hair seemed to be his, but some errant strands were a sandy brown dyed blond, a dark brown nearly black hair, and two others of an auburn shade. Fibers were red cotton, pink polyester, blue nylon, light blue Dacron, white cotton, brown cotton, green cotton. Nothing exciting.

  She examined a flake that looked like a piece of popcorn husk, a number of shards of apparent wood, sawdust or maybe paper dust—no surprise there. She also found a few miniscule orbs that looked like tiny footballs or maybe Sugar Smacks, back when they were called Sugar Smacks, before the marketing execs caught on to the idea that sugar plus children produced a not-good image in buyers’ minds.

  Interesting. Unfortunately, all of it told her nothing.

  She put away the tapings and mounted slides she’d made from them and pulled out the sheets from Jerry Wilton’s clothing. Following the same theory, she examined the tapings from the back of his shirt. If the killer had to insist on evisceration, he had done her a favor by hanging the body first instead of letting it rest or roll around in the offal. That would have soaked the shirt, possibly washed off some of the trace evidence, and made it more difficult to pick up with tape. Not to mention messier. If he had taken the knife to the back it would have really screwed her up—duh, she reminded herself, of course slicing a person open from the back would not have the same effect. The spine and ribs would be in the way.

  “What are you up to?” Carol appeared at her elbow, startling her.

  “Pondering the various route options for disembowelment.”

  “You worry me when you say things like that.” Carol rested against the workbench, worrying a heart-shaped pendant around her neck that her daughter had given her. Though Maggie was technically acting supervisor, Carol had taken over the bulk of Denny’s duties in his absence, dispatching the “youngsters” Josh and Amy, approving overtime and turning in hours worked to payroll, distributing processing requests, organizing subpoenas, and making sure the coffee cabinet remained stocked. She was babying Maggie, but with the Herald murders on her plate Maggie was more than willing to be babied.

  “Your appointment with Dr. Michaels is this morning.”

  Except about that.

  “I’m kind of bu—”

  “You can’t cancel it again, Maggie. It’s mandatory. Manda-tor-y. As in, you have to go or they stop giving you paychecks.”

  Maggie had to laugh. “They can’t do that!”

  “You really want to find out? Exactly what are you so busy with, anyway?”

  “Hairs and fibers,” Maggie elaborated as she adjusted the microscope settings. “Lots of synthetic fibers. Young man, liked to work out, so that’s not surprising. What are you doing?”

  “Supply orders.”

  “Any word on when Denny will be back?”

  “I think he’d love to be back now, except his wife would probably slit his throat if he tried to leave. Not that I blame her. The first few months, your whole life revolves around getting sleep whenever and wherever you can.”

  “How’s the baby doing?”

  “Not sleeping like one, that’s for sure. But gaining weight, so they’re happy.”

  “Huh.”

  “What? Babies are supposed to gain weight.”

  “No, this taping. Wilton has cottons—red, blue, green, but the blue looks like the same shade as the fibers on Davis.”

  “Yeah, blue cotton is so unusual.”

  “Sarcasm is not becoming in a woman of your stature,” Maggie told her. “I know, if it’s denim, then it’s useless, but still . . . and hey, those little orbs.”

  “You’re getting into the paranormal, now?”

  Maggie switched the microscope to a higher magnification, though peering at tape on a sheet of acetate did not make for an ideal image. If she really wanted to get a look at something, she would have to dissolve the tape adhesive and mount the item on a glass slide. “Pollen.”

  “Gesundheit.”

  “No, plant pollen. Ooo—a dog hair, too.”

  “It’s nice to see you enjoying your work.” Carol shoved off the desk. “I have to get back to the fingerprint searches. Congratulations on narrowing your search to someone with a flower and a dog.”

  “Wilton lived in an apartment. He had neither flowers nor dogs.”

  “Then you’ll have to narrow it down to the specific flower and the specific dog.”

  “Dogs I can probably do. Flowers—not so much. Hardly anyone’s looked at pollen since television went to color. It’s a very dying art.” Maggie leaned back and rubbed her eyebrow. “Sort of like print journalism.”

  “Sometimes,” Carol admitted, “I have trouble following your brain down the paths it takes.”

  “That makes two of us,” Maggie said.

  Chapter 24

  Stephanie Davis didn’t seem as stunned to find cops on her doorstep as she had been the first time, but she did seem curious. “Did you find who killed him?” she asked upon opening the door.

  They admitted that no, they hadn’t, and that they would like to look through anything Bob had brought home from the Herald offices, if she wouldn’t mind (and even if she would, though they saw no reason to go there unless necessary). Oh, and Maggie here would like to collect some fur from your dog.

  Stephanie Davis had no objection. She seemed glad of the company.

  “Want something to eat? Just like the past hundreds of years, all people do is bring me food. I guess it’s all they can do, really, so they do it even though there’s a limit to how much even teenage boys can eat, and I’m on a chronic diet. It’s not like I’m going to have hordes of out-of-town relatives descending. Neither of us had large families.” She led them through the kitchen. It did indeed smell of cold rigatoni and potato salad. “The boys are in school. It sounds weird, sending them to school, but when they were home we all just sat around looking at each other and that wasn’t doing them any good, either. Or me.” Her face scrunched and it seemed, at the mention of her sons, that she would burst into sobs. She even turned toward the wall that held their class pictures, framed eight-by-ten glossies.

  Age-wise, Ronald Soltis would have been right in between them, Maggie thought. She wondered how his mother was dealing with her grief.

  Stephanie Davis fought back her tears and waved them into a small spare bedroom.

  It held an old roll-top desk, unlocked and opened with some neat stacks of paper on it and pens sticking out of its cubbies, a twin bed, and a sewing machine in its own cabinet. “This is what he’d use as a desk.”

  “This is all the stuff he brought home from work?” Riley clarified. “Anything else? Filing cabinet? Briefcase?”

  “He was a copy editor.” Once again, she explained. “The biggest part of his job was approving other people’s stories and doing the layout. He couldn’t really do that at home. When he was a reporter, yeah, he’d bring work home all the time, but as a copy editor . . . sometimes he’d bring stories to read, but then he’d take them back. That was about it.”

  Riley sat down at the desk, using the one chair, and Jack stood beside him. Stephanie Davis turned to Maggie. “You wanted to see my dog?”

  She led the forensic scientist out the back slider. The day was damp but clear and the dog trundled over, delighted to have visitors. “This is Killer. Bob thought that was a funny name, since he’s so not.”

  Maggie petted Killer, which only made him more excited. He used the entire lower half of his body to wag his tail. She took out a disposable comb and ran it through his fur a couple times. The strands quickly accumulated.

  “He sheds like a bitch—no pun intended,” Stephanie confirmed. She sat on the edge of the deck, tilting her face toward the spotty sunlight.

  Maggie perched on the step. Killer liked being combed so she gave him a few more passes. “We’re sorry to disturb you.”

  “That’s all right. I needed a break. There’s an ove
rwhelming amount of his crap to clean out.” Slight pause. “Sorry, that sounds terrible. But seriously! He thought cleaning out a closet was beneath him, and yet he never wanted me to ever get rid of a shirt or a magazine or his bowling trophy from grade school, so it just accumulated. I’m going to have so much more room here now.”

  “I understand,” Maggie said, though she didn’t, really. She had been thrilled to rid her life of Rick’s junk and have a space that was all her own—but they had been divorcing.

  Stephanie fingered the necklace she wore, two boy-shaped charms with blue and red stones. “Like that room in there, I’m going to empty that out and then the boys can each have their own room. It will cut the squabbles down, I think, and they’re well past the age where they need a little privacy. And money! I can live so much more economically without him turning the thermostat up or down and wanting to eat out all the time and not caring how much we pay in loan interest every month.”

  She was flat-out babbling, but Maggie let her. Obviously Stephanie Davis needed someone to talk to. A confessional mood might lead her to confess something interesting.

  “I’m losing an income, yes, a substantial income. But there’s insurance, and I can sell that ridiculously expensive car he just bought. And his golf club collection. That’s going to take some work. There’s a lot of money in those stupid clubs and I don’t know what’s worth what.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Maybe it’s shock, making me talk like this. Do you think it’s shock?”

  “It could be,” Maggie said. “Everyone grieves in their own way.”

  “Honestly, I don’t think I could be described as grieving in any way, shape, or form. But it’s kind of you to say so.” She regarded Killer as he licked her fingers.

  Maggie took the opportunity. “You told the detectives your husband had been talking to someone about someone named Wilson. He had a coworker named Wilton. Could that have been the name he mentioned?” She didn’t mention Jerry Wilton’s murder, unsure if anyone had told Stephanie about it. From the absent look on the woman’s face, no one had.

  “I guess it could have been. I really thought it was Wilson, though.”

  In her soothing voice, recently practiced on Denny’s new baby, Maggie assured her, “Okay. Just checking.”

  Stephanie had not veered from her main train of thought, her relationship with her late husband. “I blame my religion, really, that I got married. If I hadn’t been raised to have morals—but if I wanted to sleep with a guy, I had to marry him. So I married him only because I wanted to sleep with him. If not for that upbringing I could have just slept with him, moved on, and maybe found someone I was actually compatible with.”

  “You weren’t happy?” Maggie stated the obvious, for lack of any other comment to make.

  “Never, really. He was. He thought everything was fine. No matter what I said, he’d just brush it off. So I figured I had—literally—made my bed and would lie in it. I’m lazy, maybe, and I couldn’t face a divorce. I can’t be the bad guy, and he definitely would have made me the bad guy. I’m sorry for him, too, not just myself. How horrible to have a spouse, someone you think you love, who is actually hoping you’ll leave the house and never come back. How terrible is that?” She rubbed her hands together as if she wished she had a cigarette or a drink or something to occupy them. “But just the idea now that I can have my life back, I can sleep when I’m tired and eat when I’m hungry and get the boys through these last few years before adulthood without him poisoning their minds with stereotypes and prejudices and—I feel like I won the lottery. I should be wearing black and crying myself to sleep and walking around in a daze, and instead I’m stuffing all his clothes into garbage bags and singing with the radio as I’m doing it. I know I’m probably talking myself into a jail cell here,” she added, “going on and on about how much better my life is going to be without him.”

  “No,” Maggie told her, though she was not at all sure about that.

  “But I can’t help it! I’m so sorry for my boys, of course—every time I think about them I want to start screaming. Bob wasn’t much of a father, they were old enough to notice how many football games and band concerts he missed, never had time for heart-to-hearts about girls or grades—but he was still the only one they’ll ever have. But all I can think about is myself. And myself wants to run singing through a meadow. Maybe turn cartwheels, except I’d probably throw out my back. Isn’t that awful?”

  “Maybe it’s human,” Maggie said.

  “When I go to bed now, I can go to sleep. Do you know he had to have sex every single night? After twenty years, still, every single night! I looked forward to my periods, they were the only breaks I got. So I work all day, make dinner, clean up, do the laundry, pack lunches, pay bills, make sure the garbage is out, and then I finally crawl into bed at the end of the day—and I have one more chore to do before I will be permitted to close my eyes. Sure, I could have refused, but the pouting and drama—you know what men are like, it’s easier just to give them what they want so that they’ll shut up and go away. I know I didn’t handle it right, should have had a lot more communication. Bob wasn’t a bad guy at all. . . in many ways he was a perfectly good guy. So I didn’t help anything, I didn’t, certainly not with the sex. Which was lousy, but again, I do admit that that’s my own fault as much as his. I could have given him some pointers, told him what to do. But you know, it’s like a diet, if you aren’t going to have the discipline to stick with it, then you might as well not start. You know what I’m saying? I mean, his idea of foreplay was—”

  Jack opened up the slider and said that they were done, sparing Maggie the titillation of learning what Robert Davis’s idea of foreplay had been.

  Both Killer and Stephanie Davis seemed disappointed to lose their guests so soon. Stephanie apologized for “bending Maggie’s ear,” offered them more food, and forced a banana bread on them before she would let them out of the house. Maggie took it. They had a toaster at the lab and Carol loved fruit breads.

  They drove away, Maggie in the backseat of the department-issue unmarked vehicle. “Learn anything?” Riley asked her. “Looked like you two were bonding.”

  “Stephanie would bond with a coat on a hanger at this point, poor woman, and prefers strangers with no vested interest in her husband’s memory.”

  “She’s glad he’s dead, isn’t she?”

  “And not afraid to say so. But you guys don’t suspect her—because she’s female? Because her husband outweighed her by about one hundred percent? Because she’s a mother?”

  Riley said, “Because she was dead asleep when we came to tell her the news, and she doesn’t strike me as sufficiently sociopathic to pull that off.”

  Jack said, “Because someone would have noticed her around the Herald offices. Besides, she wasn’t married to Jerry Wilton, and he’s dead, too.”

  “Okay,” Maggie said. “As long as you have a good reason.”

  Riley asked Maggie if the new widow had told her anything interesting.

  “Davis recently bought a, quote, ridiculously expensive car, unquote. How about you? Find something good?”

  “Nada. Clippings and printouts of stories, nothing that looks like a motive. And the car is a Chrysler 300. Not cheap, no, but it’s hardly a Porsche. What wives think is too expensive and what actually is too expensive can be two different things. I speak from experience.”

  “Champagne isn’t too expensive unless you’re on a beer budget. I thought he was worried about losing his job.”

  “Editor says no.”

  Maggie set the banana bread on the seat next to her. “He also seems to have been a bit of a sex addict. Are we sure there isn’t a mistress lurking in the background?”

  “Not unless he had a burner phone as well. The call history we got all seems to be work-related. The digital content manager, the editor, one of the advertising guys. His layout editor—also known as the typesetter even though they haven’t used type in a few d
ecades—is a matronly sort with four kids. Besides, then where would Jerry Wilton come in?”

  “Maybe the mistress had more than one, um, client?” Jack suggested.

  “You,” Riley told his partner, “have a nasty mind.”

  * * *

  At her house, the dog again scratching at the slider, the radio tuned to 105, Stephanie Davis dialed a number she had found among her husband’s papers. The bastard had started locking that desk months ago, but his hiding places had been as unimaginative as his lovemaking. She’d found the key easily enough . . . not that she’d expected to find anything in it except the bill for whatever he’d bought on impulse recently. But she’d stumbled on something much better.

  “It’s me,” she said into the receiver. “I found some very interesting items in Bob’s desk this morning—good thing, too, because the cops showed up an hour later.” Pause. “Of course not. I moved them.” Pause. “Well, I think we should talk. Don’t you?” Pause. “No, Tower City. By the fountain.” Pause. “Fine. One hour.”

  She hung up, smiling at nothing until the dog on the other side of the glass caught her eye. “Sorry, baby. We’ll go for a walk later, okay? Right now Mommy has the boys’ college tuitions to take care of.”

  She walked down the hallway, singing with the radio.

  Chapter 25

  Jack and Riley asked Maggie if she would stop at Shania Paulson’s apartment with them now that they had a warrant to search it. The girl was still in the wind, either obviously scared or obviously guilty, and they needed any clue they could get as to where to look next.

  “We’ve checked every ex-boyfriend, every gal pal, and every coworker she has. Her mom gave them all up, worried about her baby girl,” Riley reported as they looked around the tidy kitchen. Whoever had trashed Jerry Wilton’s office had not made it to Shania’s place. Unless, of course, it had been Shania.