Damage Control

by Robert Dugoni

  “Far as I know,” she said.

  Another voice shouted from the back of the room, one of the technicians. “The lamp was on. Only light on in the house.”

  “Why wouldn’t the victim pick up the papers from the floor?” Nuchitelli pointed back down the hallway.

  Logan turned. “What’s the estimated time of death?”

  “Based on the body temperature, between ten-thirty and midnight to one in the morning. Give or take.”

  Logan thought for a moment. “Okay. He gets home late, tired after a long day. He’s hungry, so he heads for the kitchen. Or maybe he had to pee, but I don’t think so if the perp was in the bedroom, because that would have given him time to get out.”

  “Maybe the perp was upstairs,” Nuchitelli said.

  “Then the victim likely would have heard him. No. I think the perp was definitely in the bedroom.” Logan turned in the doorway, facing the room with all the activity. He rocked as if walking down the hallway. “So he drops the papers on the table, and some fall. He puts his glasses on top, hangs his coat on the banister, and walks down the hall to get something to eat.”

  “Why would he take off his glasses?”

  “I don’t know.” Logan thought but didn’t come up with a plausible explanation. “Anyway, when he does get here, it’s dark, so he reaches and turns on the light. He hears something behind him, turns partway, and bam! He’s hit. The force of the blow pushes him against the table, knocking those pieces over, and he pinballs against the couch.” Logan mimicked the motion of the initial blow and fell to his knees, careful to avoid the marked evidence. “The second blow catches him in the back of the head.”

  From his knees, Logan noticed the object sticking out from beneath the black leather couch. He called over one of the technicians and asked for a plastic bag. The man pulled one from a bunch clipped at his belt and handed it to Logan. Logan reached beneath the couch and pulled out a cell phone. It was on. He stood and slipped the phone into the bag. Through the plastic, he pressed a button that pulled up the last phone numbers dialed and received. “Huh. Guess I’m wrong. He might have been going to the kitchen, but the reason he didn’t pick up those papers or clean off his glasses was because he was on the phone.”

  “How do you know it’s his phone?”

  “Because I’m a pessimist, and I just can’t believe the killer would be so kind as to leave behind his phone for us to use to convict him. Time of death was eleven-ten,” he said, turning the phone so Nuchitelli could see it. “Give or take.” He wrote the number in a notebook and handed the telephone to the technician. “We’ll want a log of every number he called. Start with the past twenty-four hours.” He turned back to Nuchitelli. “What do we know about the victim?”

  Nuchitelli shook her head. “You know me, Logan; this job is hard enough without making it more personal.”

  “How’d we hear about it?”

  “Neighbor phoned it in. Someone is next door calming her. She’s pretty upset.” Nuchitelli pointed to a doorway with no door. “Rodriguez is in the kitchen.”

  Logan walked into the kitchen. A short Hispanic man stood observing an evidence technician attempting to lift fingerprints off the inside and exterior knobs of a back door. Head of the forensics laboratory for Seattle’s police districts, and fastidious to the point of neurosis, Rodriguez stressed over the slightest detail. In a career that often involved micromillimeters and particulates of evidence, he was well suited for his job.

  Rodriguez pointed at Logan’s shoes, aghast. “Slipcovers. Why won’t you ever put them on?”

  “Sorry, Henry, I don’t carry them around with me in the car. Anything useful?”

  Rodriguez shook his head, annoyed. “Always something useful. Just have to find it. This place is loaded with fingerprints. Whether they belong to any of the killers, I don’t know.”

  “Killers? As in more than one?”

  “I’d say two. Outside the door you’ll find two different shoe prints in the garden soil. From the depth of the prints, I’d say they took off running down the back steps and jumped. Two distinct imprints; one looks to be a tennis shoe, I’d guess a size eight. The other is a boot. Bigger. Size twelve. Given the imprint, that person was heavier. ”

  “Could one of them be the victim’s?”

  “I doubt it. They’re fresh.” Rodriguez pointed in the direction of the victim. “He has no mud on his shoes, and he’s wearing loafers, a ten and a half. But we’ll cast the impressions and compare them with other shoes we find in the house.”

  “What else do you know about him?”

  “Not my area, Logan.”

  “Humor me. Nooch says you told her a neighbor called it in.”

  “Apparently, the guy was a law professor at Seattle U. The neighbor knocked on his door this morning to get coffee. When he didn’t answer, she figured he’d forgotten. She got down the block and saw his car and thought that maybe he was in the shower or something. So she came back and knocked louder. When he still didn’t answer, she thought it odd and went to get a key he gave her.”

  “Key? She a girlfriend?”

  “Not unless it’s a Harold and Maude type thing,” Rodriguez said.

  “A what?”

  “Harold and Maude—you know, the movie. It’s a cult classic. A twenty-year-old kid falls for an eighty-year-old woman.”

  “I think I’ll pass. I just ate.”

  “Whatever. Apparently, the victim and the neighbor exchanged keys in case one got locked out—a neighbor thing. She said she opened the door, stepped inside calling his name, and saw his legs on the floor. She thought maybe he’d fainted until she got close enough to see the blood.” Rodriguez paused, considering the body. “Heard they’ve reached the guy’s sister.”

  Logan sighed. “I don’t envy her.”

  8

  DANA GRIPPED THE edge of the desk, holding on.

  “His neighbor found him. She called the police.”

  “No,” she said. “I talked to him yesterday.” Her body started to shake. “I did. We were going to have lunch. I had to cancel—”

  “—Dana. Dana?”

  “Yesterday. I talked to him last night.” Her legs gave way. She collapsed into the chair, dropping the telephone to the floor.

  “Dana? Dana, are you there? Dana?”

  A hollow ringing echoed in her ears. Her office swirled about her, unfamiliar. The walls collapsed inward, shrinking like a visual effect, sucking the air from the room. She couldn’t breathe. She felt the floor vibrate, and with that came a harsh reality. The door to her office burst open. Crocket stepped in, berating her. “Do you think we can get on with the meeting? This is reflecting very poorly on the entire business…”

  She looked at the phone dangling by its cord.

  James is dead.

  Crocket’s needling voice jabbed at her, and she hated him more at that moment than she ever had. She hated him because Marvin Crocket represented reality. This was not a nightmare. She would not awake. This was real. The pain gripping her chest exploded from her like a shock wave from the center of a blast. In a burst of fury she shot from the chair, flipping the desk as if it were a balsa-wood fake. Clutter and computer equipment slid off its face, crashing to the floor with a resounding thud.

  HOURS AFTER SHE had rushed from her office in a daze of grief and a fog of disbelief and despair, Dana sat staring at fluorescent light reflecting off the waxed linoleum in the basement of Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. Next to her sat a female police officer. Despite the harsh reality of the stark white hallway, a part of her still clung to the faint hope that James was not dead—that it was all some horrible error, some egregious mistake to be rectified with profuse apologies. But she had been through this denial before, sitting on the same bench outside the King County medical examiner’s office, waiting to identify her father’s body.

  There was no mistake. This was real. Her brother was dead.

  “Ms. Hill?”

  She looked
up. There stood a well-dressed man in a tailored blue suit, white shirt, and diamond-patterned tie. He looked like a lawyer. “I’m Detective Michael Logan,” he said.

  She didn’t bother to stand.

  “I’m very sorry for your loss. Would you like to get a cup of coffee, something to drink?”

  She estimated him to be six feet, with broad shoulders and a young face, freckles sprinkled across his nose and cheeks. His red hair had a light curl and was damp, presumably from the rain. “Do you know anything more?” she asked.

  He sat beside her on the bench. “Not for certain. We believe your brother returned home at approximately eleven o’clock last night and walked in during a burglary. He may have been on the telephone, talking to you.”

  Dana dropped her hand from her mouth. “Me?”

  “That’s the last number on his phone. He called you at eleven-ten.”

  She lowered her eyes to the floor, remembering. She had been stressed and anxious after the doctor’s appointment and Crocket’s tirade. She’d been fighting with Grant, then rolled over, exhausted. James’s call woke her. “Yes,” she said.

  “You remember the call?” Logan asked.

  She nodded. “You mean he was on the phone with me…” Tears streamed down her cheeks with the knowledge that her brother’s final act had been to call and find out if she was okay and tell her that he loved her.

  Detective Logan gave her a moment to compose herself. “Do you recall what you and your brother talked about?”

  She took a deep breath. “He had called me earlier in the day. I’d forgotten to call him back. He was just checking on me.” She remembered their conversation. “He said he had a problem.”

  “What kind of problem?”

  She shook her head. “He didn’t say.” She thought a moment. “We were going to have lunch today.”

  “Did he say anything else?”

  “No. He was just… he didn’t want to talk about it on the phone.” She looked at Logan. “He said he didn’t want to talk about it over the phone.”

  “And you have no idea what he was referring to?”

  “No. James never had problems.”

  “Never?” She heard skepticism in the detective’s voice.

  “No,” she repeated.

  “So if he called you and wanted to talk in person, it was probably something important.”

  “I don’t know,” she said, tired. “I guess so.”

  “Could it have been the kind of problem that would lead to something like this?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m sorry to have to ask, Ms. Hill, but was your brother into anything—drugs, gambling, anything that might have put him in a situation where someone would have wanted to kill him?”

  “You said it was a burglary—that James walked in on a burglary.”

  “I did. I’m just following up on what you’ve told me, that your brother called and said he had a problem.”

  She shook her head. “No.” She hesitated before becoming more definitive. “No. James didn’t do drugs. He was a vegetarian; he was a fanatic about what he put into his body. And I never knew him to gamble except maybe the college basketball pool at work. My brother was a good man, Detective. Everybody liked James. I never met anyone who didn’t like him.” Her voice became edgy with frustration and anger. “This just doesn’t make any sense. None of it makes any sense.”

  Logan nodded. “Senseless acts of violence are difficult to understand and even more difficult to accept, I’m afraid. We have officers taking statements from your brother’s neighbors to determine if anyone saw anything suspicious or out of the ordinary—strangers walking around, a car that appeared out of place. The technicians found fingerprints in the house and shoe prints outside the back door. We’ll check to determine if there have been recent burglaries in the area. We’ll do our best to find out what happened and see if we can make some sense of it.”

  “Ms. Hill?” Dana turned to a different voice. A man wearing blue hospital scrubs and a white smock stood in the hallway. “We’re ready for you now.” Dana stood. The man looked past her, down the hallway. “Is there anyone here with you?”

  “No,” she said softly. “I’m alone.”

  Logan stood from the bench. “I’ll go in with you.”

  THE HILL FAMILY home in Medina was a five-bedroom house on an acre of well-manicured lawn, hedges, rhododendrons, and tulips. The backyard sloped gently from a pool to the edge of Lake Washington. Dana parked in front of the three-car garage to the left of the home, where the car could not be seen from the house. She sat undetected and wished she could remain there forever. She couldn’t, of course. Nor could she break down in hysterics or collapse from the pain and agony that felt like someone was standing on her chest. She had a job to do. She had to deliver bad news again. That was her job in life, delivering bad news. She had been the one to tell her mother when her father died. James had been out of town. She had told them both the story that her father’s law partner implored her to tell—that her father collapsed during a racquetball game at the Washington Athletic Club and died on the way to the hospital. That her father had been at his secretary’s condominium drinking his lunch and lying on top of her when he died was deemed irrelevant, a fact that would only serve to hurt her mother.

  The image of her brother’s battered and distorted face haunted her, and she knew it would continue to do so for many years. The doctors had done their best to clean him up. She tried not to consider what he’d looked like before they did. His face was swollen and bruised, a strange maroon and purple color. His eyes were thin slits, as if he were peeking out from a deep sleep. His face was so foreign to her that Dana had hoped that it wasn’t her brother after all, though that hope had been fleeting.

  “I need to see his hand,” she said.

  “Which one?” the medical examiner asked.

  “His left.”

  She walked around the tray table to the left side. On the pinky finger, at the tip, was the odd-shaped mole, the same mole she bore on the same finger of her left hand. It looked like Saturn, a planet with a ring around it. As kids, she and James would swear secrecy by pushing those two moles together. It was James’s mole. It was her mole. It was their mole.

  No mistake. “It’s James,” she said.

  Somewhere down the street, the McMillans’ beagle barked the mournful wail of an old, tired dog. Dana remembered when he was a puppy. What would she tell her mother this time to temper the bad news? What would lessen the pain of a mother’s loss of a child? What else to say but “Mom, James is dead. Someone killed him. I don’t know why, and why doesn’t matter. He’s dead.”

  “Oh, God.” Dana covered her mouth. Tears streamed down her cheeks. She felt herself coming unglued again and gripped the steering wheel, her body racked with sobs.

  Then the infrastructure collapsed, and she cried long, sorrowful heaves.

  MORNING PASSED. The blanket of gray gave way to a blue sky with rolling white clouds. A chill remained—spring fighting the lingering winter. Dana stepped along the stone path amid the lambent shadows from the pine and dogwood trees swaying in a light breeze. She passed the Dutch door to the pantry off the kitchen. It had been the only door she and James had ever used growing up. But this was no longer her home, and it hadn’t been for some time. It would send the wrong message to use it now.

  A part of her wished her mother wasn’t home, but where else would she be? Her mother had never worked. Not a day in her life. There was no need with a husband earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and who had left her a sizable estate—if not acquaintances. Following his death, her mother maintained few of their friends or hobbies. The law partners and wives who had been such good acquaintances when James Hill, Sr., was making rain for the firm—silent conspirators to his years of infidelity—suddenly disappeared. She canceled the family membership at the Overlake Golf & Country Club, not interested in pulling a golf cart around the course alone, and sold the
cabin cruiser. She kept the speedboat, not for herself but for what she hoped would be many grandchildren. Most days she stayed at home knitting, doing needlepoint, and watching the soaps and talk shows.

  Dana stepped beneath the peaked pediment supported on two white pillars, and took a moment to control her emotions. Then she raised the horse-head door knocker and rapped three times. After a moment the door pulled open. Her mother stood wearing yellow rubber gloves and holding a blackened sponge that smelled of a powerful chemical. She broke into an uncertain smile. “Dana. What a pleasant surprise. Why didn’t you use the side door? Don’t you still have your key?”

  They touched cheeks, her mother careful to avoid getting any of the black grease on Dana’s suit. Voices from the television talked in the background. If Dana’s disheveled appearance and swollen eyes were apparent, her mother did not remark on them. But then the Hills had never been a family to confront the obvious, her father’s twenty-year fling with his secretary being the obvious example.

  Dana followed her mother through the formal dining room in to the kitchen. Sliding glass doors overlooked the backyard. A spray of water from the pool sweep whipped through the air like a snake.

  “I wish you had called.” Her mother put the sponge in the sink, removed the rubber gloves, and used the back of her arm to push aside a strand of hair that had uncurled from the bun on the back of her head. The oven door hung open, the stove burners in the sink. The room smelled of ammonia and badly burned toast. “I’m just cleaning the oven.”

  “It’s a self-cleaning oven, Mom,” Dana said. She walked to the sliding glass door and opened it. A breeze fluttered the curtains. “You need air in here.”

  “Are you out on business?” Medina was across Lake Washington, just five miles east of downtown Seattle and accessible by either of the two bridges, though her mother always made it sound like an arduous trek. “How’s Molly? How’s my sweet little angel?” Her mother was flustered, her routine disrupted.