Let Sleeping Dogs Lie

by Suzann Ledbetter

  He cocked his head. "But you must have. Unless it was reflected lightning I saw through the window wall."

  A toe traced a crack in the concrete. She ummed, then said. "Well, the penlight kind of turned itself on for a second after I dropped it."

  "Uh-huh. Slick."

  "Up yours, McPhee. I was scared—totally creeped out, if you want the truth. Why I didn't faint when those security lights came on, I don't know."

  "Hey, I panicked a little around the edges myself, out on the terrace. I guess which of us set off the motion detectors is a toss-up."

  "But if you were on the terrace and I was inside, does that mean the other detectors I saw were fakes? Or broken, like the one over the mudroom door?"

  "Neither. I'm almost sure, not all of them were equipped with battery backups. If they were, some of them lost juice faster than others."

  Jack paused a moment. "This morning, Andy McGuire flashed crime-scene photos at me, taken with portable lights. Belle was in the Jacuzzi in the master bathroom. The jets were off. By my count, the bathroom had eighteen recessed fixtures. Half as many regular fixtures. A fancy chandelier over the tub. All of them off."

  His lips flattened. "Altogether, how's that add up to you?"

  Still reeling from the horror and pain those pictures must have caused him, Dina stammered, "The killer. He shut off the electricity." The answer fostered a "But why?"

  Jack's voice was harsh, raspy. "To fuck with the time of death. Like a medical examiner's determination is ever as definite and precise as it is on TV shows."

  Dina waved away a belated apology for his language. Murdering a woman in her bathtub was an obscenity in itself.

  "When the jets were on," he continued, "the water temperature was between 98 and 104 degrees. Federal law won't allow thermostats to go higher than that. As a general rule, a dead body cools about a degree and a half per hour. That's one way an M.E. determines time of death. How or if partial submersion and a gradually decreasing water temp affected that, I don't know. It's a safe guess, the killer thought it would."

  "And that mattered because "

  "Again, it's speculation, but unless the shooter was just getting his jollies, there's only one logical reason."

  Jack moved to the patio door. "Now let's go boot up the laptop, plug in your phone line and see if we can find some more."

  Loath to admit that quintessential reason escaped her, Dina said, "You want to prove yourself wrong?"

  "Sure, if I can." He chuckled. "If I don't, I'll know I'm right."

  13

  Jack closed his notebook and rose from the wrought-iron settee. "Thank you for your time, ma'am."

  "My pleasure, Mr. McBee. Do ring me if you have any more questions."

  Two can play the name game, lady, he thought. "I'd do that, Mrs. Porter."

  A visual standoff ensued. Laura Proctor blinked first. Excellent. Now they understood each other.

  She escorted him through the museum she called home. Jack had upgraded his Armani suit with a Kohl's dress shirt and tie, but sensed his hostess showed him to the door more from fear he'd pocket a Renaissance French what's-it, than etiquette.

  Naturally, it was all he could do to not boost one of Catherine de Médicis's authenticated crystal doodads while Mrs. Proctor's back was turned. Wherever Belle was, she'd laugh herself loopy when Ms. Pearl sold the bauble for a quarter at his former apartment's garage sale.

  Jack drove off realizing how lonely Belle must have been. The few neighbors he'd talked to were oblivious. Everyone pulled into the garage attached to a hermitic haven, paying scant, if any attention to the world outside the windows. That's what home was. A refuge.

  For Laura Proctor, like Belle's other so-called friends, speaking ill of the dead was akin to a lemon slice drenched in honey: the sticky sweetness hadn't masked the puckery aftertaste. All seven women he'd interviewed that morning were reduced to tears carefully dabbed from their eye corners, while damning dear, dear Belle with the faintest of praise.

  Each of them all but called her a low-class, ignorant gold digger. At the core of every humorous anecdote was an insult; each complimentary noun implied its antonym.

  Carleton adored Belle, they meowed, as if he were hardly the first wealthy man besotted by a busty, flame-haired vixen. The allusions to Pygmalion transforming a gutter wench into a princess were unanimous. So were insinuations that once a wench, always a wench regardless of how skilled and patient the mentor, or how eager to please the student.

  Last night, while Phil and Dina respectively whimpered and muttered in their sleep, Jack sifted remembered conversations with Belle for her female so-called friends' names. Why they'd rated mention, he couldn't recollect, but had a feeling Belle had ripped them up, down, sideways and repeatedly.

  Lord, how she'd detested phonies, liars and snobs. He cuffed the pickup's steering wheel. "Except for Golden Boy."

  The sobriquet attached to Carleton deHaven was coined five years prior when his bubble ascended on the get-rich-easy lecture circuit. Jack's and Dina's Internet surfing yielded increasingly awestruck references to deHaven's charisma, brilliance and groundbreaking financial philosophies.

  From Jack's biased perspective, what he read seemed like a resurrection of Dale Carnegie's and others' positive-thinking strategies. For certain, deHaven's income derived from overpriced seminar and private consulting fees, and self-published how-to manuals, audiobooks and DVDs.

  When Dina discovered that Golden Boy was also a hybrid tomato, a British bus line, a brand of fish sauce and a popular Frisco pizzeria, they'd laughed so hard, Harriet pelted them with sugarless candy.

  Jack grinned and shook his head. The old girl was frail and in more pain than she let on, but had a pretty fair arm on her. And uncommon pragmatism, as he realized during the evening's umpteenth episode of carping at her daughter for neglecting her.

  While she catered to Harriet's current whim, Jack had sat down on the ottoman. Quietly, he told her that Dina wouldn't grieve any less someday, no matter how much Harriet pushed her away, criticized her and hung haloes on Randy.

  "I like you, McPhee," Harriet said with a benevolent smile. "Here's a piece of advice you might oughta think about before you start giving it." Her eyes narrowed. "Any fool with a shovel can dig himself a well. But nobody on God's green earth ever fell out of one."

  Jack was imagining Belle's back-stabbing faux friends at the bottom of a very deep hole when a siren burped behind him. His eyes zipped to the S-10's side mirror, the revolving light bar reflected in it, then the speedometer. Reflex had eased up the accelerator. He was still nine miles over the speed limit.

  Flicking on the turn signal, he pulled into a restaurant's front lot and rolled down the window. The patrolman who unfolded from the cruiser was a hoss: six-five, two-fifty and shaved as bald as a T-rex egg. The cop's jiggling holster strap might be carelessness, or overcautiousness. Good citizen Jack held the steering wheel at the prescribed ten-and two-o'clock positions.

  "Morning, Offi—"

  "May I see your driver's license, sir?"

  "Wallet's in my inside pocket." Jack slowly opened his jacket wide with his left hand. Two fingers of his right tweezed out his billfold. The ID was slipped from its plastic sleeve.

  Eyes twice older than the face they belonged to looked from Jack to the postage-stamp DMV photo. "You're Jack Limon McPhee?"

  Affirmation brought a brusque "Step out of the vehicle, sir. Keep your hands where I can see 'em."

  The ripple in Jack's belly said this wasn't a routine traffic stop. Arms aloft, he stepped onto the asphalt, asking the same question cops heard a dozen times a shift. "What's this about, Officer?"

  It received the standard "Face the vehicle, hands on the bed, legs apart."

  A smart chuck to the side of Jack's foot splayed them an extra, intimidating few inches. No, he didn't have a weapon. No contraband or anything on his person that might cause injury during a search. The wallet, sans ID, was shoved in his jacket pocket.r />
  The pat-down drew stares from passing cars. A couple arriving for an early lunch gawked, as though trying to pick Jack out of last week's America's Most Wanted lineup.

  "Okay. Bring one hand down behind your back."

  Jack craned to squint over his shoulder. "I know the drill. I used to be a cop. I'm not resisting. I just want to know what I'm being arrested for."

  A cuff snapped and ratcheted down on his wrist bone like dull-bladed pliers. "Probable cause, suspicion of homicide." The patrolman helped himself to Jack's other arm, wrenching it backward with practiced efficiency.

  He winced at the cuff's metallic bite. The Miranda recitation sounded as atonal and distant as an echo. His Fourth Amendment rights, Jack understood. McGuire's probable cause for an arrest warrant was guessable and scared the hell out of him. Fear morphed into inane rage at the towing bill and impound fees he'd have to pay on the S-10.

  For the second time in as many days, he was passengering a P.D. unit. As McGuire predicted, it was sideward in the backseat, cuffed and caged behind a thick sheet of Plexiglas. Sweat poured off him like oily brine. The odor mingled with the stench of dried puke, blood and urine.

  An absurd remorse for a fine suit's ruination sent a laugh skittering up Jack's throat. The patrolman—S. Engels, by the nameplate above his pocket—glanced at the loon he was transporting.

  Not even close to crazy, Jack telegraphed. The suit, the least of his current worries, was resolvable with lighter fluid and a match. When the world goes to shit, it's those abstract mental baby steps that keep you sane.

  He and S. Engels parted company in the prisoner-intake area. Hoss had reports to write. Jack smiled for the mug shot. His prints were on file, but retaken because redundancy is the soul of a bureaucracy. The contents of his pockets were inventoried, bagged and sent upstairs. The cell phones' logged calls and their address books would be of particular interest to Lt. Andy McGuire.

  An enthralling millennia was spent in a wire holding cell with a detoxing meth head, two jive-talking wanna-be gangstas and a rabbitlike older man who'd confess to anything for a get-out-of-jail-free card. Jack was then taken upstairs to a different, but identical interrogation room in the homicide unit.

  The waiting game had walloped his sinuses and cleared his head. To the videocamera, he said, "C'mon, McGuire. Let's party. We both know I'm not gonna break down and cry for my momma."

  The investigator let him stew a few minutes. McGuire strolled in with the air of an executioner with a brand-spanking-new rope. A cardboard file box was set on the floor between his chair and the wall, then he magnanimously unlocked the cuffs. "Better?"

  "Peachy." Jack settled back in the chair, stifling an urge to rub his sore wrists. Behind his crossed arms, he flexed the circulation back in his fingers. "So, where'd the no-name tipster tell you to find my .38? In the Dumpster at the office? Conveniently located under a bush near the crime scene?"

  "Smart-ass'll get you nowhere." The bagged and tagged weapon in question thunked on the table. "Ballistics matched the bullet recovered at autopsy."

  Jack forced his mind and memory off the subject of that postmortem. "No prints other than mine, anywhere on the gun."

  "Not a one." McGuire's expression fell short of victorious. "From the look of your office and apartment, I figured you were waiting your turn at a border crossing by now."

  Jack couldn't stanch the pallor slithering downward from his hairline. "I told you Monday, the .38 was in the glove box in my Taurus. First thing after I left here, I checked." He shook his head. "Right then, I knew it was the murder weapon."

  "Why didn't you call me and report it stolen?"

  "Is that a rhetorical question?"

  McGuire's grunt allowed that it was. Had Jack known the .38 was missing a week before Belle was killed, the muzzle would still point at him now. "Where did you find it?"

  "Where you left it." A reproachful head shake. "A dresser drawer in your bedroom. Second from the top."

  Under the pile of orphan socks Ms. Pearl wanted for miniblind dusters, Jack presumed. Had he not bailed from the apartment, the Dumpster or shrubbery scenario would have been substituted.

  The search warrants led to the gun's discovery, rather than the reverse. Except one fingerprint at the scene and a relationship to the victim don't constitute probable cause.

  "Somebody's doing a sweet job of framing me for murder." He gave McGuire a tight smile. "What prompted the warrants?"

  The deliberation extended several seconds. McGuire's answer might cue whether he believed the Easter Bunny left registered murder weapons in sock drawers for good little detectives. "A witness put your Ford at the deHaven house at about ten-thirty Sunday night. The individual was jogging, saw the residence was dark and memorized your plate."

  Wouldn't ya know, Jack sneered to himself. I must have zoned out from boredom about the time Marathon Man laced up his cross-trainers for a nice run in the rain.

  "Approximately ninety minutes later," McGuire said, "a uniform responded to check-the-well-being and trouble calls at that address. A vehicle of that description was observed in a driveway across the street."

  "Of that description pertains to about what, about a thousand blue Tauruses in Park City? No approach. No tag, model year or VIN recorded by the responder. No suspicious-vehicle report to dispatch."

  Jack leveled a "you gotta be kidding" glare. "Jesus. I'd truly love to hear how you reconcile me killing my ex-wife, then hanging around at the house for another hour and a half."

  McGuire shot back, "Were you at that location at any time between the hours of noon and midnight on Sunday."

  "I told you on Monday, I was working." Jack realized the error the instant it was made. "Working" is what he should have said during that interview.

  For one, it was true. The rent-a-dog phone calls, the trip to the shelter, the meet with Cherise, surveillance at Belle's and interview with Dina were all hours billable to Gerry Abramson. For that reason, Jack needn't have provided contact information for Cherise and Dina.

  Being a typically sharp detective and inveterate note taker, McGuire said, "How's Cherise Taylor, the mall and your dog groomer fit with working?"

  "Take my word for it" epitomized too little, too late.

  "I'm not auditing your time sheets or tax deductions, McPhee." Failing that, McGuire stated, "Ms. Taylor mentioned a stalker is harassing you."

  Grateful for the deflection, Jack said, "A mope that needs a new hobby." Possibly something besides serial lock picking, stealing guns, using them, then planting it.

  Detailing Blankenship's vendetta would get Jack nowhere. McGuire might indulge him and canvass the apartment complex for witnesses who might have seen a fat fuck enter or exit Jack's building. If so, unless Blankenship told a witness he'd dropped by to dump the .38 in Jack's dresser, it'd prove precisely nothing.

  "And what's with the dog?"

  "Protection," Jack said, with a straight face. "While I was in the mall, the windows were down in the car enough, he wouldn't overheat."

  "Your Ford, with a loaded .38 allegedly in the glove box."

  "No." Shit. Jack hadn't lied on Monday, but the selective truth had tripped him up, anyway. When he met Cherise at the mall, she'd already taken Phil to Merry Hills.

  McGuire knew Jack had been pulled over in the S-10. If there was a God, let the assumptions begin.

  "Your other friend, Ms. Wexler. I spoke with a Mrs. Wexler at the number you provided. She refused to answer questions about you and said she'd tell Ms. Wexler to call back. Didn't happen."

  Jack gave him Dina's cell-phone number.

  "Generous of you, but I already got it off your cell."

  "I didn't know Dina's cell number, until she called me on it Monday afternoon."

  "Real close friends, are you?"

  Ignoring him, Jack went on, "I guarantee, Mrs. Wexler forgot to pass on your message to Dina. I told you her mother isn't well. And you did confirm that 911 for an ambulance."

  Mc
Guire blew a raspberry and sat back. The knot in his Father's Day tie was adjusted, the ends aligned and ironed smooth. "On Monday, you denied being at the residence. We have two eyewitnesses, plus print evidence contradicting that. You bucked me on volunteering the .38. We execute search warrants and find it in your apartment. Now you say it was stolen. You said you screwed off all day Sunday. Forty-eight hours later, you tell me you were working."

  "Yeah," Jack said. "I'm not helping myself a whole lot here."

  "Cabbage, me lad, if you were this stupid back at the academy, you sure had me fooled."