Sam’s statement broadsided them like an avalanche. Beka stopped dancing to the music in her head, but the snow kept falling into the room.
“My b … brother,” Sam stammered. “Todd is missing.”
It was four in the morning. Devon checked her watch just to make sure—it seemed as if present time were matching her reminiscence as the anniversary of Todd Daniel’s disappearance drew to a close. Or was the anniversary just beginning?
Leaning against the van and looking up at Gabe and Beka’s house, Devon was pelted by tiny beads of ice as she wondered if it would turn to rain or snow again—it was as if the world itself couldn’t decide whether to be warm or cold. She clipped her marsupial pouch, full of all the little extras she might need, around her waist and was about to grab her field kit and head back to the house when the gurney, with Gabriel bagged and securely strapped to it, came down the steps. It was definitely getting colder.
She could see her partner Frank using the black light up on the hill, trying to pick up any trace particles that normally would have disappeared in the dark.
Patches of fresh snow glowed as the purple light passed over them, and Lochwood waited until the detective was finished sweeping the scene before he said anything. Beka Imamura lay in the snow like an origami bird whose wings had been clipped. Her legs were folded awkwardly to one side as if she’d been frozen in mid-run like a deer on the highway, and both arms reached up over her head and lay twisted around the wrists and folded as if in prayer. Her skin had already begun to turn waxy, paler than usual, and for a moment Lochwood thought that she looked like a geisha doll. Her eyes stared up at him, slanted and accusing, as they had always looked at him. Beka had never liked him, he knew that, but he never knew why.
Frank stood up and looked at him expectantly. “I told them to wait a minute before they put her in the Wagon and Basket,” Lochwood informed him.
“I’ve been up and down this area twice now and I don’t see any fucking footprints. What’d she do, fly? And the damn weather is wiping everything up as it goes.” Frank pointed to the area around the body. “There are pockets which could have been footprints two hours ago, but they’re so smooth now I can’t tell for sure. This area’s pretty rough.”
“Can we tell if there was a scuffle?”
“I don’t see any signs of a struggle. She either walked here or was carried, but I don’t see evidence of either.”
“Carried—interesting idea.”
“She’s so light that her bare feet wouldn’t have left much of an imprint if she had come out here to die. Carrying would have left a deeper impression.” Frank thwarted his own theory. “It was an hour or more before we got here, which probably allowed the snow and sleet to erase her tracks.”
“What about trace?”
“Some hair that looks like it’s hers, and the knife has her prints on it.”
“It’s pretty clear what happened.” Lochwood looked at his notes, then at the body. “But why’d she kill herself here? It doesn’t look like her kind of spot.”
“See, that’s the thing.” Frank liked to think out loud. “A woman like that doesn’t want to die in the mud. She likes to lay herself out in silk, pour a Brandy with just the right amount of Seconal in it, put on something sentimental, like opera, a nice aria, and slip away. And then there’s her old man. Why’d she kill him like that?”
“Got me. I mean, if she’d just hit him over the head with a frying pan that’d be one thing, but this, this was no fooling around. She butchered him.”
“It’s like a death scene,” Frank said.
“Exactly.”
They looked at the knee prints in the path where she must have knelt down to perform her final act. “How many murder/suicides use two weapons?”
“It’s usually one, and the murder weapon is turned against the murderer.”
“Exactly. Still, it looks like a murder/suicide to me.”
“Devon’s not going to like it,” Frank mumbled.
“It’s not her job to like or dislike,” Loch said, more to himself than to Frank, her partner. “It’s her job to report the facts, no matter what they are.” He tapped his pen against his hand until it hurt.
“You don’t have to tell me, Brennen.”
“Sorry. You heading back to the house?” Frank nodded again, but both men stood for a moment in silence. “I never saw her dance, but Devon says she was amazing,” Loch said quietly, then promptly realized he’d used Devon’s first name. He coughed, hoping to cover his slip.
“I know about you two.”
“Any problems with it?”
“None of my business.”
“You ever fool around on your wife?”
“Me? Nah, she’d kill me and no one would be able to prove it. She pays attention to what I do for a living.” Lochwood coughed again, uncomfortable with the implication. “It’s a different situation, Loch.”
“Yeah, but it never made sense before I met Halsey.”
“Just remember, you hurt her and something might happen to you …” Frank stopped midsentence and pointed down the hill.
Devon stood there staring, not at them but at Beka. Her mouth fell open and snowflakes seemed to hover in and out with her breath.
“What’s wrong?” Loch started to move toward her, but she waved him away.
“Where’s her hair? My god, what happened to her hair?”
CHAPTER FOUR
Jade is tested by fire, a sword is tested by a hair.
—ZEN PHRASE
Women do cut their hair, even though Devon swore Beka would never have cut hers. It was strange, Loch would give it that, but inconclusive. There were a few other things that were strange, too. He and Gary stood in the doorway of the art studio Montebello and his staff called the Art Barn. “Did her position strike you as odd?” he asked.
“She was a dancer. I figured it was normal for her.”
“I wonder what Devon thought.”
“Maybe when she gets over the hair you can ask her.” Gary stepped into the space and looked up at the hayloft.
The barn was full of all kinds of equipment, none of which had anything to do with farming. There were paint-blowers, welding torches, two kilns—one upright and one square—rolls of canvas stacked in the northwest corner next to a vertical pile of wood moldings to stretch canvas on, and a miter saw; there were buckets, and bags of plaster and alginate. There was a corner that looked almost like a clothing rack in a department store that was full of painter’s pants and jackets and paper Tyvek suits, most of which were spattered with paint and plaster and clay. There was even a small foundry for lighter metal castings and a pouring bin.
“Quite a studio,” Gary marveled.
“You don’t become as well-known as Gabriel Montebello without being well-versed in a number of mediums.”
“You sound like Halsey,” Gary scoffed at his partner. He opened a large metal locker at the side of the room. Clean paper jumpsuits were hanging in a row, seemingly new and untouched. “Hey, what’s this look like?”
Lochwood peered at it and paused. “A Crime Scene locker.”
“Where the hell did he get Tyvek suits, from Halsey?”
“You can buy those at Canal Street Jeans a few blocks from his Soho studio.”
“He has a studio in Soho?”
“He has a building in Soho,” Loch replied. “Four floors. Each one a separate loft of about two thousand square feet. It’s bigger than this place.”
“Man, can you believe some guy who plays around with paint and clay for a living lives like this?” Gary picked up a pair of booties and a paper cap like the ones the Crime Scene Unit usually wore. “What about these? You can’t tell me he got these at Canal Street Jeans.”
“Maybe he buys them from the distributor.” Lochwood picked up a drop cloth and looked at the sculpture hiding underneath, then dragged his forefinger under the tarp and across the floor. “It’s too clean. Let’s get Halsey up here. She’s been here before
; she can tell us if this is normal.”
Devon’s field kit was reassuring in its order and familiarity: the test tubes with their blank labels waiting for samples; the sterile swabs wrapped in foil packages of two—one for a control sample, one for the sample itself; the small bottle of distilled water she would sprinkle onto the sterile Q-tip swab in order to take a control and then a blood sample; the Amido Black to make blood appear on white objects; the Luminol to make blood appear on black; the sterile scalpel for scrapings. Everything was relatively untouched by human hands until the moment she opened the ordinary-looking toolbox and the equipment inside became property of the Imamura-Montebello Crime Scene.
The house was almost as quiet as a zendo full of deeply concentrating people. Devon watched the Crime Scene detectives-in-training pull out their own plastic bags—they looked like aliens moving through a world they did not yet understand. She walked to the fireplace mantel and took her first swab off the painting, sealed it into vial 1-a, then took a swab of blood and sealed it into vial 1-b. Then, because she was both cautious and thorough, she took a control sample off the painted wall and another swab of blood. “2-a, 2-b,” she wrote on the outside of the test tubes, then slipped them into her pocket before continuing to track the scene she had just documented on film. She didn’t think they were looking for more than a single blood type, but one could never be sure when there was so much of it around. She recalled the case where Homicide had proved a murder had been committed by the amount of blood at the scene alone, even though the body was never found. The DA had argued that no one could lose so much blood and still be alive.
She loved the careful rituals of evidence collection. It took a creative mind to walk through a crime scene and read it correctly, and she felt her mental arm stretch and flex as she walked contemplatively, breathing deeply and slowly, through the living room.
The coffee table was made of copper tubing, with two slabs of broken marble set in the middle that fit together like the jagged edges of a jigsaw puzzle. But it was the bottle of bourbon on the table that caught and held her attention.
Kneeling down on the floor, Devon picked up the fragments of peeled paper from the Jack Daniel’s label and placed them in a bag. There might be a partial print that she could pull later. Then, following her intuition, she checked under the couch; there was a prescription bottle of Norflex. Beka used muscle relaxers for back pain, and that’s what Norflex provided.
Lochwood had come back inside. She caught his eye. “Did Beka overdose?”
The profiles for male and female suicide victims were very different, and a drug overdose was definitely more Beka’s style—women were generally more concerned with appearances and how they looked after death, while men opted for a more violent, certain death. In the case of murder/suicide, however, the weapon used on the murder victim was almost always the one used in the suicide as well. Devon had to know the answer to her own question.
Loch’s voice broke through her reverie. “Jo says her eyes were dilated, which could indicate cardiac arrest, but for now it looks like loss of blood.”
“Really?” Devon looked at the prescription bottle she had just bagged. It had been filled three days ago for twenty pills and was now empty. “Have Toxicology check for Norflex in her system.” She handed him the bag.
He held it up and raised an eyebrow. “We’re going to need you up at the studio when you’re done in here.”
“Okay.” She looked at the bottle of Jack Daniel’s again. “Who made the 911 call?”
“It wasn’t Gabe.”
“So why make it?”
“Maybe she wanted them to be found quickly.” He didn’t want to tell her what he really thought, that Beka had wanted Devon to find them.
“She?” She looked at him questioningly.
He wanted to give her more time, but she saw the same things he saw—she had to have reached the same conclusion. “It looks like a murder/suicide.”
She snorted. “Don’t jump the gun, Brennen.”
“We aren’t jumping anything, Halsey. We’re evaluating each piece of evidence we find and reading the signs as they’ve been left for us.”
Her voice was calm but she could feel her muscles quaking. “Beka was temperamental and self-destructive, but she was not homicidal. And Gabe, whatever his faults, didn’t deserve this.”
Their voices were hoarse from traveling between the cold air outside and the warm air in the house, and they tried to argue in hushed tones so as not to disturb the other workers.
“We’ve both seen it happen before,” he reminded her. “Maybe she just snapped.”
“There’s no way she had the strength to drag him down the hallway.”
He paused. “Clytemnestra,” was all he said.
Devon’s eyes reflected a brief trace of doubt, then she nodded in agreement. Beka had dragged Orestes, also known as her dance partner, Edilio Ferraro—all six feet, one hundred and seventy-five pounds of him—around stage during every night and matinee performance of the fall season five years earlier.
“The Bourbon in the bottom needs to be analyzed, it looks like it’s been rinsed.” A detective-in-training opened a bag as Devon placed the bottle inside. Just a year ago, she’d been the one in training and on her way to becoming a full-fledged Crime Scene detective. Now, with her probationary period over and her promotion official, Devon Halsey, the first female Crime Scene detective in Suffolk County, was training others.
She continued through the room dusting objects that were in unusual places and pulling latents. It was the first time she had ever worked a house she already knew, and she found that her preknowledge both helped and hindered her. For one thing, she was aware of what was new in the house and what was old. She even recognized her wedding present, a raku vase, in the corner of the room. On the other hand, these details carried emotional attachments for her, and she felt she was tripping over memories instead of crime-scene cones and tape.
From the doorway to the master bedroom, Devon retraced the impressions of footwear and the bare footprints on the wood floor in the hall. Halfway down the hallway she stopped and took a closer look at the samurai sword hanging off-kilter on the wall. The sword had been passed down in the Imamura family for centuries and brought over by Beka’s grandfather from Kyoto when he first settled in Hawaii. To Beka, who considered herself one-hundred-percent American, it was just a family heirloom. To Devon, it was the sword of Damocles. It looked clean—too clean.
Pulling a small bottle of Amido Black out of her kit, she paused. The weight of what she might find pressed down on her as she raised the spray bottle—the pressure to complete her job, the consequence of what her work might reveal. A light spray of Amido Black grabbed hold of the protein residue of blood as she rinsed it off with acetic glacial acid. It shifted and collected like beads of mercury around what was invisible to the naked eye.
“What is it?” Loch asked.
“Blood …” She stepped back. “Lots of it.” She pointed to the coagulation up and down the hilt of the sword. “What the hell happened here, Brennen?” She was beginning to feel lightheaded.
“Come over here and sit down. You look faint.” He tried to push her head between her legs but she refused. That would just provide more grist for the rumor mill: Women shouldn’t work in Crime Scene or Homicide. She pulled a stick of gum out of her pouch and used the methodic rhythm of her jaws to calm her nerves.
“I can’t believe she did this,” she whispered. “I’m sorry. I’m trying to keep an open mind but I can’t buy it.”
He knelt down by her side to discuss their differing opinions more quietly. “We can’t be sure about anything this early,” he conceded.
She searched his eyes for reassurance, but they were glazed over with that faraway glint he got whenever they passed the scene of some crisis. He was like a bloodhound when it came to trouble, always sniffing it out when it didn’t come looking for him. She watched him walk over to the stereo where it was recess
ed into the wall. The light was on and the digital display indicated disc two was in repeat mode. He pulled out his handkerchief and turned up the volume.
The CD changer immediately went into its recall mode, and in seconds Kiri Te Kanawa’s voice engulfed the room in Madame Butterfly’s tragic wail. Frank stopped what he was doing and looked over at his partner. She shut her eyes.
Devon felt as if she were hanging in the air as Un Bel Di Verdremo stung her heart with the voice of betrayal and lost love. When she opened her eyes again, Lochwood and Frank were still staring at her, as if she held the answer. Her voice was flat against the graceful lyricism of the soprano when she said, “She’s about to commit suicide.”
CHAPTER FIVE
A skillful craftsman leaves no traces
—ZEN PHRASE
The monk stamped his feet as he walked through the snow and ducked beneath the privet hedge. Though it was still dark he could make out the gray shape of the garden Buddha and bowed in respect toward the shadowy corner of the yard. As he raised his eyes from the ground though, he stopped mid-bow. Despite the darkness of the grove, he could just make out something in the Buddha’s hands. Someone had left an offering of long black hair, and even Buddha’s supreme serenity seemed puzzled by the presence of the locks. Hans didn’t remove the offering; he was merely mindful of its presence. He was used to finding little gifts to the Buddha, and more than one member of the Northwest Woods Zendo came to meditate at night. That last night was New Year’s Eve did not disturb him in the least. He turned, felt his robes catch on the wet ground, gathered the hem up, and headed toward the tiny barn where the morning sit would begin in thirty minutes.
The door to the zendo swung open in the wind as Hans stooped through the doorway. He lit the small oil heater in the main sitting room and began to sweep the floor as he did everyday before the early-morning meditation. The planks of wood in the old barn were wide and hid dirt well, but he muscled the broom in between the cracks and swept the dirt out the door. Warmth slowly sucked the damp smell of mildew out of the air, and through the windows of the barn he could see the sky slowly changing from dark to light gray as he prepared incense and fresh candles for the shrine.
The Weeping Buddha Page 4
