Linda Crowder - Jake and Emma 01 - Too Cute to Kill

by Linda Crowder

  3

  There wasn’t much time to think about the mystery woman on Monday. Emma had slept fitfully and awakened before dawn. Sitting up in bed, she watched Jake sleeping beside her and her thoughts returned to the previous afternoon.

  He’d found her in the bedroom when the deputies and Coroner’s men left. She’d been curled up in the center of the bed, a cat snuggled on each side of her. He didn’t point out that it was only 3:30 in the afternoon.

  “How did she die?” Emma asked as Jake removed a cat to make room beside her.

  “They don’t know. Or at least they didn’t tell me if they do know.” He draped his arm over her side. “She smelled like alcohol though. Wouldn’t take long to freeze to death if she’d been drinking.”

  “But how did she end up in our front yard? Why didn’t she come up to the house?”

  “I don’t know,” responded Jake. He was silent for a long while. Emma thought he’d fallen asleep when he spoke again. “Maybe her car broke down or got stuck in a drift during the storm. Maybe she was headed here but she just couldn’t keep going in the cold.”

  “She wasn’t dressed for walking around in a blizzard,” Emma noted. “She wasn’t wearing boots or a hat. She didn’t even have a coat on.”

  “It was warm yesterday morning. You know as well as I do that not everybody keeps an emergency set of winter clothes in the car. They should. You never know when the weather’s going to change. People are warm in their cars. They never think about what they’ll do if they break down.”

  Emma nodded silently. She had been guilty many times of dressing for the warmth of car, house and office. Jake had put an extra coat, hat and gloves in her trunk along with an emergency shovel. Now she was glad he had insisted.

  If she should get stuck in a drift, Emma knew the safest thing would be to stay in the car, running the heater for a few minutes at a time, shoveling out the exhaust pipe periodically. So many people didn’t know that or thought they would be better off trying to find help.

  There hadn’t been anything else to say and the day passed silently, both of them absorbed in their own thoughts. When Emma awoke, she’d slipped quietly out of bed and stood for a long time under the hot shower, trying to wash away the disturbing image of the body by the fence.

  Jake was eating cereal and reading the paper as she came from the bedroom. He was dressed casually so Emma knew he didn’t have a court case today. None of the attorneys Emma knew wore suits except when they appeared before a judge.

  She poured the coffee Jake had ready for her and joined him at the table. “Anything about our mystery woman in the paper?” she asked. He shook his head and continued reading. Too early, Emma thought. She finished her breakfast and did the dishes while Jake fed the animals. Then they kissed a hurried goodbye and headed for their separate offices.

  As Emma pulled into the parking lot at her office, Emma’s thoughts began to center on her schedule for the day and the memory of the woman at the fence faded into the background.

  “You look like something the cat dragged in!” Kristy Castle was not a flatterer. Emma usually appreciated that quality in her assistant but this morning she frowned.

  “Happy Monday to you too,” quipped Emma. “Is that any way to greet the woman who signs your paychecks?”

  “I have automatic deposit,” Kristy replied. “The computer signs my paycheck.”

  “How about you buy me a cup of coffee and I’ll tell you about my big adventure yesterday.” Emma unlocked her office door and hung up her coat. She sat down at her desk, switched on her computer and waited for it to come on line.

  Kristy came in with two cups of steaming coffee. Putting one on the desk in front of Emma, she settled into the visitor’s chair and sipped from the other. “You and Jake decide to start working on that family you keep talking about?”

  Emma laughed. “Not that kind of adventure, unfortunately.” She told Kristy about the finding the woman, leaving out her own strong reaction to viewing the woman’s body. Kristy’s eyes widened and she set her cup down on the desk, forgotten.

  “Emma, I can’t believe it. How did she…? Why your house? Are you sure you didn’t recognize her?”

  “I’m sure. I have no idea what happened to her or how she came to be in front of my house.”

  “It’s crazy,” Kristy sighed. She sat back in her chair. “You’ll have to let me know what the police find out.”

  “If they let me know. They might not tell me anything. I don’t really have any connection to the woman, aside from finding her. We may have to wait and read it in the paper like everybody else.” Emma wondered if she would ever know what happened.

  “Well, it’s a good thing you don’t have any clients today,” concluded Kristy. “You look like hell.”

  Emma didn’t think about the mystery woman for the rest of the morning. She was a therapist with a busy private practice and Mondays were reserved for paperwork. She caught up her case notes, resolved issues with insurance billings and wrote an occasional article or blog entry.

  She never accepted appointments on Monday, unless a client was in crisis, so Monday became a relaxed, casual start to her week. This Monday Emma was working on a journal article she’d been asked to write. The tight deadline drove all thought of the dead woman from her mind.

  As Emma was struggling with a particularly troublesome paragraph, Kristy reminded her she needed to leave if she was going to be on time for her Rotary Club meeting. Emma thanked her and hurried to put away her notes.

  She shrugged into her coat and waved absently at Kristy as she tried to remember if she’d left her club pin in her car. Like many service clubs, the Rotary “fined” a member who forgot to wear their club pin. The fines went into the club’s charity fund and ultimately into the community.

  Emma was remembering with dismay that she had put the pin in her jewelry box for safekeeping – she’d already lost three of them – and it was still there. She sighed, it was a good thing for her the fine was only a dollar.

  Sheriff Reggie Newsome was a member of her Rotary Club. Emma had met him at meetings and social functions but she wasn’t well acquainted with him. She was surprised when he sought her out after the meeting. “I heard you had a little trouble out at your place yesterday,” he told her, steering her to a quiet table.

  “It was awful,” agreed Emma. “Do they know yet who she is or how she died?”

  “No, nothing yet. I was hoping you could tell me now that you’ve had some time to get over the shock of finding her.”

  Emma shook her head. “I wish I could help you, Sheriff. I can’t stop thinking about that poor woman, out there freezing to death 100 yards from warmth and safety.” Emma shuddered, trying to erase the woman’s lifeless face from her mind. “What could she have been doing out in that storm?”

  “I don’t know.” Reggie looked closely at Emma. “She didn’t freeze to death, by the way. The Coroner is pretty sure she was already dead when she was placed up against your fence.”

  Emma frowned at this. “That means you think she was murdered.” The Sheriff replied that he didn’t think anything yet and asked if Emma had seen or heard a car on the night of the storm.

  Emma closed her eyes and thought about that night. She remembered the headlights she’d seen coming down the county road and told the Sheriff about them. “That was so early though. It was right after dinner when I went to bring in the dogs. That had to have been too early to….” her voice trailed off.

  “To have been the person who dumped the body,” Reggie finished. “I don’t know. The Coroner won’t even give me a guess at a time of death. Did you hear or see anything else that night?”

  “No I didn’t, but we closed the curtains to keep out the cold. With the way the wind kicked up after that, I don’t think I would have heard a tank.”

  Reggie nodded. Casper wind might be a gold mine to clean energy producers but it was the one drawback to living on the mountain, as Jake and Emma did. “That�
�s pretty much what your husband said too. Well, let me know if you think of anything else.”

  The Sheriff left and Emma realized with a shock that the police had questioned her and Jake separately. They were comparing their stories to see if they were telling the truth. Did that mean that the police would consider them as suspects if the Coroner decided the woman was murdered?

  She supposed it couldn’t be helped. A woman’s body had been found practically on their doorstep. Emma supposed the police had to rule them out as suspects in order to move on to other leads.

  It was understandable, she concluded, but it was unsettling. She pulled her cell phone out of her purse and called Jake’s office. He was out so she tried his cell but it went immediately to voice mail.

  He must be in a meeting, she thought. Jake always turned off his cell during meetings and his meetings could go on for hours. She left him a message to call her and headed back to her office.

  4

  Jake didn’t like the sound of it; no he didn’t like it at all. He leaned back in his chair and fixed his attention on Sheriff Newsome, who was sitting across the desk from him. “If she didn’t freeze to death then someone had to have put her body there.”

  “And that someone could have been her killer,” agreed Reggie, “though I think it’s more likely she was doing drugs and something went wrong. People get scared if someone OD’s on them.”

  Jake liked that explanation better. He didn’t want to think that a killer could come so close to his home and to Emma. “When do you think you’ll know how she died?”

  “The Coroner had to send the body to Colorado for autopsy. We’ll have their initial findings in a day or two but the lab tests can take weeks.” Jake nodded. Real life rarely matched the pace of television crime lab dramas.

  “She didn’t look like a meth-head,” Jake mused, “but these days you just never know. I could smell the alcohol on her. Did you find a car abandoned nearby that she might have come from?”

  “No, nothing like that. A few tire tracks but too fresh. Any tracks from a car that might have dumped her would have been buried in the snow. Same for footprints, all we found were yours from when you checked on the body.”

  Reggie sighed and stared out the window. He didn’t usually have much use for lawyers, but he liked Jake. Jake defended kids. He took the cases of juveniles who’d gotten themselves into trouble and he represented kids whose parents were charged with abuse or neglect.

  Their paths didn’t cross often since the Sheriff didn’t usually do investigative work. Most of the time he rode a desk. This case had caught his interest. He was curious to know what happened to Jane Doe #5, as the Coroner had dubbed the woman until she could be identified.

  They didn’t have any local reports of a missing woman matching her description. They’d sent her prints through the state database without a hit. They were waiting for a response from the feds. If that didn’t yield her identity, they would enter her information into the missing persons databases.

  Usually, they were able to identify someone pretty quickly. People had to wait three days before reporting an adult as a missing person so there was often a lag time between the discovery of a body and a match with the missing persons database. Eventually though, most bodies got identified.

  Once they knew who Jane Doe was, they could start tracking down her movements. Most murders weren’t much of a mystery. It would probably end up being someone she knew. It usually was when a woman was killed. Damn shame, thought Reggie, but there wasn’t anything he could do to change it.

  He roused himself from his thoughts and told Jake to call him if he remembered anything more. Jake promised he would and walked with the Sheriff to the door.

  “Let me know when you find out what happened to her. I know you can’t talk to me during the investigation, but when it’s over, let me know. I don’t have to tell you how much it shook us finding that body.”

  Reggie agreed to notify Jake when the case closed and left the office. Jake returned to his desk and picked up the case file he’d been reviewing when the Sheriff arrived. He stared at the page unseeing.

  She had been dead before her body was dumped. That at least explained why she hadn’t been dressed for the cold. What kind of person tosses someone out of a car on the side of the road like an unwanted piece of garbage?

  Sheriff Newsome thought she’d died of an overdose. She was a young woman. The autopsy would say how young but he thought early 20’s. Her face had looked young anyway, which meant if she’d been on meth, she hadn’t been using it long.

  Early in his career as a defense attorney, Jake had gone to the jail to meet with a new client. She’d been arrested for possession and Jake had been shocked by her haggard appearance. Her file said she was 26 but she looked 50.

  Drug addicts made bad friends. If Jane Doe had been using drugs when she died, he could picture her fellow addicts driving aimlessly into the country to get rid of the body.

  Whoever it was they had to be loaded or crazy to go out in that storm, Jake thought. He’d gotten up in the night to fill the stove and the snow was so bad he couldn’t see the light over his neighbor’s barn door half a mile away.

  A Wyoming native with a four-wheel drive, Jake was an expert driver in bad conditions. He could drive in almost any weather if he had to but to take on an unplowed county road driving under the influence? That was suicide. What kind of junkie would drive five miles up an unplowed county road in a blizzard when he could have dumped the body anywhere along the way?

  Jake hoped the Sheriff was right but he had an uneasy feeling there was more to it. He shook his head and forced his attention back to the case file on his desk. There weren’t going to be any answers until they identified Jane Doe and knew for certain how she died.

  5

  “Tell me again why we’re doing this.” Jake winced as the shopper in line behind him started singing along cheerfully off-key with the store’s Christmas background music.

  “Because it’s fun,” answered Emma. Jake raised an eyebrow. “I like Black Friday shopping.”

  “You like getting up in the middle of the night, parking a mile away, pushing your way through unbelievable crowds of people all to save a little money on things our friends probably don’t even need?”

  Emma giggled. “Absolutely! It’s the spirit of the chase. You hunt, you ought to understand that.”

  Jake snorted, “I don’t think that waffle iron counts as big game.” He nodded at the appliance Emma was clutching proudly and that had been her main quarry in this particular store.

  “It flips over when you cook! How can you not love that?” Jake rolled his eyes. “And I almost didn’t get it. Somebody took his sweet time getting through that last store.”

  “That was different. That was an HX-860 fish finder. My brother’s going to eat his heart out when he sees it.”

  Emma laughed. “You’re not supposed to buy anything for yourself after Thanksgiving. You know the rule.”

  “It was technically still Thanksgiving when I got in line with it.” They both laughed at that. Black Friday wasn’t even on Friday anymore, with stores jump-starting the sale on Thanksgiving evening. Initially, they both agreed to not set foot into a store before midnight. Then Jake saw the fish finder advertised at a door buster price and they’d joined the line at 8pm.

  They finished their shopping and left the mall to have breakfast in their favorite diner. It was all part of their Black Friday tradition. They compared notes about their purchases at the smaller stores where their plan had been to split up to cover more territory.

  Emma checked names off their shopping list. “We did well this year, I think we’re almost done. Well, except for each other.”

  Jake nodded. “I already got your gift. It’s tucked away where you won’t find it so don’t even think about looking.”

  Emma blushed. “Guilty as charged. Know any good defense attorneys?”

  “You’re too old, I only represent juvenile
s. You’ll have to throw yourself on the mercy of the court.” Jake smiled. He knew Emma would look for the gift but he’d left it at the jeweler’s to be picked up on Christmas Eve. “What did you get me?”

  “Not saying,” smiled Emma. She was going to have to return the HX-860 fish finder hidden under the blankets in the guest room closet and think of something else.

  They finished their breakfast and left a holiday-sized tip for their favorite waitress. At home, Emma wrapped gifts while Jake carried in the bins of Christmas decorations from their storage shed near the barn.

  Peachy watched their work from the top of the kitty tower. Sparky was everywhere at once, under their feet, climbing the tree, batting at the decorations like kitty toys.

  Emma chopped up leftover turkey for the cats as a treat and made sandwiches for her and Jake. They ate as they talked and decorated the tree. She turned off all the lights and they both gasped when Jake flipped the switch to light the beautiful tree.

  Christmas was Emma’s favorite holiday. She loved the music, the decorations and the smell of fresh pine in the house. Sparky sat looking up at the tree, her eyes wide, while Peachy purred and rubbed against their legs until Emma reached down and picked her up.

  Jake sprang up suddenly and caught Sparky just as she made a flying leap toward the center of the tree. “You little monster,” he scolded her. “That is not a kitty toy.” The cat squirmed but Jake held her firmly. He looked at Emma, “We may have a problem with this one.”

  “Not exactly full of Christmas spirit,” she agreed. “I hope she doesn’t pull the tree over.”

  Jake held Sparky up and looked into her face. She licked his nose and purred. “Yes, I know. You’re too cute to kill.”

  6

  Fort Caspar was an outpost of the United States Army established to guard the telegraph lines during the Civil war. Caspar Collins, a young officer, was killed just outside the Fort during a rare Indian raid.