Marlin rocked back on his heels and looked up at David. "You need to hurl, go outside. Me and Duckworth already flocked the geraniums on the patio."
"If it'd help, I would."
"It won't." He wiped his mouth on the shoulder of his sport coat. "A smoke won't, either, but I'm gonna have one."
He passed off the camera to Josh Phelps. The trainee would assist the coroner when he rolled over the body, then commit that perspective to film.
Marlin was old school. Digital video and stills had their place, but in addition to, not in lieu of, traditional prints and Polaroids. A defense attorney who insinuated that court exhibits had been processed on Photoshop got their asses handed to them. Few things put the chief of detectives in a better mood.
David followed him to the front lawn, realizing the investigator was as eager to brief him as he was for a nicotine fix. They'd worked some horrific scenes togethera multi-fatality shooting sprang immediately to mindbut David couldn't recall Marlin's hand shaking when he lit a cigarette.
A deep drag was taken, held, then exhaled out his nostrils. "After all these years, shit's not supposed to get to me like this." The toe of Marlin's shoe eviscerated a clump of wild onion. "If you want Cletus Orr to lead this one, say the word."
"It's your unit. That makes it your call. No explanation necessary, either way."
David meant it, but hoped the case wasn't reassigned. Cletus Orr was a good investigator. He had seniority in years of service. There were reasons, though, that he'd twice been passed over for promotion to chief.
Cletus was also due to retire soon. If Jessup Knox won the electionDavid cursed himself. Hiring on as Orr's replacement hadn't occurred to him before, and damn well shouldn't have now.
"I'm just blowing off steam." Marlin's fingers raked his thick, rapidly graying hair. "I want this dirtbag. Want him about fifteen feet out and dead-bang in my sights, if possible."
He squinted at the sun, as though condemning it for shining at a time like this. "I thought it was a jolt when Larry Beauford kicked in the emergency room that night. Everybody could see, he was a coronary or a stroke waiting to happen, but this "
He flicked ash off the Marlboro pinched between his gloved fingers. "Bev? Strangled to death in her own house? Jesus."
The pause demanded and defied a response. Seeing wasn't always believing. A kid doesn't have to see the monster under the bed to believe it's there. Cops know monsters exist. If they lived under beds and had claws and fangs, instead of looking like everybody else, Bev wouldn't be lying dead on the family room floor.
"I haven't seen her around town since Larry's funeral," Marlin went on, "but the wife said Bev was volunteering at the hospital again, getting her hair done at the Curl-Up & Dyethat kinda shit." His eyes cut to David. "Who could have had a hate-on for that woman?"
A question he himself would answer, if it was humanly possible. God help the perpetrator, when he did.
"I saw the scuff marks on the carpet," David said, "and the smashed-up table. Do you think she walked in on a burglary in progress?"
"Phelps found the desk drawers ransacked in the spare bedroom Larry used for an office. The dressers in the master and Bev's jewelry box were dumped, too."
"Dumped as in interrupted, or staged?"
"You tell me." Marlin field-stripped his cigarette and dropped the mangled remains in his jacket pocket. "Bev's purse is on the kitchen counter on top of the mail. If there was any cash in her billfold, it's gone."
David asked, "How about her credit cards?"
"Still there, all nice and neat in their little slots."
Staged. A burglar cold-blooded enough to steal money from the woman he'd just murdered wouldn't balk at taking her credit cards. He might think twice about using them, but leave them behind? Not a chance.
A thief nicknamed the Basement Burglar was operating all over the county, but this didn't fit his MO. He'd left homes as neat as he'd found themjust a little emptier.
"What's Junior's best guess on the time of death?" David asked.
The coroner wasn't a certified medical examiner, but grew up in a funeral home, like his father before him. Duckworth's had phased out their ambulance service in the mid-seventies, but as a teenager, Junior had a second job transporting the sick, the injured and the dying to the hospital. He was also an assistant embalmer. Back then, it wasn't unusual for Junior to provide both services to the same person an hour or so apart.
Marlin's lips moved into what David alleged was a smile. "Notice how cold it was inside the house?"
David nodded.
"Notice the outfit Bev had on?"
"Uh-huh. A short-sleeved blouse and slacks." David thought back and frowned. "Not regular slacks. Those below-the-knee things."
"Capri pants." Marlin rolled his eyes. "My wife and daughter own about fifty pairs apiece. I keep telling 'em they look like they ripped 'em off a midget, but I'm a guy. What the fuck do I know about fashion?"
"More than I do," David said, grinning. The crude language he could live without, but not Marlin's droll sense of humor. To an extent, both were coping mechanisms and neither was intended for civilian ears.
Or eyes, David thought, noting Chase Wingate near the curb, speaking with a middle-aged woman dressed in cutoffs, flip-flops and a Silver Dollar City T-shirt.
David asked, "Where is Cletus?"
"Canvassing the neighborhood, starting with Sheri Watson, the neighbor who called 911."
"Is that her, talking to Wingate?"
"Uh-uh." Marlin chuffed. "Probably a lookie-loo from two streets over wanting her name in the paper." If cynicism was a country, he'd be the emperor. "Mrs. Watson's house has the only direct line of sight to Bev's. The family next door is bonding on a beach somewhere. That one with the For Sale sign is empty."
"What about the neighbors behind Bev?"
"We're working on it. Four uniformstwo of them, off-duty Sanity PD officersare helping." Greenaway Circle was in county jurisdiction, but a Little Leaguer could punch a low-and-outside into the city limits.
Marlin said "Witness statements" as if it were an epithet. "I expect a minimum of nineteen different suspicious vehicle descriptions, three suspicious persons, seven gunshots and two tips about dudes who look exactly like fugitives on America's Most Wanted."
"About average," David agreed. "And it'll turn out nobody saw or heard anything until the neighbor found Bev."
As Jimmy Wayne McBride added another county car to the logjam at the end of the cul-de-sac, Marlin said, "Her prints were the only ones on the interior door between the garage and the utility room, too."
"By her, you mean Bev?"
"Sheri Watson's." Marlin poked another Marlboro between his lips but didn't light it. "The AC was cranked down as far as it would go, but the thermostat's clean. So are the desk, dresser drawers and the jewelry box."
David pondered a moment. Briefings with the chief of detectives were partly informative, partly figure-it-out-yourself. The methodology was like working a puzzle behind your back: ignore the big picture and focus on the pieces.
"Then the utility room door must have been standing open when Eustace and Vaughn arrived," he said. "Otherwise their prints would be on the doorknob."
"Not wide open," Marlin said. "Eustace pushed it the rest of the way with his baton."
"But Bev's prints aren't on it, or any of the other stuff. Not even her own jewelry box."
Marlin's eyebrow dipped. "Careful son of a bitch, our burglar. I didn't need Duckworth to speculate that the air was turned down to delay decomp, or make it a helluva lot harder to determine time of death."
Jimmy Wayne cast a lankier and slightly shorter shadow than David. "What're you doing here, boss? I thought you went 10-7 a couple of hours ago."
"I didn't get any farther than Ruby's." A full-size diesel SUV entered David's peripheral vision. Its gold shield decals on the doors and hood warranted a double take. "Thanks, McBride, for leading Elvis to the building."
<
br /> Marlin said, "Maybe he's gone over to the dark side."
Jimmy Wayne started toward the SUV, pointing his finger at Jessup Knox, rocking and rubbernecking in the driver's seat. The chief deputy jerked his thumb sideward in the universal "Get outta here, now" gesture.
Marlin made throat noises. "Screw hand signals. How about I just shoot him?"
"It crossed my mind more than once after Knox busted in on my breakfast," David said. "How about the three of us ignore him and get this scene processed."
To either rule out or confirm the possibility that Bev Beauford brought her killer home with her, Marlin told Jimmy Wayne to glove up and assist David with a preliminary examination of her vehicle.
Starting for the front door, the detective glared at Knox, now making a beeline for Chase Wingate. Marlin yelled, "Eustaceif that jackass sticks his nose past the tape, shoot him."
The garage's concrete floor was littered with windblown debris, just as the deputy had mentioned. Assorted tools, brooms, mops and the like hung beside the door to the utility room. A lawn mower was parked in the far corner; plastic storage tubs and paint cans were stowed on plywood shelves nailed to recycled two-by-fours. David's half of his college dorm room had more junk in it than this.
Along the foundation, phantom outlines extending up the wafer-board walls alluded to cardboard cartons and claptrap stored for many a year. As far as he could tell, the few overlapped footprints on the floor weren't fresh.
Jimmy Wayne returned from the kitchen with Bev's key ring and a solemn look on his face. He issued a curt heads-up to the deputies outside, then pressed a wall-mounted button to lower the garage door. "Mother Andrik says, don't get in the car, and don't fuck up any prints when you're checking it out."
A bare bulb in the ceiling fixture exuded a meager forty watts of illumination. It was sufficient to avoid barking a shin on a shelf standard and note the absence of dusty black whorls on the vehicle's pearl-white doors and trunk.
"Marlin doesn't want it printed first?" David asked.
"You want to ask him again, be my guest." Contempt suffused Jimmy Wayne's voice and body language as he moved to the sedan's passenger side. You'd have to know him well to understand that the target of it had strangled a petite, fifty-one-year-old widow.
"Smells like a smoker in a pine grove in here." Jimmy Wayne shined a Mag-Lite on the carpeted floorboard. "Clean, though."
"Deluxe car-wash package," David said. "And wipe-down crews usually wear gloves." If the perpetrator had occupied Bev's vehicle, its recently detailed interior was a fingerprint tech's dream.
The garage door's remote control was clipped to the driver's-side visor. In the closed ashtray were several butts of the same brand spilled from the living room's ashtray. David left them for Marlin or Phelps to collect.
Leaning in to give the console a once-over, he saw that the slender niche beside the seat held a postcard water bill, a women's clothing catalog and an opened number-ten envelope from the GMEI Group in Dover, Delaware.
Jimmy Wayne ducked, then reached over and pulled out a tri-folded flyer from beneath the driver's seat. "Sanity High's Booster Club is having a bake sale at the preseason football scrimmage."
"Same junk here, looks like." As David skimmed the postmarks on the empty envelope and the postcard's metered mail stamp, plastic evidence bags materialized on the seat.
"I'm bagging and tagging the soda straw wrapper I found under the floor mat, too," Jimmy Wayne told him. "Marlin won't be impressed, but he'll bitch if I don't."
"Yep. I don't see any need to mess with the contents of the console and the glove box, though. If Marlin does, I'll take care of it later."
On the back seat on the driver's side were three library books and a brown grocery sack. Inside it, a frozen Mexican dinner's carton bulged from its thawed contents spilling out of the compartmented tray. Under a loaf of bread was a package of chocolate candy, aspirin, two bottles of spring water and a blister pack of C batteries. According to the soggy receipt, the purchases were made at the Pump 'n' Munch at 5:47 last night.
It was nearer fact than speculation that Bev planned to microwave her supper before the storms hit. Water and batteries sized for a flashlight or a portable radio were bad-weather staples. The melted, silver-foiled candies wrenched David's heart.
One of Hannah's refrigerator magnets read, When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Eat Chocolate. Picturing Bev hurrying through the store, gathering up the necessities, then impulsively indulging her sweet tooth was like a sucker punch to David's gut.
He gently placed the sack on the concrete floor, then flipped through the library books. A time-dated slip inside a Carol O'Connell thriller revealed that it, the Caribbean Island travel guide and a bestselling biography were checked out early yesterday afternoon.
Working a crime scene was like reading a diary, beginning with its final entry. Adding an approximate drive-time from the convenience store told David that Bev had arrived home at, or just before, six last night.
He'd gotten back to town from the ice cream social at about the same time, and it had rained on his drive home. The sedan's wipers were poised midway on the sedan's windshield. The control knob's position indicated they'd stopped when Bev turned off the ignition.
"Bev's keys," he said. "Were they with her purse in the house?"
"Yeah." Jimmy Wayne doused the Mag-Lite and weaseled backward out the rear passenger door. "On the kitchen counter."
"Doesn't that seem odd to you? This sack doesn't weigh more than three pounds at most." David held up the books. "These, I can understand leaving behind, but why didn't she carry in her groceries along with her purse and keys?"
Jimmy Wayne studied the door to the utility room, then the bag on the floor. "Maybe the phone was ringing." His eyes rose to David's. "Or maybe somebody in the car with her hustled her inside."
"Or was waiting for her in here." David nodded at the space between the side wall and garage door's metal track. "She wouldn't have seen him when she pulled in."
"But if he'd ambushed her inside the house, more than likely, the groceries would be in there with her purse and keys."
"You'd think." David edged away from the car. "Do what you want, but I'm not touching another thing until Marlin dusts this vehicle for prints."
6
Nellie Dunn's, the largest restaurant in the heart of Valhalla Springs' business district, was lively for the middle of a Thursday afternoon.
The late lunchers usually departed well before the little somethings arrived toting their shopping bags. They'd plop down for a rest, a chat, a cold drink and a little something from the dessert menu to tide them over until dinner.
Hannah assumed the two groups had overlapped because the golf course was closed. Last night's rain had flooded several greens and sand traps, and littered fairways with downed branches. It was doubtful the red flag waving above the clubhouse would be replaced with a green one before tomorrow morning.
The little something she'd ordered was a slice of lemon meringue pie and iced tea. To the man picking up the tab, she said, "I don't believe you."
Luke Sauers frowned and chuckled simultaneously. "Have I ever lied to you?"
"Probably." She nibbled a tiny sliver of pie. Free dessert this delicious was worth savoring. "You are an attorney."
His coconspirator said, "I wasn't there, but if I thought Luke was making it up, I wouldn't be here." Her nose wrinkled at the fresh veggie plate in front of her. "I've got a fridge full of this crap at home."
Claudina Burkholtz was Hannah's only female friend not receiving a social security pension. The single mother of three was also David's chief dispatcher, his original campaign manager and permanent fan club president.
After assisting with a murder investigation, Claudina aspired to becoming the county's first woman deputy. How she'd comply with the academy's height requirement hadn't been resolved. To meet the weight standards, she'd shed thirty pounds over the summer but still had fifty-some to go.<
br />
Hannah looked down at her pie and winced. "Fine friend I am."
Claudina waved a dismissal. "The world doesn't have to go on a diet just because I am. Get fat as a house, then knock off a couple of rooms and you start to get snotty about it." She winked. "That part, I like."
Luke fidgeted in placeguy code for "Let's can the girl talk, shall we?" He nudged a minuscule cell phone across the tablecloth. "Give David a call, if you don't believe me. He'll confirm the entire discussion."
"Yeah, right. I'm sure he wouldn't mind taking a break from working a homicide scene to discuss our wedding."
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