A Stranger in the House

by Shari Lapena

  “Maybe,” she says doubtfully.

  Tom turns to Brigid. “I’ll take it from here,” he says. “Thanks for rushing over.”

  “Anytime,” Brigid says.

  “Yes,” Karen says gratefully, as Brigid gets up to leave. “I don’t know what I’d do without you, Brigid.”

  Tom watches Brigid give his wife a gentle hug; Karen hugs her warmly back.

  “Thanks for cleaning up the broken glass, too,” Tom says.

  “No problem.” She smiles at Karen. “See you soon.”

  Brigid heads across the street to her own house, while the two of them stand on the doorstep watching after her. Tom is standing slightly behind Karen. He’s watching Brigid, and he’s also watching his wife.

  Chapter Eleven

  Detective Rasbach pauses for a moment to take in his surroundings. There’s a run-down plaza across the road, with a convenience store, a coin laundry, a dollar store, and not much else still open for business. Even on a sunny summer day like this one, the neighborhood is depressing. In front of him is the scene of the crime—an abandoned restaurant. The building has been boarded up, but someone has pried a couple of boards off the window in the front to look inside, or maybe they’ve just fallen off over time. Rasbach walks around the outside of the derelict building to the back. He nods to a couple of tech people, and steps inside the yellow crime scene tape.

  He enters the restaurant through the grimy back door, which hadn’t been boarded up like the front—at least, if it had, it wasn’t any longer. Anybody could get in or out. The first thing that hits him is the smell. He tries to ignore it.

  There’s an old-fashioned dining counter to his left but there are no tables or chairs; the place has been stripped clean—even the overhead lights are missing. But there is an old couch up against the wall with some empty beer cans on the floor around it. There’s some sunlight filtering in from the windows, where the boards have fallen away, but most of the light is coming from lamps put in place by the forensics team. The dirty linoleum floor is cracked, the walls are dark and stained with nicotine. And there’s a dead man lying on the floor.

  The smell is pretty bad. That’s what happens when a body isn’t discovered for a few days in the heat of the summer. This one is pretty ripe.

  Rasbach stands perfectly still in the middle of the reeking restaurant in his smart, expensive suit, thinking he will have to have it dry-cleaned, and pulls a pair of latex gloves out of his pocket.

  “Someone called it in. Didn’t leave a name,” the uniformed officer beside him says.

  The detective nods tiredly. He moves toward the bloody, buzzing mess on the floor. He stands for several minutes looking down at the body, studying it. He’s a dark-haired man, probably mid- to late thirties, dressed in expensive-looking black trousers and an equally expensive-looking dress shirt—now crusted in dried, dark blood and covered with flies. The victim had taken a couple of shots to the face, another to the chest. His shoes are missing, revealing rather stylish socks. No belt either. “Any sign of the weapon?” Rasbach asks a technician standing on the other side of the body, also looking down thoughtfully at the corpse.

  “No, not yet.”

  Rasbach leans over the body carefully, trying not to breathe, noting the pale shadow around the finger where a ring has recently been removed, and a similar pale band around the wrist, where a watch had once been. He’d been robbed, but this was not primarily a robbery, Rasbach thinks. What had the man been doing here? He didn’t belong here, in this neighborhood. This looks more like an execution. Except he’d been shot in the face and chest rather than in the back of the head. The body looks like it’s been dead for at least a couple of days, maybe longer. The face is discolored and bloated.

  “Do we know who he is?”

  “No. He doesn’t have any ID on him. In fact, he doesn’t have anything on him, except his clothes.”

  “Any witnesses?” Rasbach asks, already knowing the answer.

  “Nada. At least so far.”

  “Okay.” Rasbach sighs deeply.

  The body would be removed soon and sent to the medical examiner to be autopsied. They’d get fingerprints from the body and see if there was anything matching them on file. If they couldn’t ID him through the prints, they’d have to go through missing persons, which would be tedious, but much of police work is tedious. It’s often the tedious work that pays off.

  They’ll keep looking for the murder weapon. Probably a .38-caliber handgun, by the looks of it. Odds are the shooter disposed of it far away from the scene, or someone else picked it up and is keeping quiet. Given the neighborhood, Rasbach’s not surprised that the belt and shoes were taken, as well as the victim’s wallet and jewelry, and no doubt his cell phone as well.

  By the time they’ve finished with the body and completed a wider sweep of the area, all they’ve found is a pair of pink rubber gloves with a floral print near the elbows, discarded in a small parking lot a short distance away. Rasbach doesn’t think they have anything to do with the victim in the restaurant, but he has them bagged anyway. You just never know.

  Rasbach and another detective, Jennings, along with a couple of uniformed officers, spend the evening going door-to-door in the area, looking for witnesses.

  Not surprisingly, they come up empty-handed.

  —

  Dr. Perriera, the medical examiner, is expecting them the next morning. “Hello detectives,” he says, obviously pleased to see them.

  Rasbach knows the ME enjoys it when the detectives come to visit. Rasbach marvels at the fact that even after almost twenty years, the depressing nature of the doctor’s job doesn’t ever seem to get him down. Stabbings, gunshots, drownings, car accidents—nothing seems to bother the sanguine and invariably social Dr. Perriera.

  He holds out a bowl of wrapped mint candies. They help with the smell. Both detectives take one. The wrappers crinkle as they unwrap the mints. Dr. Perriera holds his hand out for the wrappers and drops them in the trash can.

  “What can you tell us?” Rasbach asks as they stand around the long, steel table looking down at the cadaver resting upon it. Rasbach is grateful that Jennings has always had a strong stomach, like him. Jennings looks keen and curious and not at all bothered by the butchery on the table, the mint candy making a bulge in his cheek.

  “The body’s intact.” Dr. Perriera begins cheerfully. “Caucasian male, late thirties, good health. The first shot went into the chest, the second into the cheek, but it was the third shot, which went right into the brain, that killed him. Death was fairly quick. He was shot at close range—from about six to eight feet away—with a thirty-eight-caliber handgun.”

  Rasbach nods. “When did he die, exactly?” he asks.

  Dr. Perriera turns to Rasbach. “I know how much you guys love to pin down the time of death, and I do my best, I really do, but if you send me a corpse that’s been sitting idle for a few days—it affects my ability to be accurate, you understand.”

  The detective knows Dr. Perriera is a perfectionist; he always qualifies his findings. “I appreciate that,” Rasbach says patiently. “But I would still prefer your best guess over anyone else’s.”

  The doctor smiles. “I performed the autopsy last night. Based on the state of decomposition and the larvae found in the body—bearing in mind, of course, the very hot weather we’ve been having—my guess is he died about four days before that, give or take a day.”

  Rasbach calculates. “So, four days from last night—that would be the evening of August thirteenth.”

  Dr. Perriera nods. “But he could have been killed as early as the evening of August twelfth or as late as the evening of August fourteenth. Somewhere in there.”

  Rasbach looks down at the body on the steel table. If only he could talk.

  —

  Back at the station, Rasbach chooses one of the large meeting
rooms for their ad hoc command post, and addresses the team he’s cobbled together. He and Jennings are the detectives on this, and he has chosen several uniformed officers from the Patrol Division to assist.

  “We still don’t know who this guy is,” Rasbach says. “We have no match on his prints anywhere, against known missing persons, or on any other databases. Let’s start circulating a description and photos to law enforcement agencies and the media—see if we can find out who he is. He might still be recognizable to somebody.”

  Rasbach decides to check all police records for the forty-eight-hour period between the evenings of August twelfth and August fourteenth. He’s looking for anything out of the ordinary. There isn’t much; nothing shows up but some minor drug busts and a couple of car accidents. One of the car accidents seemed straightforward enough—a midafternoon fender bender. But the other one. A Honda Civic had been speeding—away from the vicinity of the crime scene—and had hit a utility pole at around 8:45 on the evening of August 13.

  The hairs on the back of Rasbach’s neck tingle when he sees it.

  Chapter Twelve

  What can we do for you?” Fleming asks Rasbach, sipping coffee out of a mug. “Not every day a homicide detective comes to our end of the building.”

  Rasbach places the photographs of his murder victim on the desk.

  Fleming and Kirton both lean forward to look. Kirton shakes his head. Fleming takes his time, looking carefully, but says nothing.

  “Body wasn’t found for several days,” Rasbach says. “August seventeenth. At least, no one called it in till then. I think it was picked over by locals first.”

  “Don’t recognize him,” Kirton says.

  “I haven’t seen him before either.” Fleming looks at Rasbach. “What’s this got to do with us?”

  “He was killed in an abandoned restaurant on Hoffman Street around August thirteenth, give or take a day. I understand there was a car accident not far from there on the evening of the thirteenth.”

  Fleming and Kirton share a quick glance. Kirton sits up straighter, nodding. “There was.”

  “Tell me what you know about it,” Rasbach says.

  “Woman was speeding, ran a red light. Swerved to avoid a car, lost control, and went into a pole,” Kirton says.

  “Did she survive?”

  “Yes,” Fleming says, leaning closer over his desk. “She survived, but apparently she has amnesia.”

  “You’re kidding me, right?” Rasbach says.

  “Nope. Everyone’s buying it—the doctor, the husband,” Fleming says.

  “But not you.”

  “I don’t know. The husband called 911 reporting her missing the same night. She’d left the house in a hurry without her purse and her phone, forgot to lock the door.”

  Rasbach turns to Officer Kirton, who is shaking his head.

  “I think she’s lying,” Kirton says.

  “What do you know about this woman?” Rasbach asks.

  “Her name is Karen Krupp,” Fleming tells him. “She’s just a regular housewife—if you ignore where she was and what she was doing that night.”

  “A housewife.”

  “Yup. Early thirties, works as a bookkeeper. Married to an accountant. No kids. Nice home in the suburbs—Henry Park.”

  Rasbach suddenly remembers the pink rubber gloves he picked up and had bagged near the murder scene. They’d been run over, and there were tire tracks on them. “What happened to the car?” he asks now.

  “A Honda Civic. It was totaled,” Kirton offers.

  “I’m going to need to see the tires on that car,” Rasbach says. He feels a little hum of excitement. Wouldn’t it be interesting, he thinks, to find a connection between that car—that housewife—and his murder victim?

  “I guess you’ll be taking it from here, then, Rasbach,” Fleming says.

  —

  Tom is tense and unhappy as he leaves the house the next morning. He’s put on jeans to go in to the office for a few hours to catch up on work on the weekend. He’s missed so much with Karen in the hospital. She seemed tired this morning. She was already up again when he woke; her face when he kissed her was pale. The swelling on her face is gone and the bruising has begun to fade, but she doesn’t look like the old Karen.

  She’s been different since she came home. She used to be so warm and uncomplicated. Now she’s a bit distant. She’s too quiet. Sometimes, if he reaches for her, she flinches. She never did that before. She seems nervous, jumpy. And he finds the episode about the glass disturbing. He’s certain that no one has been in the house. Why was she so convinced that someone had? She got herself into a total panic about it.

  He’s troubled, too. Does she really not remember that night? Or is she simply not telling him?

  Suspicion is an insidious thing; doubts have started creeping in, things that he’d previously been able to ignore.

  Doubts about her past. When she moved in, she brought so little with her. He’d asked her at the time if she had some things in storage. She’d looked him in the eye, and said, “No, this is it. I don’t hang onto things. I don’t like clutter.”

  He’s wondered, once or twice, why she seems to have no old ties at all. When he asked her about her family, she explained that she had no family. He understood. His parents are gone, too, and he has no one left but his brother. But she has no one at all. He has friends from college, but she seems to have none. When he pressed her on it, she told him that she wasn’t good at staying in touch with people. She’d acted as if he were making a big deal about nothing.

  He loves her, she loves him; they’re perfect together. If she didn’t want to tell him a lot about her life before they met, he accepted that. He’s never suspected anything disturbing—he just thought she was private, not prone to sharing.

  But now he’s not so sure he’s okay with it. He realizes he doesn’t really know that much about his own wife.

  —

  Detectives Rasbach and Jennings are at the crime lab. The lab already has the pink gloves and they’re working on them, in spite of the fact that it’s a Sunday.

  Now Rasbach offers a fragrant double espresso to Stan Price, who has agreed to come in this morning to go over the evidence with them. It’s only Starbucks, but Rasbach knows that Stan is usually so busy he doesn’t have time to go out.

  “Thanks,” Stan says, his face lighting up as he takes the cup. “A good coffee goes a long way.” They have a crappy little coffeemaker in the basement here, where the forensics lab is, but it makes famously lousy coffee. It could be because nobody ever cleans it, but nobody has been willing to test that theory by giving it a good scrub. Rasbach now makes a mental note to get a new espresso maker for the forensics department for Christmas this year.

  “What have you got?” Rasbach asks.

  “Well, the gloves. I was able to lift a good tire print off one of them.” Stan sips his coffee appreciatively. “The tire tracks on the glove match the make and model of the tires on the car in question. They’re the right type, but we can’t match them definitively to the tires you brought in. We can’t say that it was definitely one of the tires on that car that drove over that glove. But it could well be.”

  “Okay,” Rasbach says. It’s something. “What are the chances of getting DNA off the inside of the gloves?”

  “I’d say pretty good, but that’s going to take longer. There’s a waiting list for that.”

  “Can you speed it up for me?”

  “Can you keep bringing me this excellent coffee?”

  “You bet.”

  —

  Karen gathers up her purse, her keys, and her cell, and prepares to leave the house. She has to run to the corner store.

  When she opens the front door, there’s a strange man standing on the front porch.

  She’s so startled she almost screams. But
the man standing on her doorstep, while unexpected, doesn’t appear to be threatening. He’s nicely dressed, in a well-cut suit. He has sandy hair and intelligent blue eyes. That’s when she notices the second man, still making his way up the steps. She looks at him in dismay, and then back at the man directly in front of her.

  “Karen Krupp?” the man says.

  “Yes,” she answers suspiciously. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Detective Rasbach.” He glances at the other man now joining him on the front porch. “And this is Detective Jennings.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Karen stares at the detective, her heart pumping frantically. She hadn’t been expecting this.

  “Can we speak to you for a few minutes?” Rasbach asks, pulling out his detective badge and holding it up for her to see.

  She can feel her pulse in her temples. She doesn’t want to speak to them. She has a lawyer now. Why hadn’t he given her any advice on what to say to the cops if they came to question her again? Why hadn’t she asked?

  “I was just on my way out,” she manages to say.

  “This won’t take long,” Rasbach assures her, not moving.

  She hesitates, unsure of what to do. If she sends them away without speaking to them, it might antagonize them. She decides that she’d better let them in. She’ll tell them that she remembers nothing. After all, it’s the truth. There’s nothing she can tell them about that night.

  “Okay, I guess a few minutes would be all right,” she says and opens the door wider, closing it behind them once they’re inside.

  She leads them into the living room. She sits on the sofa; they take the armchairs across from her. She fights the urge to grab one of the pillows on the sofa and hug it to her chest. Instead, she deliberately crosses her legs and leans back into the corner of the sofa, trying to appear unfazed at having two detectives in her living room.