by Aimee Hix
My father stood in front of the coffee pot. He had a cup he’d clearly just prepared if the steam wafting off it was any indicator. Even sleep-deprived I was a master detective. I got a cup down from the cabinet and moved to the pot, but Dad didn’t budge.
“We should talk,” he said.
“We should talk. If you’d like me to be coherent, you might want to step aside.”
He moved enough so that I could reach the pot and pour myself a cup. He was stubbornly stuck against the counter, giving me enough space to access the pot and nothing else. I had to ask him to move twice more to get the sugar and half and half from the fridge. Mom had come in while we’d bantered about access to the pot but watched the exchange in silence. Finally he sat at the table and I joined him. If he thought a night’s sleep—assuming you could call two hours a night’s sleep—was going to have changed my mood toward him, he was very much mistaken. I would have been annoyed enough without the bombshell those three pages had contained.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“What do I think about you keeping the secret of Michael and Seth’s parentage from me … and him? Or what do I think about you deciding, once you’d been found out, that you were going to dump the information in that folder on me at the dinner table? Please clarify.”
“Oh, honey. I know you’re upset—” my mother started to say.
“Their biological father was a violent felon who died in prison serving a thirty-year sentence for rape and mutilation of his victims.”
Nancy’s hand flew to her mouth.
“You knew I’d look it up, Dad. You didn’t even warn me what I was going to find. I have to decide what to do with that information? Are you serious? My choices are don’t tell Seth and live with him possibly finding out that I knew or telling him. Those are not choices, Dad.”
“Yeah, they are, Will. They’re just not good ones, but that’s life. That’s love. Making hard choices to do the best thing for the person you love.” He was looking at Mom over my shoulder when he said that.
This was the thing he wanted to use to give me some kind of lesson about love? Was he nuts?
“Arch, this isn’t fair. She’s right. You can’t ask her to take this on. Seth’s parents need to be the ones to tell him something like this,” Mom said.
I didn’t know if that was a better choice of who to hear this from, but I knew I didn’t want to do it. Not that it mattered who told him. If Seth was going to go off the rails because of this, he was going off the rails no matter what.
“I have to be the one to tell him. I’m the only person he trusts now.”
Dad nodded. “Exactly, Will.”
Dammit. I hated it when he was right. I mean, I didn’t hate it when he was right most of the time but it would have been good right now. Seth deserved to know the information and he deserved to hear it from me, someone who loved him enough to put themselves second. That was love.
I put the mug down and rubbed my eyes. “What do I say … I mean, how … ?”
My mother put her arms around me. “You don’t do it now. You wait until he’s home. You deal with the discord from him going off without telling you first. This information isn’t going to change in the meantime.”
She was right, of course. Kicking the can down the road made sense.
“Willa, he’s going to be mad that you looked into it behind his back. Make it clear that I found it after Barbara and the Colonel came to us. He can be mad at me. I can take it. Then he knows he can trust you.”
Oh, the irony of us worrying about him trusting me considering his Casper act at the moment. But they were right. I had time and Seth needed to trust me of all people. I was pretty much the only one he had left.
“What about the woman?” I couldn’t call her his mother.
“No current info on her that I could find. I’ve got skip traces scrolling for any mention of her but she dropped off the radar about five years ago. No one that I contacted, old neighbors, coworkers, knew what had happened to her.”
“So she’s alive and off the grid. Good. At least for the time being. One mess at a time.”
I picked the mug up and took a swallow. The coffee was surprisingly still extremely hot. It felt like ages since I’d poured it, though it hadn’t even been five minutes.
“Let me make you breakfast, sweetie,” my mother said.
“That’d be great, dear,” Dad said.
“You can have cereal, Archibald.”
Looked like Dad was in the dog house. Dog. Where the hell was Fargo? In all the stress, I’d forgotten all about her.
Mom noticed my sudden searching gaze. “Adam came by and took Fargo for a long run. He said he’d take good care of her.” My mother always knew what her kids were thinking. It was kind of eerie.
I tried to enjoy the eggs and bacon she made me. I knew the food was delicious, but my stomach roiled from the knowledge I was failing to put to the back of my mind.
Nancy rubbed my back. “It’ll take some time, hon. You’re still processing.”
Still processing, indeed.
I was showered and sitting cross-legged on the basement floor arranging and rearranging the photos when my father clomped down the stairs. I invited him to sit with me and offer any thoughts he had about how to look at the information in a different way. I would get credit for my work with Jan and the FCPD but, technically, he was still the supervising investigator for my apprenticeship.
“Is this all Jan gave you?”
“No, I have the autopsy file and the evidence log. She held back her notes and the witness statements. Said she wanted my eye and my own interview notes without hers intruding.”
He nodded. “It’s not a bad idea. Show me how you’ve been working the photos.”
I handed him several of the copies of the log with each item of evidence highlighted and my handwritten notes on which photos showed the item.
“Good thinking. Take each item and look at it separately within its context in the scene only. Are you making any progress?”
I took the pages back from him and stacked them back on the piles of photos where they went. “Maybe. I don’t know. It’s why I wanted to go to Aja’s yesterday; see how she lived in the room, how she moved amongst her things, give myself some idea of how to build the scene and the vic’s movement through the scene. Like a movie. Then running the movie backwards from the moment she hit that nightstand.”
“It’s clever. Would the witness statements help with that?”
I shook my head. “No one was home with her in the hours before she died. Her mom was shopping … Black Friday with the receipts to prove it. The brother said he was visiting a bunch of different friends but he can’t be sure about the times he was at any given house and neither can any of them. Best friend hadn’t even seen her in months.” At this odd look, I added, “College.”
“Okay, well the brother’s story is totally legitimate and would leave him under suspicion.”
“He’s one of two suspects Jan had. Him and the boyfriend.”
“Just the two?”
“No one else fit any of the usual criteria. The victim and the brother had been fighting the day before and hadn’t been getting along in the months before. The boyfriend … well, he was the boyfriend.”
“Friends? An ex?”
“Nope, she had only arrived home a few days before. She was going to be catching up with friends that afternoon. You know, if she’d survived to see it.”
“And your interviews with them?”
“Nothing. I can’t see any of them killing her. It’s so frustrating.”
He got up, slowly. I could empathize. Getting up off the floor was a chore for me and I was thirty years younger and had better knees.
“Here’s a thought. You’ve been looking at what’s there in context. Maybe look for what’s the
re out of context.”
What in the hell was that supposed to mean? I had no idea, but the man had been solving crimes longer than I’d been alive so it must be good advice. What’s there but out of context? I knew what was there. I had a list. But the list wasn’t everything in the room. What was there but wasn’t there? What was out of the context of the evidence in the murder?
I grabbed a sticky and started making notes of what I saw in the photos but wasn’t on the evidence log. I started putting them on the back of the photos, in some cases overlapping there were so many items. I was going to need a master list. And some lunch. It was going to be a long day.
I hadn’t realized I’d dozed off until my phone woke me to the darkening sky through the slider. It was the alarm company with an alert to a breech at Aja’s house. The back door into the basement, the operator informed me and did I wish for the police to be called? You bet your ass I did. With one hand, I texted Jan to meet me there as I shoved my feet into boots and grabbed my jacket.
I called for Aja as I hurried up the stairs. She met me at the top of the stairs.
“Is there any reason someone would be at your house?”
She shook her head, eyes big, lip in between her teeth.
“I’ll be back. Text anyone you think might have tried to visit you to double check, okay? If you find someone who said they stopped by, call me immediately.”
“What’s going on?”
I didn’t want to worry her, but I didn’t want to lie either. “The alarm company just called to let me know the basement slider alarm has been set off. I’m going to meet the black-and-white.”
“But … if Damian’s dead, who tried to break in?” Aja asked.
My guess? The masked man.
Chapter
14
Shattered glass and soil littered the floor of the basement surrounding an upended planter.
“They had to have been strong. It’s not one of those foam ones made to look real.” Jan gave me an exasperated look and I held up my gloved hands. “I gave it one poke to see and I have on gloves. I’m not an idiot.”
“It had to have been loud too, but Mr. Busybody said he and his yappy dog were watching Jeopardy,” Jan said.
“You’ve been over twice now. You see a wife either time? I mean, he could have killed her and stuffed her in one of those big freezers. Won’t our faces be red if he sells that house and goes on the lam before the new owners find her trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey.”
“Don’t you have enough cases on your hands right now, Pennington? And, yes, I saw the wife. Her cookies aren’t as good your neighbor Susan’s.”
Nobody’s were. They needed to come back from California. I wasn’t at all enjoying their new plans to winter in sunny climes. I missed the cookies, sure, but they’d been over more often in the wake of my injuries accumulated in pursuit of the killer I’d stumbled over during their granddaughter’s case. It had been like when Ben and I were younger and they’d acted as surrogate grandparents. It was nice for them that their relationship with their son was repaired in the wake of all they’d done for his daughter, Violet, though.
Wayward parents and daughters reminded me of Aja. And the question of the hour: If Damian Murphy was lying in a tray in the county coroner’s office twenty miles away and we weren’t seriously considering zombie apocalypse, then who in the hell had picked up a planter that weighed at least forty pounds and flung it through a glass door hard enough to shatter the door and launch the planter a good five feet into the room?
“No drag marks from its previous location on the patio, which is ten feet from the door?”
“Easily. And since we know it’s real, it wasn’t picked up and used as a battering ram. It was thrown.”
We stared at one another. Strong was an understatement. The person had to be really built up to be able to pick up that planter, carry it close enough, then gather the extra force needed to throw it.
“Damian’s physical transformation is making more sense, huh? Dimes to dollars the coroner finds steroids in his system.”
“Makes sense. Wait, dimes to dollars? Is that another one of your grandfather’s sayings?”
“What do you think?” I squatted down to view how far the glass and dirt had spread into the room. “Y’all have some kind of program that can calculate the force and velocity?”
Jan shrugged. “Considering this isn’t a television show, I’m going to have to say probably not.”
“That would have been cool.”
“We already know the person had to be extremely strong. The exact strength it would take seems unnecessary.”
“No, but it would still be cool.”
Ugh. All the talk of calculus must have infected me.
“The uniforms cleared the rest of the house, right? I’d like to take a look,” I said. I was dying to take the gloves off. They were itchy and my hands were hot.
“Yeah, let’s take a look around. They said there was some ransacking.”
I tried the knob to the other half of the basement space and found it locked. I made a note to ask Aja if that was the way she left it.
“At least we’ll have an idea if anything is missing. I mean, I won’t know if some painting was expensive or a statute is historically significant, but I’ll notice the space,” I said.
“Aja’s parents have to be notified, you know? We have to do it now.”
I started up the stairs to the main floor. “I know. I told her. She’s freaked out about the break-in but seems unfazed that her parents are going to be called.”
“She’s a smart girl. She’s probably worried that Damian Murphy wasn’t her stalker.”
We reached the foyer, lights out, and I kicked myself for leaving my flashlight in my kit in the truck. I slid my feet along the floor to make sure I wasn’t going to trip over anything and made it halfway to the door when the wall was illuminated in a beam. The circle of light located the switch panel and held steady until I’d flipped on all five switches. At least Jan had her tools with her. I walked to the other side of the door and turned on all the outside lights. With the black-and-whites leaving, I wanted to make it abundantly clear that the building was still occupied.
Burglars sometimes came back after triggering alarms. Sometimes they triggered them on purpose, waited for the cops to come and clear the location after seeing nothing and then proceed to make entry. Stealing shit was just so much easier when the cops had already told everyone that nothing was wrong. Whoever had the ability to heave that planter wasn’t someone I wanted to run into. Not since he’d probably beaten Damian Murphy to death.
“Split up?” Jan asked.
Gulp. I didn’t think there was a way to say no without looking like a scaredy cat so I nodded. I stripped off my right-hand glove and shoved back my jacket, unsnapping my holster. I watched Jan stroll into the formal dining room with its plush carpet and acre-like polished wood table. The gun was a reassuring weight in my hand. I didn’t feel any less scared, but I was at least more prepared. My dad always said being brave wasn’t not being afraid but being afraid and doing something anyway.
I reminded myself that the uniforms had cleared the place. I just hoped they’d done as good of a job as I would have with Jan Boyd on the way. Up the winding staircase I went for the third time in a week. The bright lights from the foyer and first floor followed me only so far. As I got to the top, deep shadows slashed the walls. I took the turn to the right, heading toward Aja’s room and losing almost all the light. There didn’t seem to be a hall light switch accessible from that side, so I pressed my back against the wall and leveled the gun at the wall.
My stomach fluttered and I stopped my advance to take a few steadying breaths. There was something about this house that had my panic button on a hair trigger. I reminded myself that the uniforms swept for an intruder, knowing that other cops we
re going to be wandering around with the expectation they were safe. I mean, Fairfax County wasn’t exactly Beirut or Saigon in the seventies, but there was sweep protocol for a reason. I just wish it was done with every light in the joint blazing and not flashlights.
I continued inching toward Aja’s room, a trickle of sweat rolling down my spine. My armpits were damp and cold, another sure sign panic was creeping up on me. I reached inside the open door and turned the light on. Breaking the first rule my training officer had drilled into me, I stepped into the doorway without looking first. I only realized it after I’d done it. I was well and truly spooked and that was causing me to rush.
Luckily, there was no one in the room who wanted me dead or otherwise incapacitated. In fact, there was no one in the room at all. It wasn’t in disarray and the only missing items I noticed were the ones she’d taken with her the day before.
I heard a scuffling noise at the door and jumped, whipping my gun up. Jan stared at me, startled.
“Dammit, Pennington, I’ve been hollering ‘clear’ at you for the past five minutes. Didn’t you hear me?”
I lowered the gun, engaging the safety as I did. It had been five minutes since I’d started up the stairs. How long had I taken to make it down the hall from the stairs to Aja’s room?
“Sorry, the house is so spread out and with this room tucked back here … .” The excuse sounded lame to my own ears so I could only imagine what Jan thought of it.
“We should have held at least two unis at the scene. This place is too big for just the two of us to sweep and secure.”
I nodded. “This room is clear. Nothing moved or taken that I can tell, and I got a pretty good look last night. If there was a search, it was professional and that breach in the basement was anything but.”
Jan nodded. “I agree.”
The two of us searched the remaining room on the floor together. Jan remarked that she’d thought a house that size would have more bedrooms. I mentioned that I was sure they’d had it customized. Nothing seemed amiss anywhere we’d looked, which meant that if the uniforms had seen signs of burglary beyond the basement, it was in the attic loft space.