by Susan Dunlap
“Nope. By the time he got the fourth shot off, she must have gone down.”
“Maybe,” I said, cautioning myself against creating scenarios in my mind. Once in place it’s hard not to adjust every new fact to fit in. “I’d say this makes you the finder of record.”
Leonard groaned. Now anyone who found any evidence at all would bring it to Leonard and he would sign it in. It was no boon for Leonard, but it meant the whole team wouldn’t be tied up in court.
I took my own flashlight off my belt and aimed it at the nearest casing. Could be from a 30.06 rifle cartridge; Raksen, the lab tech, would know. And damp as the ground was in this ever-shaded spot, there should be usable prints. I suggested that to Leonard.
“Could have been a suspects’ picnic here, Smith. You’ll be lucky to get a decent toe or heel with all the foot traffic that’s been through here.”
“Maybe near the last two casings.” He would have landed harder there.
“Cement. Look, Smith.” He aimed his flashlight at first one then another cement disk. “Only two goddamned garden steps in the place, and he lands on them.”
“Chooses them, surely. It’s hard to imagine such a stroke of luck. It makes me think of the nudist leaping off the railing at the end of the path from Rose Street—like someone who knows this spot.”
We were standing in front of a redwood, small in the annals of redwoods, but huge compared to normal trees. The trunk was a good three feet in diameter. “Perfect spot to wait for her to pull up. Then all he had to do was step out and shoot.” I looked across the street. “And disappear into that grove of trees before anyone saw him. Rope that off and check it out, and I’ll send Raksen over after he’s done here.”
“Right.”
“Officer! What the hell’s going on here!” A man in sweats pushed in between us.
My radio crackled. “Adam nineteen?” I glanced at Leonard and moved away. Leonard’s beat was Telegraph Avenue; he was used to handling crowd problems.
I flicked the mike on. “Nineteen.”
“I got the CHP dispatcher who took the nine one one call. The cellular phone.”
Bryn’s cellular phone. What kind of person would lean over Bryn Wiley’s bleeding body and use her phone to call us? Why bother? You don’t fire four shots at a woman and then when she’s hit, call the police. “What exactly did the nine one one caller say? What kind of voice?”
“Male. No accent. Sounded young. Shocked. Said a woman had been killed and gave the address.”
“That’s all?”
“Dialogue, yes. But the thing was, Smith, well, CHP’s embarrassed about it. And it was just a split-second mistake. But at first CHP thought it was a call from the field.”
“From one of their own? Why?”
“She said it sounded professional. Momentarily. She was just about to chew him out … Because it’s a busy night. She thought he was taking up air time on the emergency channel to call in plates. She caught the mistake in a second, but …”
Plates. License plates. Nora, Ocean, Pablo. “His voice sounded young?”
“Yeah. His voice, Smith, it broke.”
“Thanks, Control, you’ve been a big help. Ten-four.”
“Ten-four.”
I turned toward the dark house on the other side of the construction site. Karl Pironnen’s windows were dark. But I was willing to bet he was sitting inside them, trying to peer out through the coating of slobber left by Nora, Ocean, and Pablo. Pironnen was sixty years old. Did voices that age still break? As terrified as he seemed of people, when he opened the door to me in my uniform, I’d be likely to find out.
If he was still there by the time I could cut loose of the scene.
All the lights were on in Bryn Wiley’s house now. I wanted to get in there, into Bryn’s nightstand, her letters, her medicine closet, to see the trinkets she kept to remind her who she was. And I needed to go over the car.
The fronds of the redwoods rustled and the wind blew off the freezing night waters of the Pacific. I heard shoes slapping the street behind me, heavy, moving fast. I turned, hoping it was Raksen.
It wasn’t. Looking down at me was Grayson. His arms were folded across over his chest, his mustache almost covering lips pressed together in annoyance. He was the scene supervisor; it was his scene now. “What’ve you got, Smith?”
I gave him a rundown on the scene and watched him listening for omissions, noting things to change. His finger was rubbing against his cuff, itching to point, to assign, to wag. I half-smiled. Guys come on the scene, they want to mark their territory.
While that finger was still rubbing, I held out my notes to it. Pages of names and times and assignments.
Heling came up behind me. “Smith, the house is clear. The small bedroom’s really clear. Clothes, but nothing else. No papers, no photos, no books. Like the occupant just came for the weekend. And the weekend’s over.”
Behind the crowd, another marked car pulled up.
The red pulsar lights took twenty years off the driver’s graying red hair. But when Inspector Doyle hoisted himself out, those two decades crawled back on, weighing down his every move. He’d had surgery a few years ago, never would admit the cause. Never quite bounced back. His dark Windbreaker fluttered loosely in the wind, as if it had been made for a larger man—him, before he went under the knife.
As he hurried across the street, futilely trying not to favor his left leg, I realized how much it mattered to me to be in charge of a case, to be the one who got all the reports, the conclusions; the one who could see into the soul of the case. Investigation is a team effort. All jobs are vital. Maybe, I thought looking at Grayson, I just wanted to make my mark.
But no, it was more than that in this case. It wasn’t just that my knowledge of Bryn Wiley and her life would be watered down in the retelling. It wasn’t that I even liked her; I hadn’t. But I cared enough about her to close her file for her. And to get the person who had stood waiting behind the redwood to blow her face off.
Doyle would be doing assignments now. Bryn Wiley’s house. The Volvo. Karl Pironnen. He’d give me only one. The physical evidence is vital; it was tempting. It wasn’t going to change. Heling could list the contents of a room. But interviewing suspects is the heart of the investigation. Few things are as important as those first statements, hearing them in person, seeing the suspects’ reactions, getting the small facts, the asides, the nuances you’ll use to trip up suspects later. When you merely read a transcript, you miss those little things. Without the initial interview you’ve got nothing to judge against. I’d seen Karl Pironnen before; I had a baseline for him.
I briefed the inspector, told him about the space under Sam Johnson’s house—a beaver dam of hiding places for a suspect, or for Sam Johnson himself. He assigned Heling’s team back to the house, and took on the car himself.
I turned and strode down the street, rerunning my talk with Pironnen, seeing him when he wasn’t a suspect, setting in mind the standard of innocence against which to judge his words, gestures, silences. Despite the probable hygienic deficiencies, I would interview him inside his house, and see what the dwelling told about him, and I would see his face in the light.
Where to start, with the 911 call, or hold that in abeyance? Or ask about a gun? I’d run him through files the other night. We had no gun permit listed.
Despite the uniform and the tight protective vest, I felt like I could breathe. I realized, as I pressed the doorbell, that I felt different than I had the whole time I’d been on patrol. Now I felt like me.
Chapter 9
I RANG KARL PIRONNEN’S buzzer again. It pierced the interior silence then died like a cigarette stubbed out in a planter. The door was set with the smallest and highest leaded glass window I’d ever come across—a peep hole for the tall. Raising myself on tiptoe, I peered into the dark at one small light in the distance. Had it flickered, I’d have taken it for a candle. It was that kind of house.
I turned the volume on
my radio down to a murmur, pushed Pironnen’s buzzer again, and held it in. I’d have laid cash that Pironnen was inside, too stubborn or too frightened to answer, except that it was dead quiet in there. No barking, no scraping of toenails. Occasionally there’s a dog that doesn’t go racing to the door; one dog, maybe; definitely not three together. The buzzer groaned on inside. No footsteps approached. I lifted my finger. Still no sound.
But I’d be damned if I was going to walk away. I tapped the buzzer like Sergeant Joe Friday, in a series of staccato beats. Behind me, the onlookers, numbering over fifty by now, created a mosaic of sound, asking each other for facts, tossing in speculations, edging forward to hear as the radio on Murakawa’s shoulder sputtered a call.
Raksen had arrived and was setting up lights around Bryn’s car. As soon as he started photographing, he’d provide a show worth waiting for.
I rang the buzzer one last time. Pironnen didn’t have to come to the door. Legally, he could stare through the leaded glass at me and still choose not to open up. But damn it, a woman was dying, her face a mush of blood and flesh from the gunshots. Hours ago she’d been on the stage, catching the last ray of sun. For a woman determined to stay in the center of things, who seemed alive and focused only when she was in the spotlight, it was a cruel irony to meet death with no face. Soon—maybe already—she would be just another corpse, a lump of matter in a closed box. There would be no last viewing for her friends, fans, supporters, to fix her face in their memories and give her that small bit of immortality.
Footsteps—stockinged-foot soft—approached. Pironnen would peer through his leaded peep hole at the glass-distorted night. He would spot me and pad away. And if I called out “Police!” he’d just pad more quietly.
I bent my knees and stayed close to the door. The footsteps stopped. I could hear his wheezing breath. He was looking. Seeing no one. If he left I’d have to—
The door opened a few inches.
I stood. “Mr. Pironnen, you remember me, Officer Smith. We talked the other night when you were out with Nora, Ocean, and Pablo. Where are they? I didn’t hear them. It’s freezing out here, do you mind if I come in?”
His eyes widened and his wheezing breaths were barely more than puffs—I’d overloaded his circuits. While he was letting them unscramble, I walked in.
I took a couple steps through the entry hall and into the living room. The whole room was brown and black and gray, the colors of the dogs, and coated with hair malamute thick. The sofa, tables, mantel, lampshades, radio, pictures were so completely covered they might have been merely raised sections of the wall.
I am not a good housekeeper—well, not a housekeeper at all—so I understand the progression by which a socially acceptable room deteriorates into an embarrassment. I know that, like true rabbits, dust bunnies multiply. If you let them go for a month—not intentionally, of course—they will clump together. But if you fail to collect them at that key moment and permit another few weeks to pass, they will disintegrate again.
But this room was so far beyond my experience I couldn’t begin to guess how long it had been in the making. Or how long since there’d been a guest in here. Not in this decade surely. Probably not in the last two.
Pironnen himself was liberally covered with dog hair. It was no wonder the man was wheezing. And also no wonder I hadn’t heard footsteps. I glanced at his feet. Through the muck of dog hair I could make out the brown leather around the pointy toes of his wing tips.
Pironnen edged back till he was five feet away. His narrow mouth pursed. Deep-set gray eyes cowered in their sockets. And short gray hair hung over his forehead protectively. His navy V-necked sweater seemed inadequate for the cold of the house, and his black chinos bagged at the knees. He didn’t ask me to sit—thank God. I was hoping the smell—that musty-sweet odor of dog, here layered with dust and dirt, a sort of compost lasagna—would diminish as I stood here. But no such luck—it was the aroma of the house. Hairs floated in the light like snow. With each inhalation I was sure I felt a strand entering my nostril. I snorted and tried to inhale more gently, so the air didn’t move. Give it up, Smith! Perhaps I’d forgotten the point of breathing!
I looked back at Pironnen. He hadn’t moved or changed expression. Now that I was inside the house, I needed to guide those circuits of his into usable paths. “Aren’t the dogs here?”
“Out.”
“For their walk?”
“Out.”
“Do you usually take them out at night?”
He nodded.
“But there are too many people around tonight, huh?”
Again he nodded, the stiff lines of his fearful face tightening. Instinctively, I wanted to put a comforting hand on his shoulder, but that would have been the worst move. And of course, I didn’t want to touch him. I kept my gaze on him, letting its effect seep in. Already, he was nervous enough for his voice to crack—if he spoke more than one word at a time. I wished now I’d heard the 911 tape. Distorted by multiple circuits, the voice might not have revealed much, but the syntax, that could hang him. I decided to go for broke. “What kind of gun do you have?”
“None.” His voice didn’t break; he looked no more frightened than before. That was the problem with the far different drummer set—with them an extreme reaction didn’t stand out.
“Have you been outside at all tonight?”
He hesitated.
“When?”
“Earlier.”
“Before or after it was dark?”
“Oh, after,” he said definitely.
“Don’t you go out in the daytime?”
“No … unless … sometimes, I have to.”
“For doctors and dentists?” I was leading him, but there was no choice. I wondered what percentage of his conversation was spent with people leading him. Or not waiting for him to force out the words at all. How long had the man lived alone, where words were tools best used singly to suit the canine mind?
“Doctor, dentist. Yes.”
“And business?”
“Through the mail.”
I nodded, letting that thought settle before I moved on. “But you went out tonight after dark?”
He nodded.
“Do you recall the time?”
“Eight twenty.”
Amazing. “How come you remember so specifically?”
“My chess match with Milwaukee is at nine. I’ve got to get back.”
“Do you play with a friend there?”
He stared, perplexed. It was a moment before he said, “I’m on Chestnut.”
“A computer bulletin board that arranges chess games? How many games are you playing now?”
His eyes shifted up and to the side as if the answer were hanging off his right brow. “Twelve.”
“You have twelve chessboards set up here?” How could he tell the red squares from the black under all this hair? And the king and queen and the horses, wouldn’t they be buried in the underbrush?
“No, no boards.”
“No boards?”
“In my head.”
I didn’t know whether to believe him or not. Was the man a genius, or was he hallucinating? For the moment I opted for the former. “Mr. Pironnen, I’m really impressed. You must be a very penetrating thinker. And you must remember everything, right?”
“No.” It was a single word, uttered without intonation, but it screamed: Don’t patronize me.
Cops don’t embarrass easily, but I could feel my face coloring now. “Tonight,” I said, “did you see the flashing lights outside?”
“From in here. Ambulance.”
“Did you call it?” I slipped the question in.
“No,” he said, but this “no” had none of the nuances of the previous one. Just a straightforward no.
I pressed my lips together against a sigh. Had a confession been too much to hope for? Or even evidence that he was the culprit? I didn’t picture Pironnen shooting Bryn and reaching across her dying body for the phone. I co
uldn’t imagine him choosing to come that close to anyone.
Still, the 911 tape had radio codes in the background. “When you were out tonight, did you see the Volvo station wagon?”
“I didn’t notice it.”
I asked about the period before the ambulance arrived, but he denied, with that blank expression, hearing shots, seeing anyone unusual on the street, then or earlier. “At night, I don’t have to talk to people. Even if they see me, they don’t rush over, push in on me.”
“Have you found that with the neighbors, pushing in on you, calling it help?”
He didn’t smile, but he nodded more easily. I guessed that that was as close to a smile as he came. For him, was every human contact a potential smothering? Did he have the same cringing reaction outside that I had in this room?
“Bryn Wiley,” I said, “did you know her?”
Again he nodded, and I noted that the quality hadn’t changed. He was relaxed as he recalled her. “Ellen’s cousin. I saw her over there.”
“Did you speak to her?”
“No. She was always on her way.”
“But you know Ellen?”
The creases around his eyes and mouth deepened.
“Did she try to help?”
He nodded.
“Nora jumped on glass. Split her paw open. I couldn’t stop the bleeding. Outside. Ellen saw it. She came running. We took Nora to Dr. Abbey, the vet.”
That sounded like Ellen. It made me smile. “Did you go inside the vet’s?” I wanted to know whether Ellen was just doing a favor or using the opportunity to push him into social contact. I wasn’t surprised when he nodded. That sounded like Ellen, too. She’d have been the right person to support him.
“Have you and Ellen gone back since?”
“Yes, Dr. Abbey’s.”
“Anywhere else?”
The lines deepened and he physically pulled back though he was a good five feet away from me already. It was too big a question. “The last time was when?”
“Yesterday.”
“Where did you go then?”
“Vet.”