“It’s something I have to ask. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry.”
“The night you found your wife’s body. Earlier that day you came into the office with scratches on your face. With scratches on your face and a split lip and, forgive me, an unusual explanation for their occurrence.”
Sponholz considered. “I disagree. I’d say a strange or even a bizarre explanation. One that seems in retrospect a little too neat, a little too convenient. And at the same time a bit far-fetched. Don’t you think? All that business with the birds burrowing into the roof? That last one flying out and scaring me off my ladder? Even the way I told it, there in the conference room, making sure I got every detail of the story out to everybody? And my wife getting murdered—no, I should say, her body discovered, so shortly thereafter. My goodness, heck of a coincidence. If I were you, Detective, I wouldn’t think that was merely suspicious, I’d say it was well on the way to damning.”
Jarsdel was thrown. It was as if Sponholz had listed, in order, everything that had been lining up in his mind. Evidence plus evidence plus evidence, tossed in the machine of deductive reasoning, and the conclusion was right there. Only Sponholz had been the one to point it out, not him.
“It gets worse,” said the lieutenant. “Though I’m sure you can already tell me how.”
“Life insurance,” said Jarsdel. It had been easy to find, emerging in their standard review of the decedent’s holdings. The most valuable things Amy Sponholz owned were that life insurance policy, her small ranch in Shadow Hills, and her horse.
“Life insurance,” Sponholz agreed. “With a double-indemnity clause. And with me as sole beneficiary. Ever see that movie—Double Indemnity?”
“No.”
“You should. Excellent film. ’Bout a woman who conspires with an insurance agent to murder her husband. The main guy they have to fool for the plan to work out is the head claims adjustor. So if we were to transpose those roles, I’d be Barbara Stanwyck, you’d be Edward G. Robinson, and some as-yet-named third party would be my lover, the Fred MacMurray character. Found anyone to fill that part yet? The illicit lady love, with whom I conspired to do in my sweet Amy?”
“Sir, we’re nowhere near that kind of thinking. Do you have anything at all you can give us? Anything that could say definitively your wife was alive when you came into the office that morning?”
“You mean other than the time of death set by Dr. Ipgreve? I believe he said it was early the next morning that she died. Or do you think I fooled a thirty-year veteran pathologist?”
Jarsdel saw how improbable that was. But it was quite a coincidence—Amy’s murder coming so soon on the heels of that ridiculous tree story.
“You’re right,” said Jarsdel. “Forget it.”
“No, I don’t wanna forget it. I don’t like being looked at that way, and I don’t want it to happen again. Let me see what I can come up with.”
Jarsdel watched as Sponholz ruminated. The lieutenant’s expressions ran the gamut from pained to fearful to wistful.
It’s a stall. An act.
Jarsdel chastised himself for thinking that, so he tried to see it differently. Sponholz was a man lost in grief and confusion, and now he’d been accused—however softly—of murdering the very woman he mourned.
“Not every day your life suddenly depends on you being able to come up with an alibi,” Sponholz said.
“Lieutenant—”
“No, no. It’s fine. Don’t beat yourself up. Nature of the work. It is so important to remember that.” He exhaled, then raised his head, eyes suddenly alight. “There is something. But if Ipgreve isn’t good enough for you, I doubt this will be.” A sad, wheezy chuckle. “I guess at least now I know how the guy on the other side of the table feels. A little compassion ain’t such a bad thing though, is it?”
Jarsdel didn’t comment, didn’t want to distract the lieutenant from his point.
“Amy,” said Sponholz, “Amy had a, uh—you remember she was in real estate?”
Jarsdel nodded.
“Yeah, so, she had an open house, I think. Or had that been the day before? I don’t remember for sure, but it feels right. You could easily find out. She worked at—”
“McWilliams Real Estate Group, yes.”
“Oh, of course. You already knew that. Tell me, how long have I been under suspicion?”
“You’re not under suspicion. It’s just the procedure.”
“Just the procedure. Oy.” When Sponholz spoke again, his manner was indignant. “I know how this works, Detective. You can be straight with me. Don’t feed me all those lines about procedure. I want to understand, and I’m not angry. I’m not angry, but I want to understand why is it that I’m even being asked these questions, put in this position, when the DNA, fingerprints, MO—everything—clearly point to an established perpetrator. Who is it who suspects me?”
“No one, sir, no one at all thinks you had anything to do with this.”
“So it’s just you? What is it exactly you have against me?”
Jarsdel was appalled. “Nothing. I don’t have anything against you. I’m not trying to offend you or upset you or anything at all. It’s like you pointed out: the injuries, the coincidence of your injuries and her date of death.”
“Murder.”
“Murder, yes. And you said MO—the Creeper’s MO—but it wasn’t, sir, not really. He was wearing gloves, and that doesn’t track with him. He’s never done that before.”
“How do you know he was wearing gloves?”
“Traces of leather under her nails, but no human matter.”
Sponholz thought about that. “I’m confused. I thought there were prints all over the house.”
“There were, which is also a puzzle. It looks like he wore gloves just for the assault, but otherwise wasn’t particular about what he touched.”
“Who cares?” said Sponholz. “Honestly, Detective, who cares why he did each little thing he did? He’s a psychotic, an animal. I’m not interested in psychoanalyzing every crackpot move he makes.”
“Because, sir, he still operates within his own sphere of logic. His own eccentricities, his own paraphilia, they make sense to him.”
“Paraphilia. Sounds so much better than ‘perversions.’ So much more scientific.”
Jarsdel ignored the digression. “And from what we know about him, he’d have no reason to wear gloves. Quite the contrary. It would frustrate his process, make the moment less immediate, less intimate.”
“You’re speculating.”
“And he didn’t bite her.”
The lieutenant’s expression hardened. “That’s something I’m grateful for.”
“We all are,” said Jarsdel. “But it doesn’t fit with the Creeper. He always bites the women.”
“Remarkable. I’m under suspicion because the murder wasn’t as depraved as it could have been.”
“You’re not under suspicion.”
Sponholz grunted. “Punish the victim.”
Silence as Jarsdel let the lieutenant’s words hang out there. He knew Sponholz was grieving, and he didn’t want to engage with him. Maybe if he let him cool down, he’d see he wasn’t being reasonable. To encourage a return to good sense, Jarsdel finally said, “If you were in my position, you’d want these issues cleared up as well. Doing so can only help us catch him.”
Sponholz closed his eyes, took a slow breath. “You’re right. Please accept my apology.”
“Isn’t needed.”
“It is.”
“No.”
“Please accept it.”
“All right, but it’s not necessary.”
“And Amy,” said Sponholz. “Yes, I think so, about what I mentioned before. About the open house. I’m almost positive now that she did have one that day. You’ll want to talk to Rich Woolwine. I don’t have the n
umber off the top of my head, but it’s easy to find. Just google McWilliams Realty Group. It’s the office number.”
Jarsdel took down the name. “Appreciate that. Thank you, sir. Please let us know if there’s anything we can do.” He was about to go when something occurred to him. “Who played the husband?”
Sponholz blinked. “The husband?”
“In Double Indemnity. You named all the actors who played the wife, the insurance agent, the claims adjustor, but not the husband. Not the actual person who gets murdered.”
“Oh.” Sponholz looked up, squinting, trying to remember. He shook his head in defeat. “No idea. Old-time character actor. Why do you want to know?”
“No reason, really,” said Jarsdel. “It is funny, though, how we always remember the killers, never the victims. Real-life cases too. The killers get to be famous. In ten years, everyone will know who the Eastside Creeper is, but I doubt we’ll be able to say the same for Maja Rustad or Joanne Lauterbach.”
“Or Amy Sponholz?” The lieutenant’s expression was unreadable.
“Dumb thing to say. Thinking out loud. Shouldn’t do that.”
“No. Maybe not.”
Jarsdel backed away. He’d had enough of Sponholz’s ever damp, desperate eyes. They reminded him of what he’d heard about drowning victims. How dangerous they could be—how you’d sometimes have to knock them out to rescue them, because the first thing they’d try to do is pull you under. And how their terror and anguish fired their muscle fibers with adrenaline and made them unnaturally strong.
“See you back at work,” said Jarsdel.
Sponholz watched him, unblinking, nor did he say anything else as Jarsdel got into his car and drove off.
20
Of the dead, there were three.
Brian Minchew, twenty-nine—and stabbed at least as many times—lay naked on the floor near the bed, half wrapped in a bedsheet. A swollen length of intestine snaked its way out from beneath his body and wound around the man’s neck, cinched tightly into the flesh.
Natalie Minchew was on the bed, sprawled diagonally across its length. She’d been nearly decapitated, her throat cut all the way to the spine. The serrated bread knife that’d done the work still protruded from the yawning wound. Either the hand that wielded it had lost its willpower or the blade had lost its edge.
The room stank of putrefaction, of congealing blood and broken bodies. Jarsdel had once read that if you wanted to simulate the stench of death, you should buy the cheapest ground beef you could find, leave it out in the sun a few hours, then take a big whiff of it while you sucked on an old penny. He’d never tried it himself, but figured it wasn’t too far off. It had the right ingredients: metal and meat comingling in a unique bouquet that—once it got in—seemed to live in your sinuses far longer than it had a right to. The stench only changed by degree of intensity, but it was always the same, a biological signature writ in the air itself.
At some point, Al-Amuli had wandered over to Jarsdel’s side. “Wig snatch.”
Jarsdel turned to look at him. “What?”
“Wig snatch.” He made a gesture of pulling off a hairpiece.
“What’s that mean?”
“It’s like, ‘holy shit, blown away.’ You never heard wig snatch?”
Jarsdel let his gaze hang heavily on Al-Amuli another moment, glanced once more at the Minchews, and made his way out of the master bedroom and across the hall. The smell lingered as he knew it would, a phantom that would cling to him for hours. He’d get whiffs of it until he showered, maybe even after.
He stopped in the doorway and beheld the crumpled form at his feet.
Emma Minchew. Six years old. She wasn’t as far into decomp as her parents. Almost would’ve looked like she was sleeping, if not for the unnatural cant of her limbs.
When first responders had arrived, she’d been covered with a threadbare blanket, rose pink and printed with fat, smiling strawberries. It now lay next to her, tossed aside when EMTs attempted to resuscitate the girl. Chance had arranged the blanket in nearly the same pose as the child, curled in a C-shape, almost fetal. The similarities between them ran deeper. She’d been unplugged from life’s great, animating current, and now had more in common with the yard of cloth than she did with any of the investigators drifting in and out of her bedroom.
Jarsdel didn’t want to look at the bedroom, and kept his eyes on the body. He would wait to examine the area until after she was taken away. This he had learned to do from painful experience. His first dead child had been about the same age and had taken a bullet fired from across the street during an argument. It was a freak accident, but the child, a boy, was dead all the same. The round pierced his tiny chest while he played with his Legos, planting itself in a lung. He drowned in his own blood, unable to call for help.
Jarsdel remembered seeing the boy’s kindergarten graduation photo—grinning, eyes squinted in the sunlight, a single missing tooth. At the time, Jarsdel had looked away, hoping for something else, something that wouldn’t show him the boy in life, and only reaped further horrors. An orange belt in karate, mounted on a wooden display stand, a stuffed polar bear, a novelty trophy for World’s Greatest Grandson, a poster of a dozen Pixar characters smiling and waving.
Sleep hadn’t come that night for Marcus Tullius Jarsdel, former doctoral candidate in classical antiquity and newly minted patrolman. His closed eyelids became screens on which he played reruns of the crime scene. People died every day, many of them violently. And some of those would, unavoidably, be children. But it was one thing to hear of such things happening, another to stand over the boy and see the bullet hole in his Daniel Tiger pj’s, the expression of terror and agony frozen across his features. He’d wept as he lay dying, and his cheeks bore streaks of dried tears.
As bad as the bodies were for Jarsdel, the children’s rooms were somehow always worse. Adults scatter their personalities over a wider radius, free to imprint a multitude of spaces with some evidence of their existence. A child’s room was his whole world. Each tin of putty and chunk of pyrite and macaroni collage was a story point in the narrative of self. You couldn’t be in children’s rooms without knowing them at least a little, and Jarsdel didn’t want to know them.
“Busy couple months.” Ipgreve, the medical examiner, squeezed by Jarsdel and crouched next to the girl’s body. With his left hand he thumbed her eyelids open; with his right he trained the beam of a penlight into the fogged irises.
“Subconjunctival hemorrhages in both eyes,” said Ipgreve. “No bruising on the neck.” He stood and went to the girl’s bed. Jarsdel kept his attention on the body.
“Pillow appears to bear residue of mucus and spittle. I see some bloody fingerprints too, but since the girl’s not bleeding, I’d say the killer transferred them after he did the parents. Ninety-nine-point-nine-nine out of a hundred the girl was smothered.”
“Okay.”
“Doesn’t seem strange to you, Detective?”
Jarsdel looked at the girl. Her skin had a bluish cast, and even without Ipgreve’s penlight, he could see the ruptured capillaries in her cheeks and eyelids.
“Detective?”
“What?”
“I said doesn’t that seem strange to you? Her parents are filleted in the bedroom and this girl is quietly suffocated in here?”
“No.” Jarsdel turned to go.
“Hey, hey,” said Ipgreve. “Hang on. Stop a second.”
Jarsdel looked at him. “What is it?”
“I know, okay? I know how it is, but just process something in all your misery and loss of hope for the human race.”
“What?”
“This was merciful.”
“No. How?”
“It was. Comparatively.”
Jarsdel sighed.
“It was,” Ipgreve repeated. “Not so much for the girl, true. But fo
r the killer. No blood, for one. And you don’t have to see her face as she’s breathing her last.”
“Fine,” said Jarsdel. “Let me know when she’s out of here so we can finish up with the room.”
“You’re welcome anytime. Won’t bother me.”
Jarsdel spotted Rall heading toward the kitchen. He caught up with him as the detective grabbed a Granny Smith apple from a hanging fruit basket. He dusted it on the sleeve of his coat and took a bite. Seeing Jarsdel, he picked up another apple and held it out to him.
“No. Thanks.”
Rall tossed it back into the basket and finished chewing. Jarsdel was about to speak, but Rall took a second, much larger bite, sending a spray of juice into the air. He chewed slowly, leisurely.
“I don’t think this is the Creeper,” said Jarsdel.
Rall indicated for him to go on.
“It’s all off. Single-story apartment, no crawl space or even a walk-in closet. Nowhere to hide and watch the victims.”
His superior considered that, shrugged.
“You’re going to say that was the same with Amy Sponholz—abandoning the pattern, I mean.”
Rall held up a finger, swallowed, then said, “He was on a mission, an objective other than his usual crazy-ass routine. Payback against the LT, hence the straight-up murder without all the drama.”
That didn’t sit right with Jarsdel. “You’re saying that’s the case here, too? He was on a mission to kill a random family of three? Wanted them dead so badly he was willing to give up his signature?”
“What you mean, signature?”
“His reason for killing. The MO can change, can evolve, but what drives him, what doesn’t change, is the signature. In the case of the Creeper it’s about the power that comes from living among his victims, watching them, knowing he can take them any time.”
Rall looked doubtful, so Jarsdel went on, searching for an analogy. “Like ants under a magnifying glass. From observation to annihilation with a tilt of the lens. That’s what excites him, building his own suspense, moving shit around, seeing what he can get away with. And then picking his moment. That’s his signature. Serials don’t tend to just abandon it, because it’s what gets them going in the first place.”
What Waits for You Page 25