Just Watch Me

by Jeff Lindsay

  But he didn’t come. The longer she waited, the more her defiance faded. And finally Katrina couldn’t sit still any longer. She lurched to her feet—and then paused. What was she thinking of doing? She took a ragged breath, clenched and unclenched her fists, and stood indecisively. Maybe she should just slip out to the garage, take a car, drive into Manhattan, and wait . . . but wait for what? Whatever was going to come of this, wasn’t it better to get it over with right away? If Michael wanted a divorce, fine, he could bloody well have one. She could walk away from this marriage and never look back. She didn’t need him, or his money, or this enormous house. She was a complete person, and she had plenty of her own resources—emotional as well as financial. And as for Michael—what could he really do? Call her names?

  Katrina took a deep breath, put some of the old Eberhardt steel in her spine, and marched out the door and down the stairs.

  The hall was empty when she reached the first floor. In fact, the whole house felt empty. Had Michael stormed off, maybe to the apartment he kept in the city?

  Katrina felt a small spark of hope, which she immediately pushed away as shameful. She wasn’t afraid, and she was going to face him now and have it done. Just to be certain, she stuck her head around the corner and looked down the hall, toward the front door. Michael’s coat was there on the rack—so he was still here, in the house. And that almost certainly meant he was in his office, his normal habit when he came home.

  Anger sparked. So he would act like he always did? That’s how much it mattered to him that he’d found a strange man alone in the house with his wife—at seven in the morning?

  It was infuriating. Katrina stomped toward the office, ready to give Michael a full broadside blast of anger and contempt.

  The office door was closed. Katrina turned the knob and found it unlocked. She pushed it open and peered in.

  It was a beautiful office. Michael had excellent taste, although somewhat old-school and definitely male. It was one of the things that had originally made him seem attractive to Katrina; he surrounded himself with beautiful objects, the kind of antique furnishings that reminded her of her grandfather. And even though the rest of the house was ultramodern, with lots of steel, glass, and angles, Michael’s home office reflected his true taste. It was all classical masculine leather and dark wood with absolutely no regard for expense.

  In the center of the room, beside a beautiful seventeenth-century Persian rug, sat Michael’s desk, a massive rolltop of old dark wood. A computer monitor and keyboard were perched incongruously on the desktop, and there was Michael, slumped over, apparently asleep.

  Katrina was momentarily stunned—how could he fall asleep like that? She’d heard him yelling at Randall; he had to know. Did he really care so little?

  Her anger flickered high again. She stepped into the room, now completely determined to put him on the defensive. “Damn it, Michael!” she said—and stopped as her brain registered what she was seeing. “. . . Michael . . . ?” she said. It was almost a whisper, but that didn’t matter.

  Katrina was fairly certain Michael wouldn’t hear her, no matter how loud she called him.

  CHAPTER

  17

  The police arrived fairly quickly. In Katrina’s neighborhood, they usually did. Cops are ultimate realists, and they know how the world works. Slow response and sloppy service tend to piss off rich guys. Piss off a rich guy, you’re looking for a job. And Katrina and Michael Hobson were very, very rich. So even though most cops would not really go out of their way to give rich people a better kind of law enforcement, it was a good idea to let the rich folks think they did. Katrina’s 9-1-1 call got a very quick response.

  First on the scene was a patrol unit, two uniformed officers with over thirty years on the job between them. They arrived, took one quick look at Michael’s body to verify that he was dead, and then went to work. There is a well-established routine for a homicide, and both officers knew it well. Hoffner, the senior of the two, led Katrina gently away to the kitchen. There he politely asked her for a cup of coffee. Over the years he’d found that giving somebody a definite task settled them down, and coffee created a chummy atmosphere that made a witness more likely to talk freely. He had also found that the smell of coffee usually covered any unpleasant odors from a homicide. And there are odors, almost every time. So if you wanted your witness to calm down a bit and answer questions rationally, it helps if they’re not thinking, Oh my God—that stink is Herbert’s intestines!

  So Hoffner asked for coffee, and Katrina bustled about making a pot. He asked a couple of simple questions as Katrina worked, noting down her answers as well as his own observations: Witness’s hair was tousled, clothing a bit mussed—probably just out of bed. Witness appeared greatly agitated but not hysterical, and so on.

  Hoffner’s partner, Officer Beard, was junior by seven years, and so he got the dirty end of the stick, doing the grunt work. He immediately secured the area around the crime scene—Michael’s office—and then began a careful perimeter search. By the time he finished that and returned to the house, the detectives had arrived.

  Officer Beard led the two detectives to Michael’s office, informed them that the victim’s wife had discovered the body approximately twenty minutes ago, and that no one had been in the office since their arrival on the scene. Then he took up station beside the office door and the two detectives, pulling on latex gloves, went into the room.

  They paused just inside and surveyed the room. “Nice office,” the younger one, Detective Melnick, observed. His gray-haired partner, Sanders, just nodded and went to one knee just inside the door, looking at the scuff marks on the floor. Melnick took two steps in toward the body, and so he saw it first and jerked to a halt. For a long moment, he was absolutely speechless. Then, when he tried to think of something to say, nothing came. Melnick wanted to be a captain someday, and he was enrolled at the community college to better himself with that in mind. He wanted to say something really cogent, something that reflected the B-plus he got in his psychology course, but what finally came out was “Holy shit.”

  Sanders looked up at Melnick with one raised eyebrow. “You gonna hurl?” he asked with mild scorn. “First dead guy?”

  Melnick shook his head. “Lookit,” he said, nodding toward the victim. “You’re not gonna believe this.”

  Sanders sighed heavily and got slowly to his feet. He looked at the corpse, expecting to see nothing out of the ordinary. But what he saw was a surprise, even to him.

  After a first quick glance he had seen only the handle of a knife protruding from the victim’s back. But this was not an ordinary knife. The handle was beautifully carved, from ivory, it looked like. And the loving and skillful hand that carved it had fashioned it into a perfect likeness of a penis, now sticking straight up in the air. The sight of it was enough to make even Sanders grunt with surprise, which annoyed him. He covered it by saying merely, “Uh-huh. How ’bout that.”

  “The handle,” Melnick said. “The handle of the knife?”

  Sanders nodded. “Yup. Looks like a dick,” he said, straight-faced.

  Melnick, in spite of his lofty ambition, tried for a true cop zinger. “Kinda small one, don’t you think?”

  Sanders didn’t even look at him. “You’re the dick expert,” he said.

  Defeated, Melnick moved around his partner and bent over the body where the blade stuck up. “It’s ivory. Isn’t that illegal now?”

  “You want to write him up?” Sanders asked. He nudged in beside his partner. “Multiple stab wounds,” he said.

  Melnick frowned. “Doesn’t look like he struggled much.”

  “Mmp. One of the first stabs musta been the lucky one,” Sanders said. “Cut the spinal nerve.”

  “But the killer kept stabbing anyways,” Melnick said thoughtfully. “So . . .” He glanced at Sanders. “Not a professional job. Killer was upset? That work
s with the multiple wounds, too.”

  Sanders nodded at his partner. “Yeah, that makes sense. So, upset about what?” He knelt beside the opened briefcase. “Be nice to know if anything was missing from the case.”

  “Yeah, but . . . ,” Melnick said. He tried to shape the scene with his hands. “Briefcase looks like it fell, maybe during a struggle? Except the guy’s already at the computer, working. Right? So the killer comes in, stabs him, takes out whatever . . . and THEN drops the briefcase? I mean—if he wanted something from the briefcase and the guy’s dead, he just takes it, probably takes the whole case, and then puts it back so nobody notices something’s missing. But it’s on the floor, like busted open? And they didn’t fight for it ’cause the wounds are all in the back, and . . . it doesn’t add up.” He looked inquiringly at his partner. “Set dressing? Make it look like a robbery gone bad?”

  Sanders said nothing. He’d already reached the same conclusion. He glanced up at the desktop. “Hey, the screen saver is on,” he said.

  Melnick reached for the mouse. “Let’s see what he was working on when he got stabbed,” he said. He twitched the mouse, and the computer screen came to life. “Oh Jesus fucking Christ,” he said.

  Sanders leaned in and looked at the screen. For a moment he was speechless again. “Shit,” he said at last. He looked around the room slowly, then back at the screen, then at the knife. “I think I wanna talk to the wife,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  Katrina had seen enough cop shows on TV to know that it was never good news when the detectives asked you to “come down to the station and answer a few questions.” It usually meant they thought you were guilty. But of course, she was not guilty, so really, what was there to worry about? There wasn’t really any point in calling Tyler, her lawyer. This was just a formality, probably taking no more than an hour. And in all honesty, Katrina’s kind of wealth—enormous and inherited—has an insulating effect. Even if you are a very good person, a vast fortune makes you tend to believe, consciously or not, that you are protected against being arrested or otherwise inconvenienced.

  So Katrina was a little bit alarmed to receive the invitation to answer a few questions, but not really worried. And the two detectives were so polite, asking if she was comfortable several times as she rode to the station in the back seat of a patrol car. She told them she was, thank you. But Katrina was not comfortable. Not at all. Not because the car’s seat was lumpy. Her discomfort came from her thoughts. First, because her husband was dead from a violent murder. Of course, that would make anybody uncomfortable. Even if they didn’t really like their husband.

  But far worse was wondering if somehow Randall was the killer. He certainly had a motive—and she had heard Michael yelling at Randall! Right before the front door slammed. He could easily have killed Michael and then hurried out.

  But then the alarm had gone back on—after Randall left! Only Michael knew the code, so he had to have been the one who turned it back on. Randall couldn’t possibly have done it—and so he couldn’t possibly have killed Michael. But that meant the killer was already in the house—except how and when did the killer leave the house? After the place was swarming with cops?

  Katrina could not make sense of it. And the two detectives with their constant fake concern for her comfort didn’t help. And it didn’t stop. They were even polite when they took her fingerprints—“Would you be willing?” and it was “just a formality.” Katrina agreed, thinking it would help prove her innocence when none of her prints were found in Michael’s office.

  The politeness continued when they took her to an interrogation room. They even gave her a cup of coffee. True, it was really terrible coffee. But it was not at all the kind of rough treatment she’d seen on TV shows, and for that, at least, she was grateful, and she sipped from a Styrofoam cup as they all sat at the table.

  “Mrs. Hobson,” the older detective said in a kind of sympathetic way—although he did emphasize the name a little, as if to remind her that she was married—had been married—to a person who had just been murdered. “I’m Detective Sanders. This is Detective Melnick.” They both nodded courteously. “It must have been a terrible shock for you.”

  “Awful,” Melnick agreed.

  “And I’m sure you’re not a violent person, not normally.”

  “But seeing something like that?” Melnick said, shaking his head sorrowfully.

  “It might have turned anybody violent,” Sanders agreed.

  “Even Mother Teresa,” Melnick said. Sanders glanced at him, eyebrow raised. Melnick shrugged. “She was a nun?”

  “I’m pretty sure even the DA would understand,” Sanders said, turning back to Katrina. “It’s called ‘extenuating circumstances.’”

  “It means you had a reasonable motive for what you did,” Melnick said. “They take that into account.”

  “Of course, it is still murder, isn’t it?” Sanders said.

  “It is, no question,” Melnick said. “Murder.” And the two of them looked at her solemnly, just looked, and let the silence grow.

  Katrina looked back. Her mouth had gone dry, and she felt like all the air had gone out of the room. “What . . . what are you . . . ?” she stammered. She knew perfectly well that they were accusing her of killing Michael, but it seemed like such a stupid idea that she couldn’t think of any response that made sense.

  “I guess you never had a clue about Mr. Hobson,” Sanders said. “Until just a few hours ago.”

  “And when you found out like that? Had to be a terrible shock,” Melnick said.

  “So you snapped,” Sanders agreed. “Understandable—I mean, your own husband.”

  “A pedophile,” Melnick said, shaking his head. “Terrible.”

  Katrina felt her jaw drop, and for a moment she couldn’t breathe. “He was— Michael didn’t . . . What . . . ?” she managed at last.

  “You see?” Sanders said to his partner. “She didn’t know.”

  “No wonder she was so angry,” Melnick said. Then he turned back to Katrina. “But you must have noticed something? Some little quirk of behavior that made you suspicious? Not even once?” They both looked at her expectantly, but she could only shake her head numbly.

  “So you didn’t know he was a board member of True Mentor, did you?” Sanders asked.

  “Of True—of, of, what?”

  “True Mentor,” Sanders said. “It’s an organization that believes having sex with young boys helps them grow up right.”

  “They’re pedophiles,” Melnick explained. “Even worse, they’re self-righteous pedophiles.”

  Katrina could only stare. What they were telling her was utterly impossible. It was as if they had told her Michael was actually a large cactus trying to pass as human.

  “You’re right,” Melnick said. “She really didn’t know.”

  “Well, that explains it,” Sanders said, nodding pleasantly. “You had no idea what your husband was. So when you find out he’s in an organization that seduces young boys—”

  “SNAP!” Melnick said.

  “So you picked up the knife—” Sanders said.

  “I think it’s a letter opener,” Melnick said.

  Sanders looked at him. “Pretty sharp for a letter opener.”

  “Very sharp,” Melnick said. “One good stab would have done it.”

  “But you stabbed him seven times,” Sanders said, looking mildly at Katrina.

  “Which usually indicates great anger, or shock, or both,” Melnick chimed in.

  “In this case? Definitely both,” Sanders said.

  “Honestly?” Melnick said. “A lot of people would thank you for killing a pedophile.”

  “Of course, we can’t do that,” Sanders said sorrowfully.

  “Not officially,” Melnick said, winking at her.

  “But we do understan
d—and I think the DA will understand—why you killed him.”

  At last, Katrina found her tongue. “I didn’t,” she said. “I just—no. No. No. I, I— This is some kind of— It’s a terrible mistake!”

  “Yes, murder is always a mistake,” Sanders said.

  “Even a pedophile,” Melnick added.

  “For Christ’s sake!” Katrina snapped. “I didn’t kill Michael! And I had no idea that he was—I mean, if he even was! Which is crazy!”

  The two detectives just looked at her with identical bland expressions.

  “Well, good God,” Katrina said. “You can’t really believe I— Michael was much bigger than me, and stronger, and I couldn’t even—and I never go into his office anyway, so how could I—”

  “That’s a really nice security system you have at your house,” Sanders said abruptly.

  “State of the art,” Melnick added.

  “My—what?” Katrina replied, confused by the sudden change of subject.

  “Security system,” Sanders said. “Alarm, motion detectors—”

  “And cameras,” Melnick added happily. “There must be fifteen, twenty cameras.”

  “And they all record,” Sanders said.

  “Unless somebody turns ’em off,” Melnick said.

  Sanders nodded. “Which they can’t do unless they know the pass codes.”

  “How many people know those codes, Mrs. Hobson?” Melnick asked politely.

  Katrina just blinked.

  “The codes,” Sanders said.

  “You know. To turn the whole thing on and off?” Melnick said.

  “He means the security system,” Sanders said.

  Melnick nodded. “And the cameras, too.”

  “Who knew those codes?” Sanders repeated.

  “I, I guess—just Michael and, uh . . .” Katrina swallowed hard. “Just me now, I guess.”