The Witness

by Dee Henderson

  “So we’ll see if that can change in the future. I’ve got plenty of friends to share,” he suggested, smiling. “What do you have to lose, Amy? I like you, and I’m safe, relatively. The rest is going to take care of itself.”

  “I’m old enough to take the plunge and close my eyes for the outcome to arrive.” She knew the night was opening doors to a possible new future, and she found herself wanting to walk down that road with him. “So where do you want to go next weekend? I’ve a yen to see some snow.”

  “Snow we can stay right here and watch fall, if you believe the weatherman. I thought we’d take in some holiday lights and maybe a movie. We could do some early Christmas-gift shopping.”

  “A guy offering to go shopping … I’m remembering this, Luke. Just you and me, there’s no need to take along security?”

  “That’s a call for the night before.”

  “Then yes, tentatively. Assuming Tracey and Marie haven’t had a major hiccup in their lives I need to stay and worry about instead.”

  Luke laughed. “Deal, then. How long have we been hiding?”

  “Long enough someone besides Caroline has realized we’re gone.”

  “True. Five more minutes. I am the boss.”

  “I notice they still call you Chief, even off duty.”

  “They’re teasing and rubbing in the age a bit and also accepting reality—I am the chief and nothing changes that in our relationship, even off duty.”

  “Respectful friends.”

  “Yeah. They know the decisions that come across my desk; I’m glad for that at times, the fact the respect stays even when it feels like I’m in over my head with the job. It helps, having cops like that working with me.”

  “You’re a good police chief.”

  “Working to be. You’ll like my secretary, by the way, and my sister. Both are sticklers for my work staying at work.”

  “How long, Luke, before it is safe to meet them? to come out of the shadows? You know as well as I do that we are heading to an impasse if this is still the way it is in six months, a year from now.”

  Her question turned him serious. “It won’t continue as it is for months. I’m just hoping we get a few weeks of calm before trouble arrives. You need that time; your sisters do. But we both know there are too many pressures at work for this not to erupt somewhere.”

  She sighed. “I know. Sometimes fantasy clashed something awful with reality; I so want to blink and find this was all a bad dream.” She lifted her head to look at him. “Daniel’s got better security around him?”

  “Yes. It was a condition of his coming out tonight to meet you.”

  “Good. We’d better get back to the house, I think. Marie said something about getting out the picture albums tonight to compare notes on where Henry and Mom must have met and traveled together. I can’t say I’m looking forward to it.”

  “They need the closure that facts can provide. Just listen. I’m sorry they aren’t talking about your father too. I know that remains an awful hole for you.”

  “I never wanted to know and I still don’t. I’m glad Henry was not my father.”

  He looked surprised by the intensity of her answer but chose not to probe that painful spot. He picked up their coats.

  “I am glad you came out tonight, Luke. Very glad.”

  “I’m not planning to go anywhere for a long time,” he reassured, helping her on with her coat and his hands resting for a moment on her shoulders before releasing her and slipping on his own coat.

  He took her hand again for the walk back to the house.

  “Until this danger passes: don’t get too attached, Luke, please. When trouble comes—I’ll do what I think is right and best. Even if that means leaving.”

  His gaze didn’t shift from the path they were walking. “I know.” He glanced over and smiled but with a hard, watchful look behind that gentleness. “You’ll do what you think is best, just as I will. And if both our hearts get mangled in the process, but your sisters are safe, we’ll still know it was the right decision.”

  “I thought you deserved to know.”

  “I haven’t pushed for a promise that you’ll stay not because I don’t want it, but because I know you can’t give it. There are risks now and ones that will wound us both if we’re not careful. But I’m committed to seeing Marie and Tracey are safe, because they are the most important people in your life, and I’m committed to doing what I can to keep you safe too, with or without your cooperation when it comes down to the details.”

  She smiled. “I’m glad we both know that then. Don’t be mad one day when I decide something you wouldn’t have decided for me.”

  He tightened his grip on her hand. “I’ll get mad, but I’ll do my best to forgive you too. But you’ll owe me a phone call or two this time—no more gone-forever-without-a-trace flights. You haunted my dreams for the last three years, you know.”

  “Did I?”

  He smiled at the pleasure in her words. “I think we should plan an early start next weekend—say 6 a.m., and catch breakfast at one of the truck-stop diners that make the meal a feast. What do you think?”

  “I think you’re taking every minute you can get out of a yes, but sure, I’m game. Even if I do prefer to skip breakfast and catch the extra sleep.”

  “I’ll be here early then.”

  “I don’t know that I’ll be telling Marie and Tracey where I’m going and who I’m going with just yet though.”

  “Chicken.”

  “You’ve only got one sister. Two is tougher when they both decide to go for answers and giving advice. When can they come out again?”

  “It depends on how the press reacts to their disappearance tonight. Basically, as soon as it can safely be done, but not a day earlier.”

  He held open the door to the house. Amy paused, hearing music and laughter even before they passed through the coat-room. “Laughter. I’ve missed hearing them laugh for so many years.”

  “I know.” He smiled as he took her coat for her, then nodded to the next door. “Go enjoy it.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  “SO WHAT TIME should I pick you up, Marie? Say 7 p.m.?” Connor showed his badge to the officer guarding the walk path that led up to a small bungalow off Eisenhower Boulevard and then slipped under the police tape. The idea of arranging a date while arriving at a crime scene didn’t sit well as something he wanted her to know he was doing, but it had been such a headache last week trying to coordinate seeing her with the unpredictable hours of the job that he was taking a chance to talk with her whenever he could find an opening.

  “Could you make it eight? With the shipment that just came in I’m going to need every minute I can get of Tracey’s time to help me hang it, and she’s around until seven. Eight will give me time to shower and change or else I’ll be your date wearing packing dust and sweat.”

  He smiled at the thought. “I’ll be there at eight,” he promised.

  “Thanks.”

  “Bye, Marie.” He closed the phone and slid it in his pocket, catching the first breath of what awaited him in the house as he opened the screen door. He lifted an arm to cover his nose as he stepped inside. “So much for colder weather making this job easier. How long was it before he was found?”

  The living room just off the entryway was small, more a place to sit and read a book than a place to have more than two people linger and talk. Marsh turned from where he crouched beside the body to look back at him. “I’m guessing two days plus. Monday’s mail was brought in, and Tuesday’s was still in the box.”

  Connor didn’t have to ask cause of death. Stab wounds, deep and plentiful, the blood spray from artery wounds having hit the wall, furnishings, and turned the room into a horror show. Connor held back his initial reaction to the sight of the body out of respect for the dead. “Stabbing implies very personal.”

  “We’ll look at the family first,” Marsh agreed. “The front door wasn’t forced, and the officer who walked around the
house looking for signs of entry saw no immediate evidence of a forced screen or broken glass. Our victim appears to have let his attacker in, and our murderer inconveniently locked the doors on his way out. I had to shove out the lock to get inside.”

  Connor came around the sofa and stepped over the end table so he could get into the space beside the body without stepping somewhere soaked in blood. He pulled on latex gloves. “Do we have a name for him?”

  “No wallet on him. A seventy-year-old retired gentleman, by appearance still in reasonably good physical shape: good muscle tone, fit, not wearing glasses or hearing aids, and with tennis shoes that look well used for walking. He would probably have lived to be a hundred if someone hadn’t murdered him.”

  Connor absorbed the details while trying to block out the smell. The hands were still in remarkably good shape given the decomposition, no slices or broken bones. “No defensive wounds? That surprises me.”

  “Probably the blow to the side of the face comes first, knocks him down, attacker straddles him and stabs repeatedly … ,” Marsh guessed, noting the angles.

  “Yeah. You can see where the attacker’s legs protected the guy’s slacks from the blood splatter. Our doer must have looked a mess on his way out of the house afterward unless he changed clothes somewhere inside. There weren’t blood drops on the front walk that I saw. Arrived and departed by car?”

  “There’s a door going out to the garage. We’ll check that direction. After dark, a short walk to a parked car—neighbors aren’t going to be that nosy, but we’ll see what anyone happened to remember.”

  “He’ll have bloody clothes, shoes, a knife—at least it is something to find. Who called it in?”

  “The postman thought it odd the mail and newspapers hadn’t been picked up for a couple days and mentioned it to an area patrol. Officers knocked on house doors on either side of here and across the street but found no one home. I’m wagering we’re looking at a retired guy living in a neighborhood of working couples and no one will remember seeing anything at all.”

  “It’s easier to solve a murder in a community where crime is an occasional thing than a neighborhood absolutely shocked when it happens the first time,” Connor agreed, hoping someone at least had a dog that had gone off barking for no reason at all and an owner observant enough to remember the cars on the street. He looked at his partner. Marsh had caught the call—this one was his. “Where do you want me?”

  Marsh smiled and nodded toward the hall, letting him off the hook. “Work the office and bedroom and find us a name for him. If you can’t find his wallet, a prescription bottle might do. It looks like he lives alone.”

  “Thanks.”

  “The next one is going to be yours. I’m betting it’s an ice floater in one of the rivers.”

  “Don’t even think it,” Connor protested, remembering last year’s winter discovery. He headed toward the bedroom to see if he could put a name to their victim. “We’ve got blood drops in the hallway,” he called, noting the evidence. “Maybe cleaned up in the bathroom?”

  He glanced in the open door on his left. “Oh yeah, blood in the bathroom. He tried to wash up in here.” A bleach bottle sat with the cap still half off in the tub, suggesting the killer had been at least trying to destroy evidence of his own presence after the wash-up. The lab guys would be struggling to get prints on the guy, for the smeared blood still present looked like glove smears rather than fingerprints. Connor left that problem to the experts. He nudged open the medicine cabinet. He saw no prescription bottles, which surprised him, just Chap Stick, extra hand soap, a shaving kit, solitary toothbrush. Nothing in the room suggested a female lived here.

  The room he thought would be the office turned out to be a spare bedroom. He opened the next room and found it to be the man’s bedroom. The man kept a very neat home—that was Connor’s first impression of the room. The bed was made with the spread tugged tight to remove folds, the pillows perfectly aligned. The furniture was clear of the usual miscellaneous items dumped from pockets: no spare change, matchbooks, toothpicks, pocket comb. A very nice watch sat on the dresser next to a cigar box. Connor pushed up the lid of the cigar box and found it full of coins, a couple dates on the dollar coins putting them at a hundred years old and solid silver. The watch and coins sitting out in plain sight, still here, said this wasn’t an obvious robbery.

  Connor opened the top dresser drawer and found the wallet in the same place his own grandfather kept his, top drawer left, next to the folded socks. He opened the thin worn leather. The driver’s license gave him a name, and the photo was enough of a match to be the match they needed. “Nolan Price, seventy-one,” he read aloud. Two hundred in cash still in the billfold.

  He carried the wallet back with him to the living room. “I know this guy is going to prove to be former military, probably Korea. The house is tidy neat. I’m not seeing robbery as a motive—there’s cash, coins, a nice watch, all within easy reach.”

  “I’ll add another piece to it,” Marsh said. “Look behind you, fourth picture down in that frame of snapshots.”

  Connor scanned the wallet photos arranged in the matted frame. “This is not good. Our victim, standing beside a Mr. Henry Benton.” He lifted the frame down and worked the backing free. He slid out the wallet photo and then handed it to his partner. “That looks like a uniform to me.”

  “Chauffeur? It must be, given the car that is behind them. What is that, a Rolls?”

  “Daniel doesn’t use a chauffeur, but maybe his uncle did. The age would fit with this guy having retired recently.”

  “A coincidence? This particular guy turning up dead right now?”

  “We’ve had stronger coincidences before,” Connor replied, not wanting to get drawn somewhere the crime wasn’t taking them yet. “Even if he still had something useful like keys to Henry Benton’s estate, that kind of thing—Daniel doesn’t live there, and a robbery isn’t that simple. There are full-time security guards walking the grounds while the estate goes through probate. What’s keeping forensics?”

  Marsh stood. “They’ve got a fatal house fire over on the west side of town. I told them not to rush; our guy isn’t going anywhere.”

  “True. Let’s get outside a few minutes, Marsh. This is killing my sinuses.”

  “It’s a little raw,” Marsh conceded. “If it’s family, we’re probably looking for a nephew, I’m thinking.” He grabbed Connor’s arm, stopping him from passing the mirror. “How did we miss that?”

  Connor saw the image too and turned to scan the room. “You’re telling me.”

  The note was written in blood across the rich leather-bound books on the middle bookshelf, the note probably bright three days ago and now darkened into a stain in the books’ leather. The sun passing free of clouds had briefly brightened the room and the contrast. He walked with Marsh around the body to get a closer look.

  “‘I know …’ Something else looks faded out,” Marsh said.

  “‘Family secret,’” Connor figured out, tracing but not touching the pattern from the other end of the shelf. “‘I know the family secret.’”

  “What secret? A seventy-one-year-old guy has a family secret worth murdering over?” Marsh wondered aloud. “This victim is not Henry Benton giving away two hundred million in his will. What is going through this killer’s messed-up head?”

  “I don’t think we’re looking for someone particularly crazy,” Connor said. “He used blood already at the scene and on a vertical canvas; that’s a nice way to stop any match to handwriting. And writing on objects—forget fingerprints in this. This looks like a paper towel dipped in blood was used as a pen.”

  “The psychiatrist is going to love interpreting this one,” Marsh agreed, writing the words down.

  “You’ve got to admit, notes are pretty rare. What is this, our second one in six years?”

  “I didn’t like that case either,” Marsh replied. “What else? Is that the extent of the message or did he try and write on
something else strange when this line of books ran out?”

  Connor looked around the room. “It’s going to take hours to eliminate everything.”

  “The back of doors, the back of pictures, rolled-up blinds … not just what we see now, but what the killer might have selected as amusing at the time. What time are you meeting Marie tonight?”

  “Eight.”

  “Don’t expect to make it on time.”

  Connor took out his phone. “I knew it was going to be like this today, Marsh. Didn’t I tell you just this morning while we were getting coffee that things were going too smooth with Marie?”

  “You did.”

  “The third date and I’m already canceling one.” Connor shook his head and walked away to have some privacy for the call.

  “Don’t tell her someone killed her father’s former chauffeur, claiming to know a family secret,” Marsh offered dryly, beginning the laborious process of turning over pictures on the wall one at a time to check for what might or might not appear behind them.

  Connor scowled at his partner. “Marie? Connor. How’s the picture unpacking going?”

  He listened and smiled at her answer as he walked through into the kitchen to begin systematically opening and closing all the cabinet doors.

  “You’re not going to be able to come tonight after all,” Marie guessed, speculating on why he had called back so soon.

  “I’m afraid not. We’ve got a case that wants to be difficult.”

  “Dangerous?”

  “Only to catching hepatitis B or some other blood-born bug. Forensics isn’t here yet so the preliminary walk-through is on us.” He covered the phone. “Marsh.”

  His partner came to join him.

  Connor pointed to the inside of the pantry door. I know the family secret was painted in blood across the wood.

  “He’s getting neater. This must be the second attempt to write it.”

  “Prints,” Connor suggested. “Maybe.”

  “A very slim maybe. But five will get you ten we find this message at least a couple more times.”

  “I’d take that bet.”