The Only Suspect

by Jonnie Jacobs

  “Local gentry, local money.” Michelle frowned. “I guess this one’s going to be in the headlines.”

  “Afraid so.” They looked at one another and Erling voiced what they were both thinking. “The lieutenant will put our feet to the fire if we don’t hand him a suspect in short order.”

  “Can we do that?”

  “You tell me. How’s it look?”

  Michelle flipped to a different page in her notebook. “Crawford’s here from the medical examiner’s office. His initial estimate is that they’ve been dead twenty-four to thirty-six hours. Both were shot at close range. The older woman in the head. The younger one in the chest and right leg. Weapon appears to be a shotgun.”

  Again Erling felt the tightness in his chest. Sloane moved with grace. A woman completely comfortable in her own skin. He couldn’t imagine the terror she must have felt when she saw the gun in the killer’s hands. His mind flashed on an vision of a Sloane trying frantically to fend off the inevitable. For a moment, he couldn’t breathe. Then he shook his thoughts clear.

  “We have the weapon?” he asked.

  “No.” Michelle paused and glanced around the room. “Looks like they put up a fight, doesn’t it? But even with two of them, they’d be no match for a sleazeball with a gun.”

  Erling grunted agreement. “Any ID on the second victim?” he asked, moving in to take a closer look. She appeared to be in her late teens or early twenties. The older woman comment made sense to him now.

  “The neighbor who called it in is a regular verbal fountain. Says there was a young woman living here with Winslow. Olivia Perez is the name. She was a student at the university.”

  “A relative?” Last Erling knew, Sloane had been living alone.

  “A boarder, I think.”

  “A boarder?”

  “I know, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. The Logans must be loaded.”

  Certainly not in need of taking in boarders. “What do we have in the way of trace evidence?” Erling sent a silent prayer to the heavens for a dumb perp. One who’d left fingerprints and fibers, maybe even his driver’s license.

  “We won’t know until the techs have finished going over the place. But there’s an old guy a couple of houses down who gave us the description of a car he saw out front Tuesday night. A silver Porsche with a broken taillight. If Crawford’s right about the time of death, that would put the car here near the time of the murders.”

  An eyewitness wasn’t as good as a dumb perp, but Erling would take it. At least a Porsche wasn’t your average, run-of-the-mill kind of car. “Did the old guy see anyone?”

  “He thinks the driver was male, but can’t say for sure.”

  “What about other neighbors?”

  “Nothing so far. The houses are pretty far apart and private.”

  That was one of the things Sloane had liked about living in this part of Tucson. It wasn’t as affluent as some of the newer gated communities, but the houses were all set on large lots, many of them an acre or more, and the neighborhood landscaping had matured to the point where plantings provided a screen. They’d made love one night out in the yard under the black, star-speckled sky. Erling remembered the soft breeze that grazed their skin, the lilac scent of Sloane’s hair, and the rough texture of the nubby blanket beneath them.

  The crime scene photographer reached into his equipment bag. “I’m about done here unless there’s something in particular you want.”

  “You get both stills and movies?” Erling asked. His voice was gruff with the invasion of memories.

  “Right. And I checked with Crawford about shots of the vics.”

  “When do you think you’ll be able to get us prints?”

  “Later today good enough?”

  “That the best you can do?” Erling asked.

  The photographer capped his camera. “Afraid so.”

  “I guess it’s good enough, then.” He turned to Michelle. “Anyone notified next of kin yet?”

  “Boskin and Dutton are on their way to the brother’s. Maybe he can give us more on the girl.”

  “Let’s hope so.”

  Independently, Michelle and Erling walked the crime scene, taking their own measurements, making their own sketches. Erling pulled out his palm-sized digital camera and shot the room from a dozen angles. The crime scene photographers did a terrific job, but he liked to have his own pictures, too, because they sometimes jogged his memory and filled in the details of his sketches.

  “What’s your take?” Erling asked as they worked. “First impression.”

  Michelle rocked back on her heels and frowned. She was wearing dark, form-fitting slacks and a cream-colored silk shirt that draped softly over the swell of her breasts—her standard uniform for the job, even when she was called out in the middle of the night.

  He’d initially resisted being partnered with her because he’d considered her a lightweight, or worse. But Erling had come to see that despite the eye-catching body and head of soft, brown curls, she was an earnest and intense as anyone he’d worked with before. A little too intense sometimes.

  “I’d say there’s a good chance the killer was someone Winslow was familiar with,” Michelle replied. “Either that or she was comfortable enough with what she saw that she had no qualms about letting him in. There’s no sign of forced entry, and both victims were dressed in street clothes, so it’s not like they were rousted from bed in the middle of the night. The lights are on, there’s an open bottle of brandy on the counter.”

  Had she been entertaining a new lover? Erling wondered. But the girl, Olivia, was in the house. He doubted Sloane would bring a man home under those circumstances.

  Michelle gestured toward Sloane’s body. “Looks like the killer went for her first, and while she was trying to fend him off, the younger woman surprised them. He got Mrs. Winslow in the head, probably standing close to her. The girl ... my guess is that the autopsy will show she was hit from farther away.”

  “Not a bad for someone who’s only worked a couple of homicides,” Erling said. Michelle had worked vice in Phoenix before moving to Tucson and signing on as a detective with the Sheriff’s Department.

  She acknowledge the compliment with a slight twist of her head. “Doesn’t mean it’s right.”

  “No, it doesn’t, and it’s good to remember that.”

  “You get locked into in a midset too sooon,” she said, parroting one of Erling’s favorite adages, “and you’ll miss the important stuff.”

  “Guess I’ve hammered that one home.”

  “You might say that.” This time there was a faint hint of a smile. “Shall we check the rest of the house?”

  Erling took a deep breath to still the pounding in his chest. Sloane’s house. Sloane’s things. Rooms charged with bittersweet memories. He wasn’t sure he could manage it.

  Finally he nodded. “Now’s as good as time as any.”

  A canvass of the home was standard procedure for detectives in instances like this. The techs processed the actual crime scene, but careful inspection of a victim’s personal possessions revealed alot about his or her life. Some of it interesting, most of it dull and irrevelant to the murder. Sometimes, though, they got lucky. A receipt, a phone number, a photo, some small tidbit that would eventually lead them to the killer.

  But normally the detective and the victim were strangers.

  Erling and Michelle spent the next forty minutes going through dressers, files, desk drawers, wastebaskets, and medicine cabinets. He was half-afraid he’d find something that marked his own previous presence in the house, and equally fearful of discovering that Sloane had obliterated his memory entirely. He almost smiled when he found the copper and bronze pendant he’d bought her for Christmas last year laid out on the velvet lining of her jewelry drawer.

  “Looks like she was astylish woman,” Michelle said at one point.

  Erling shrugged. “I wouldn’t know about that.”

  He paused at a familair photo on Sloane
’s bureau—a framed picture of Sloane and her brother, Reed, taken during a family barbeque. Her skin was virtually unlined, her blue-green eyes sparkling with humor. And often Erling recalled, with mischief. He felt an ache in his gut, a longing somewhere deep inside him that was less about her dream than his own loss.

  It had been a brief affair—six months and fourteen days, to be exact. Over since early May. Him like a panting mongrel around a pedigreed bitch in heat. Her words, but they resonated as much as they stung. His behavior was nothing to be proud of. Erling had known that even then. Still, he’d wanted to hate her for ending it. There were times he’d come close. But he’d certainly never wished her dead.

  By the time he and Michelle finished their canvass of the house, the sun was just rising over the hills near Sabino Canyon. Morning was Erling’s favorite time of day. Blue, cloudless sky, wide and open, the air soft, just beginning to build to the blinding heat of day.

  Leaving the house, he saw that the media were already out in force. A cameraman from one of the local news channels shoved a camera in his face. His cohort held a mic.

  “Detective Shafer,” the reporter shouted, “what can you tell us? We understand there’s been a homicide inside. Two victims. Was one of them Sloane Logan Winslow?”

  “We’re not prepared to make a statement at this time,” Erling barked.

  He could only hope Boskin and his partner would be able to notify Sloane’s family before they learned about her death live on television. Erling figured the murders would be the lead story on the morning news.

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  Copyright © 2005, 2007 Jonnie Jacobs

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  ISBN: 978-0-7860-3270-9