by J. Bertrand
His eyes flare with recognition.
“That’s a book about the Nicole Fauk murder back in ’99,” I say. “I put that one down, too.”
“Hey now,” he says, “I’m not trying to lock horns with you, brother. You see my situation. I’ve got a girl sliced up with a bowie knife and so do you. I got a girl floating dead in the water and so do you. All I’m asking for here is a look-see. If it’s nothing but a coincidence, I’ll be on my way and there’s no harm done.”
“You want to look at the case file, be my guest. All I’m saying is, there’s a lot of swimming pools in this town and a lot of bowie knives, too. It’ll take more than that to connect the dots on this one.”
“If you’re willing to let me look, what more could I ask?”
“Go ahead, then. Have a seat. I’ve gotta follow up on some things, so I’ll be back in a bit. In the meantime, the coffee’s through that door and I recommend it highly.”
I go straight to Bascombe and bring him into the picture, though he’s too preoccupied to do more than stare at Lauterbach through the blinds and shake his head.
“That’s your problem,” he says. “I’ve got headaches of my own.”
He ducks over to the captain’s office, so I avail myself of the phone on his desk, dialing Sheila Green on the number Cavallo gave me.
“Thanks a lot,” I tell her. “You sent that hayseed over to torment me?”
Green’s laughter echoes over the line. “Shoot, March. I thought you and Lauterbach would hit it off like old buddies. He is the Roland March of the Sheriff’s Department, you know, and causes just about as much trouble.”
“Now he’s trying to unload his case on me. It’s painfully obvious there’s no connection between the two.”
“Not to me it isn’t.”
“You’re just messing with me, aren’t you?”
“Tell the hayseed I said hello.”
Bascombe returns as I hang up, frowning at the intrusion. “Did they not put a phone in at your desk? I can call somebody and have it done.”
Leaving him to it, I drop in on my civilian researcher, who lights up the moment she sees me, an unusual occurrence. She hands me subscriber info on the phone, but that’s not all. The number belongs to a certain Sean Epps, age thirty, who has a DUI on file from eight months back. He’s a real estate agent with a Porsche Cayenne and a wife in Bellaire.
“I found all his contact info online,” she says. “And here’s an extra little nugget: the number you’ve got is billed to the office, not home—but it’s not the mobile number listed on his agency page.”
“Maybe he only gives it out to the women he sees on the side.”
She nods in agreement. “Anything else you need?”
“This is more than enough. Thanks for the help.”
With Lauterbach still thumbing through the Walker case file, I set up shop in Aguilar’s cubicle, dialing the office number for Sean Epps. The real estate agency receptionist answers with false cheer and a country twang, then tells me Epps is out at a showing and offers me his mobile number, the official one. I dial him up and he answers the line.
“Mr. Epps,” I say. “I’m Detective Roland March with the Houston Police Department. I left a message for you on your other phone, but I never heard back.”
“Ah,” he says. “I’m, uh . . .”
“We need to have a face-to-face talk in my office. You know where police headquarters is downtown?”
“Can I ask what this is about?”
“It’s about your visit to Simone Walker’s house last night.”
Silence. In the background I hear road noise and the sound of an announcer’s voice on the radio.
“Mr. Epps?”
“When do you want to do this?” he asks.
“We need to do it right now. How long is it going to take you to get downtown?”
“Now? I don’t think I can—”
“Let me explain something, sir. If you’d called me back yesterday, we would’ve made an appointment at your convenience, but since you didn’t, it’s in your best interest to show some willingness to cooperate. Do you see what I’m saying?”
“Yes,” he says. “Of course. I’ve just been really busy. I can be there in, like, fifteen minutes?”
“Make it ten.”
There’s always the risk of spooking someone, coming on strong like this, but my instinct tells me how to play the hand. His reaction to the news of Simone’s death was emotional, but given his marital status, I can understand why he’d want to conceal the relationship if he could. Now he’ll be wondering how to do damage control, trying to trade cooperation for my assurance that his extracurricular activities won’t get back to his wife.
I lean over the cubicle partition. “I’ve got a witness to interview. How much longer you think this will take you?”
Lauterbach looks up from the case file. “You really don’t see the connection? Boy, it’s staring me right in the face.”
“Good try. But if you don’t mind packing up . . .”
“All right, all right. I can take a hint.” He puts his own file into an old-fashioned hard-sided attaché with combination locks on either side of the handle, then scans around to make sure he’s not forgetting anything. As he leaves, he tips an imaginary hat. “Just don’t be surprised if this one comes back to bite you.”
Sean Epps unzips a close-fitting, tab-collared leather jacket and perches lightly on the chair across the table from me, like he might be called away any second and doesn’t want to make himself too comfortable. He unclips a BlackBerry from his belt and sets it in front of him.
“That’s not the phone Simone Walker would call you on,” I say.
He glances down at it and shakes his head.
“You want to explain why you have two cellular phones?”
He shrugs. “One for business and one for personal.”
“Your wife know about the personal phone?”
He shrugs again.
“So tell me everything you know about Simone Walker.”
“Everything I know,” he says. “No problem. But before I do that, you have to promise me something. Can we agree up front that this is off the record? I want to be helpful, but at the same time I don’t want to hurt anyone, if you see what I mean.”
“I see what you mean.”
“Okay, then. That’s cool?”
“I’m a homicide detective, Mr. Epps, which is why I’m investigating Simone’s murder and not your marriage. So if you don’t mind, let’s get on with it.”
A wave of relief washes over him, followed by an ingratiating smile. He scoots his chair forward and leans over the table.
“Thanks,” he says. “The thing is, I have a great marriage. You can believe what you want, but that’s the truth. There’s other women, but they’re never serious. Simone was the same: it was no big deal. I met her at a cooking class I signed my wife up for. She worked at the store—for all of a week, I think—and we got to talking. It was my wife’s birthday coming up, and I thought she’d like this. But I’m talking to this girl, and she’s pretty cute and she seems up for it, and . . . anyway, you know how it goes.”
“You asked her out?”
“Something like that. It wasn’t exactly a relationship. It’s not like we were dating. It was just convenient, you know. Easygoing. We hooked up a couple of times, no big deal.”
“If you didn’t date her, where did you go?”
An impish grin. “There are a lot of properties sitting on the market these days.”
“You took her to houses you were listing?”
“Good, huh? The thing is, for me, I like to keep a firewall between this kind of thing and my real life. I like to keep things in their place. So I never went to her house and, obviously, I never took her to mine. And when we were together, well, we didn’t do a lot of talking.”
“So what changed?”
His smile fades. “The thing with the baby.” He says the word and his lip tremble
s. “You gotta understand, me and my wife, that’s something we haven’t managed to do. We went to a specialist even, and he said my sperm count was low, that was the problem. Which I had a hard time accepting. All the things they can do now, the artificial stuff . . . it’s not the same, is it? So Simone calls me and I’m thinking she’s just looking to hook up. But no, she’s pregnant. We didn’t use any protection—I mean, hey, I didn’t think it was necessary, according to the doctor.”
“When did you have this conversation, the one where she revealed her pregnancy?”
“The exact date, you mean?”
I stare at him.
“It would have been a few weeks ago. Middle of November, maybe?”
Around the time of her attempt to get money out of Jason Young. I check the date against the phone records and find several calls back and forth on Tuesday, November 17. He shrugs when I mention the date, but concedes that could be right.
“Me, I was kind of thrilled to hear the news. She was acting like it was some kind of tragedy, and if I’d just give her the money she’d take care of it. But I’m like, hey, this is a good thing. I’m gonna have a kid.” His eyes cloud and he wipes them with the heel of his hand. “She was saying she’d need five grand, and I’m like, it doesn’t cost that kind of money to get rid of a pregnancy. And anyway, I told her I was gonna pay support, that was no problem.”
“Did you give her any money?”
“What do you think? Of course I did. We met up and I gave her some cash, but she needed more so we went to the ATM. I gave her five hundred that day. Then I got a call over the weekend and she said she needed the other forty-five hundred.”
“Did she say why?”
“She wanted to move out of the house where she was staying. She said the old lady who lived there was crowding her.”
The old lady. Dr. Hill would be pleased to hear that.
“And did you give her the additional cash?”
“I pulled two grand out of the bank and said I’d have some more for her when I could. It’s not like I’m totally liquid, but I have an account where I keep some fun money. Bonuses, that kind of thing.”
In my stack of paperwork, I have the bank balances for Simone Walker’s checking account, retrieved along with the bills she kept in one of her dresser drawers. There are no big deposits from the last couple of weeks, and during the search of her rooms, we recovered no large sums of cash. Her purse was in the bedroom, the wallet inside containing less than a hundred dollars. The money went somewhere. I can’t help remembering all those bags in the closet, all those names of expensive boutiques.
“Did Simone ever talk to you about her husband?” I ask.
“I didn’t know she had one until the old lady told me. She said it was him that killed her, is that right?”
“Simone never said anything to you about him? What about her past?”
He laughs. “Like I said, we didn’t talk all that much. When she quit her job at the kitchen store, we talked about that. She would tell these funny stories about people, imitating the way they talked and everything. She cracked me up with that stuff. But she wasn’t real serious. She was all about having a good time. Even when she was making fun of people, it wasn’t spiteful or anything. She was just being entertaining, you know? Eager to please. Although . . .”
“Although what?”
“She was fun on the surface,” he says thoughtfully, like he’s only just working this out, “but underneath she had that damaged-goods, self-destructive thing, you know? And it’s no good hooking up with someone who’s only with you to punish herself.”
“Mr. Epps,” I say, “where were you on Saturday from noon until midnight?”
“Me?”
I wait him out again.
“I was . . . My wife and me, we went to Herman Park on Saturday morning. Rode our bikes and everything. I stopped and threw the Frisbee around with some kids. Around two, I had to go into work. I had an open house from two to six. A few people showed up, but no offers. When I got home, she made us dinner and we watched a movie I recorded off the cable.”
“You didn’t see Simone Walker at all?”
He shakes his head. “I tried calling her earlier in the week, but she didn’t answer. To be honest, the last time I saw her was when I pulled the money out of the bank. She met me in the parking lot and didn’t even get out of the car. I passed the money through and leaned in to kiss her, then she was gone.”
“And you’re saying that the only person who can verify your whereabouts on Saturday is your wife?”
He starts to nod, then stops himself. “No, that’s not what I’m saying. You don’t need her to verify anything. Like I said, from two to six I was at the open house. I can give you the sign-up list if you want, and you can ask everybody on it.”
“But after that?”
“After that I went home. I can’t help that, can I? And anyway, what does it matter where I was? I didn’t do this. It was the husband, right? Me, I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’ve suffered enough just losing the baby.”
I could tell him there was no baby. I could tell him it was a story Simone manufactured so that he’d cough up the money. Either she’d intuited his weakness somehow, or made a lucky guess. Regardless, she’d gotten what she wanted from him and then stopped returning his calls. Maybe it would comfort him a little to know this. Maybe it would wound him to realize his fertility doctor was right. But it’s not my place to comfort or wound. I get his statement typed up and have him sign it before cutting him loose, leaving Sean Epps none the wiser as he walks out the door.
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 8 — 11:01 A.M.
After flipping his way through my report, his reading glasses low on his nose, Hedges gives me a steely-eyed, penetrating once-over. Bascombe perches on the credenza behind him, arms crossed, glaring for once not at me but the back of the captain’s head.
“I’m a little surprised,” Hedges says.
I shift my weight in one of his cantilevered guest chairs, wishing I was positioned a little more securely—in the case, not the seat.
“There are three possible suspects in there,” I say, nodding toward the report. “The case on Young was shaping up pretty good, but we just don’t have enough. And he’s pretty convincing in the interviews, too. The other guy, Epps, is relying on his wife for an alibi, but I’m guessing she’ll back him up. There’s no physical evidence tying him to the scene, and from what Dr. Hill says, he seemed genuinely shocked to learn of the victim’s death, just like Young was.”
“Maybe you’re giving up too easily on Young,” he says. “The strip club fight puts him somewhere later in the evening, but he doesn’t have an alibi for the murder itself.”
Bascombe’s lip curls downward, but he doesn’t speak.
“There are some lines I can follow up,” I say. “For one thing, I still think it’s strange there were no books in that apartment. Maybe he has a storage unit from when he moved out of the house—?”
“Can I be honest with you?” Hedges says. “I think you’re straining with the Fauk connection, reading too much into the similarities. Maybe if you’d focus more on the concrete facts of the investigation.”
“The facts.” I shift again. “I’ll make a note of that, sir. Thank you very much.”
“Don’t be smart with me, March. If you could charge a suspect on this, I wouldn’t have to sit here and spoon-feed you advice. What I’m particularly concerned about is your third possible suspect.”
“You mean Dr. Hill.”
He adjusts his glasses. “That’s right. I’m a little worried about what we might call the political aspects. If you let the press get hold of the idea that we’re looking at Dr. Hill as a murder suspect, that’s going to look a little dubious, don’t you think?”
“How so?”
He turns to Bascombe, expecting him to weigh in, but the lieutenant keeps his counsel. With a sigh, Hedges struggles for a compassionate tone. “Look, March. This is sensi
tive stuff at the moment. With the runoff election this coming weekend, you need to be reasonable. We’ve got a candidate in the race who’s positioned to become the city’s first, ah, lesbian mayor.” He glances at Bascombe again like he’s worried he got the term wrong. “And the other side is really playing up that angle in a negative way.”
“I see.”
“You’re looking at me like a deer in the headlights. Marcus, help me out here.”
Bascombe clears his throat. “Here’s the concern, March. The captain doesn’t want a headline in the papers saying ‘HPD Names Prominent Lesbian as Homicide Suspect.’ That would look political.”
“I don’t plan on going to the Chronicle with anything.” The words come slowly, which is how you talk when picking your way through a minefield. “And I’m not naming Dr. Hill as a suspect, not at this point. We have her prints outside, but it would be stranger if we didn’t. There’s no indication that a sexual relationship existed between Dr. Hill and the victim, and for that matter, Dr. Hill says the rumors about her orientation are groundless. So even if we found the bloody knife hidden in her nightstand, I would hardly call her a ‘prominent lesbian.’ ”
“That’s not the point,” Hedges snaps.
“It’s what the media would call it, March. Not you.” Bascombe stares at the drawn blinds, looking as disgusted with the conversation as I feel. “I think what the captain is asking is for any inquiry into Dr. Hill’s involvement to wait. After the election, she’ll be fair game.”
Hedges sits back in his chair. “Exactly.”
“So I’ll be free next Monday to investigate one of my suspects?”
“You said yourself she didn’t rise to that level.”
“In the meantime, is it all right if I take another look at Young?”
The captain slides my report across the table. “Be my guest. It wouldn’t hurt if you’d take a page out of Lorenz’s book and close this thing.”
“Assuming the prominent lesbian didn’t do it.”