by Dale Mayer
He walked into the bathroom to shower, only to find that his uninvited house guest had left a mess here too. He stepped into the shower, hating the smell of her perfume and old hair spray. He doused himself well with soap and shampoo to clean up the stench. When he stepped out, he felt better, but just the sight of the mess in his bathroom pissed him off all over again. After such a great night’s sleep, when he saw his bed, with her indentation and some of her long hairs and even her hairpins on the bed itself, he immediately stripped it down and threw it into the laundry.
He couldn’t believe Annalise had done that. And he couldn’t believe he’d slept through it. How the hell had that happened? He hadn’t slept well in a long time, but sleep deprivation was no excuse. Then he remembered the half bottle of scotch, now sitting empty beside him on the bar. … Well, that explained him not waking to her arrival and would be the last time he’d do that for a while.
Moodily, he started a cup of coffee and then sat in front of the huge picture window to enjoy the view. He had a two-seater couch arranged in front of the circular windows that showed him the city of Vancouver from his penthouse apartment. He sat here, sipping his coffee, trying to quell the rage inside.
He picked up the phone, turned it on, and called his ex. “You do that again,” he said, “and I’ll take apart your house of cards and make sure nothing’s left for you to pick up the pieces from.” Just when she wanted to protest, he turned off the phone and tossed it on the couch beside him.
The last thing he wanted to listen to was any more excuses from her. They’d had months of ups and downs on a daily basis. The sex had been hot, and the rest had been awful. When he couldn’t stand any more of the chaos and the constant drama, he broke it off. Only she’d refused to listen. And she’d taken her revenge in a constant irritating string of emails, texts, phone calls. Then resorted to some mad retaliation by sending her girlfriends to his doorstep. This was the first time one had entered unannounced. She’d also be the last.
He was so done with it. He was done with so many things. Hopefully his police visits were done too. He sipped his coffee and stared out at the city, wondering why everybody in his world lived such a shadowed life. He could crush business opponents; he could clean up at any card game. But, when it came to relationships, well, he hated to say it, but apparently he sucked. It was time to change his game, only he wasn’t sure exactly how. He didn’t want any of those damn recurring nightmares either.
Control was everything to him, and no one and nothing would take that away from him.
Chapter 4
Saturday and Sunday
Kate spent the next two days, her whole weekend, trying to fit in searches on the missing children, according to St. Laurant’s minimal descriptions. Only her time was at a premium. Vancouver had had two murders the previous night; one looked to be an open-and-shut case, but the other one was still dodging them. The detectives on her team had hours of interviews left to do, walking the streets and talking to passersby. They’d managed to snag a couple patrolmen to give them a hand going door-to-door, but nothing shortened the legwork that needed to be done.
*
Second Monday in June
Walking into the office early on the third day, she was tired and cranky. She hadn’t slept. They’d been out working a case until well past two in the morning.
When she dropped her phone on the center of her desk with a louder-than-normal snap, Owen looked up and snickered. “You know that getting laid is a great stress relief.”
“If that’s the only reason to get laid, I’ll skip it, thanks,” she said. She walked to the counter and picked up coffee, bringing her cheap mug back to her desk, where she set it down carefully. She might drop a lot of things, but she treated her coffee as gold. The guys had tried to replace her cheap mug several times, but she wasn’t having it. It was her favorite cup; it was thick, held the heat, and it was bigger than all the others. And that meant that she got at least one and a half cups of coffee per mug, compared to what the rest of them were getting.
Besides, they were in cahoots to empty the pot before she got hers. It drove her crazy at the beginning, and they were in sync over it all. And, if that were the case, then she was better off just letting them do their thing and ignoring them. She was still all about the case and the victims. Right now she had more of both than she was happy with. When the temperatures outside spiked—which, yeah, in Vancouver wasn’t much of a real heatwave—violence spiked. Tempers flared, dispositions shortened, patience disappeared, and all kinds of things that wouldn’t normally happen, happened.
The one possible open-and-shut case was a fight between husband and wife. They’d been out on the beach all day. Both of them were hot and suntanned—badly sunburned actually, she added mentally with a snort. They’d been drinking beer and smoking marijuana for most of the afternoon. Somehow they got into an argument at home over munchies, in which she stole his bag of chips. He grabbed the knife and pinned her to the wall with it, jamming it deep along her breastbone.
When Kate took her first sip of the hot fresh brew, she sat back, closed her eyes, and just let it slip down her throat to her stomach. She could almost imagine the caffeine being injected into her bloodstream. Surely it wouldn’t be more than ten years before caffeine was actually something you could shoot. Hell, they injected everything else. Why not coffee too?
As she sat here, her eyes closed, she let some of the case information roll through her head. No other people were in that one house, just the husband and wife, and they’d been seen arguing on the beach earlier. His fingerprints were all over the knife, and he was blubbering like a baby when they found them. Kate wasn’t sure who had called it in though, and that bothered her. She sat here, her fingers slightly drumming her desktop. Because somebody had called it in. That was the only sticking point for her.
Meaning that person knew something, but, if they had witnessed the event, where were they, and what was their role? The husband was incoherent and swore he hadn’t called it in; then he had also said that he hadn’t killed his wife. Said he’d passed out. And, when he woke up, his wife had been dead. But Kate had checked both their phones anyway, and neither had made the call to the police. And it certainly wasn’t random that the cops had showed up.
So something was going on; she just didn’t know what. The others on her team didn’t seem to be particularly bothered about it, but she was. Something was very strange about having a crime scene like that, where it seemed clearly open-and-shut, yet still no way to know who made the 9-1-1 call.
“A Good Samaritan caller,” she said, but she hated that. It was too perfect an answer. How had someone seen? Looked in a window? If so, why? Or had they been there at the time—and, if so, had that person killed the wife?
As much as she liked every case cut-and-dry, every T crossed, every I dotted, every question mark exactly where it needed to be, this case didn’t feel that way. She sipped her coffee. She worked through everything else she knew about the case, but absolutely nothing was unusual, except for that call. She thought about it and leaned forward, then picked up her phone and called Dispatch. After identifying herself, she said, “A 9-1-1 call came in at 2218 last night. Do you have a recording of the call?”
“Of course,” the dispatcher said, “but I’ll need to pass you to my manager, so you can get a copy of it.” Kate waited. The manager came on the line. “Yes, we have that,” he said. “Give me a moment, and I’ll send a copy over.”
“And can you tell me if there’s any ID for the caller?”
“No,” the dispatcher said. “Nobody ID’d.”
“So somebody made the call but didn’t answer your questions?”
“That’s the way it happens sometimes,” he said. “I’ve sent it to you. You can listen for yourself.”
After hanging up, she brought it up on her email and went over the very short recording. It looked like a thirty-seven-second call.
“This is 9-1-1. Do you have an emergenc
y? Please tell me your name and your address.”
“He stabbed her,” said the hushed voice. “He stabbed her dead.”
“Name and address,” the dispatcher’s voice said again. “Please, sir, I need your name and address.”
But the only address he gave was the address of the murdered woman. Kate found that interesting. So he knew where it was and knew enough about the scenario to call it in. But, when it came to identifying himself, he didn’t. He had immediately said, “You need to send somebody there, before he can hide his tracks,” he snapped. “Now.”
And he hung up. It wasn’t even thirty-seven seconds. The first part was just the dispatcher, picking it up and answering, going through the standard spiel.
“Interesting,” she murmured. “So what the devil is this all about?”
Something about that voice. Something she wasn’t so sure about. She thought about the psychic case days earlier and shook her head. No, it wasn’t that. It was obviously not Simon’s voice, at least not speaking in a normal voice. But it would be odd to have two weird scenarios like this in just a handful of days.
But then again, a full moon was coming, and she swore to God it brought out the crazies. She’d heard several people at the hospitals talk the same way. Somehow a full moon made people do things they wouldn’t normally do. Had a third person been in that house? And had he somehow led the husband on to kill the wife? Or had some third person just been a bystander? Maybe he’d been a pizza delivery guy and watched through the window. She understood why he wished to stay out of it, but it would certainly make her feel better to know who had placed that call.
“Good morning,” Colby said, as he walked into the bullpen.
She opened her eyes and stared at him.
He looked at her directly. “Long night, huh?”
“You could say that,” she muttered. She picked up her coffee again and finished it. As she stood to refill it, he said, “You might as well sit down. Because, one, the coffee is gone. And, two, we’ve got a meeting in three minutes.”
“Three minutes is enough to get more coffee,” she protested and stared longingly at the corner she had to get around to get to the coffee.
“But not to make a new pot,” he said. “So, in this case, no, it’s not.”
“Why is the coffee always gone?” she groaned.
“I think it’s a standard police problem,” Colby said. “The coffee is always gone.”
“It shouldn’t be,” she said, “damn it.” But she sat back down and watched as everybody else walked in with full cups of coffee. She glared at them and asked, “Did you all finish the coffee?”
Just then Audrey poked her head around the corner and said, “I put on a fresh pot. Two minutes to fresh coffee.”
At that, Kate gave her the first bright smile of her morning and said, “Good, thanks. I want to make sure I get a cup.”
Audrey looked at her funny and said, “Didn’t you already get several cups? The guys said you did.” Immediately Audrey broke up, the others laughing too.
Kate shook her head and returned her attention to Colby.
“First order of the day,” he said. “We need to wrap up the file from last night. It’s nice to see an open-and-shut case. It helps our numbers. Send it through, and let’s get that one done with. As for the second one, I understand we still have canvassing to do, so you can pull in two more plainclothes men—or a couple off the beat, if you need to,” he said, “but I want all the information by the end of the day.”
He looked over at Kate. “What about the guy who came in a few days ago? Did you check out all his descriptions?”
She shook her head. “I was only halfway through the list when we caught two live ones, so everything else went to the back burner.”
He looked at the stack of files on her desk and frowned, but she just let him look. She didn’t say anything after a moment, and neither did he. Her sergeant looked around at the other desks, and she knew they were all mostly empty. That’s the way they all rolled. Most of them stuck to the cases that were on their desk because usually enough of them were here to keep them all busy. The often worked the same case but, if not necessary, they worked independently.
She was the eager beaver, poking into things in the past, but then that’s what she did.
“Kate’s looking for a promotion already,” Lilliana said from the background, eliciting a rumble of muted laughter from the rest.
“She might get it too,” Colby said simply. “At least she looks like she’s been busy.”
The others just glared at him, and he smiled. “If anybody’s got any problems, I’m in my office until ten,” he said. “Then I’ve got press meetings after that.”
And, from his tone, everybody knew that was his least favorite way to spend the afternoon. It made her feel better to think that he wouldn’t be enjoying his day any more than she was. She immediately brought up her keyboard and started hacking away at the emails that had come in overnight. A lot of the officers had gone out last night, taking statements and interviewing witnesses.
Well, she had too, but there were just too many to canvass on her own. The interviews were coming in via email. She absolutely loved that system. It gave her a copy of the statement, a name, and a time and date stamp. And, of course, she compounded the issue by printing off all the statements because she was a very visual person. She pulled everything together from the printer.
As she walked back, Audrey poked her head around and asked, “Did you get coffee?”
She stared at her for a moment and pulled out the cases that matched her printed interviews, then shook her head. “Don’t tell me that it’s gone.”
“Not if you get there fast,” Audrey said in her chirpy voice.
Kate snagged her cup, walked around the corner, just to see Owen replacing the empty pot.
He looked at her and laughed. “Jesus, you’re really off your mark today, aren’t you?” he said, as he walked away to give her room.
She made a pot herself. She stood here, guarding it, until it was done dripping. While she was doing that, she went through the pages she’d printed off. Nothing here was different. Nobody had seen anyone else. It was just the two people in the house on a long-term basis, as far as anybody knew.
No visitors, no guests staying over, no boarders, no deliveries, or anybody else in the vicinity. They fought a lot, did drugs a lot, and drank a lot. Nobody was surprised at this end. Knowing that, Kate had no reason to stop this from moving forward. She shut down her mind on this issue but noted a question for herself on the page.
“You ready to let that one go?” Rodney asked. “You know it’s open-and-shut.”
“It’s open-and-shut except for whoever called 9-1-1,” she said.
He stared at her and frowned.
She nodded. “I’ve listened to the 9-1-1 call. He doesn’t identify himself, but he does give the correct murder address and says that our suspect stabbed the victim and that somebody needed to get there before he had a chance to cover up what he’d done.”
“So,” he said, “the caller was probably the husband.”
“It’s not his voice, and he was nowhere near that collected when we were there. If it were him, he used a different phone, as that call wasn’t made from his cell.”
“Remember? The world is a stage, and everybody is in the drama club,” he said. “They let us see what they want us to see and try to tell us whatever story they can tell us.”
“Maybe so,” she said, “but it sucks.”
“Life hasn’t changed at all in the last three months,” he said. “You were a hell of a good cop for years. Now you’re a hell of a good detective. But just because you moved up doesn’t mean the quality of the humans we deal with did.”
She winced.
“What about Jason? Anything on him?”
“No,” she said. “I haven’t found anything on that one. I’m still waiting on the autopsy report, and the coroner is still waiting on the drug tes
t to come back.”
“In other words, we’re nowhere,” he said. I’m sure the Integrated Child Exploitation Unit will want to be kept in the loop, even if we find out something else was going on with the boy’s disappearance. Although it might be a bit early to contact ICE yet.”
“Personally,” she said, “that seems to be where we were right from the beginning, when Jason first went missing.”
“Not necessarily,” he said. “We have one open-and-shut murder case. Now lock it down.”
She nodded, not having any other reason—except for the 9-1-1 call—and took care of the rest of the paperwork and sent it off. Just as she stood and turned around to get coffee, somebody grabbed the pot ahead of her. She frowned, following the hand to find Colby. She watched as he filled his cup. Then he looked at her and said, “Where’s your cup?”
She pointed; he filled it up. “Now at least you’re getting one.”
“Why don’t we just get one of those massive coffeemakers,” she said, “and then we won’t run out so fast.”
“Or,” he said, “we should just get one of those little pod systems, where you can make a cup every time.”
“Then we just fill the dump with more waste,” she said.
“Didn’t realize you were such a conservationist.”
“We’re killing the planet,” she said, “and I try not to go too crazy but, jeez, one coffee filter, one pack of coffee, it should do more than four cups of coffee.”
“It does,” he said. “You forget eight of us are here and our analyst, Reese. Of course she helps the other teams, as well as do our assistants.”