Chris spun around and looked left and right. He saw no neighbors watching or outside. He looked back at Laurie. Her body jerked. Her hand pawed at her throat. Chris reached down, grabbed her by a blood-free strap of her sports bra, and yanked her in front of her car. She’d be found but not immediately by any casual passerby. Chris flicked some blood off his knife and onto the ground, folded it up while it was still bloody, and stuffed it back into his pocket. He walked down the driveway to his truck. He had someone else to drop in on.
CHAPTER 13
We said a few more words to Pete, the front desk worker at the motel, and walked outside. The guy either didn’t know anything that was going to help us or wasn’t going to give us anything to help—I was on the fence as to which was the case. We left the cruiser parked between the street and sidewalk in front of the motel’s parking lot and rounded the front of the building for the alley. When we turned the corner, I saw Gomez’s silver Ford SUV parked behind the patrol car from central district.
Steve and I met Gomez, Skip, and Officer Heard by the body of the woman, who still lay on the mattress. Heard wrote a few things on a sheet of paper on a metal clipboard. Skip leaned against the front of his coroner’s van and watched Gomez, who was crouched and snapping photos.
“Gomez,” I said.
Gomez, somewhere in his forties with short jet-black hair and a thin goatee, took the camera from his eye and looked over his shoulder at Steve and me. “Busy day.”
“Yeah. Anything?” I asked.
“There’s some smudges and what look like prints on the dumpster here.” Gomez jerked his head toward the edge of the green dumpster nearest the deceased woman’s head. “I’m about done with the photos, then I’ll get my kit and get going on collecting whatever we find.”
“Sure. How long do you think you have here?” I asked.
“Maybe an hour,” Gomez said. “I’m going to go through the dumpsters up and down the alley to see if we can find a purse for the woman.”
“What did we have going on from what we collected this morning?” I asked. “Garcia said Colt found some blood evidence outside?”
“Well, I found it, technically,” he said. “I have to think that our killer was bleeding when he walked away from the house. It’s really about the only thing that makes sense. With a stabbing, it’s fairly common for the attackers to cut themselves in the process. I have samples, but we’ll have to run tests.”
“Okay,” I said. “What was going on with that cell phone you took back to the crime lab?”
“Tech has it now,” Gomez said. “I pulled prints and took a couple of samples from it before I passed it off to their department. I ran the prints right away. They didn’t get us any hits. But at least we know for certain that it’s the homeowner’s. When I hit the button on the side of the phone, the screen showed a new email. The email address belongs to Nick Ludwig, so it’s pretty safe to say that it’s his phone. Which I guess we kind of figured, anyway.”
“All right,” I said. I turned my attention to Steve. “You didn’t hear anything from Garcia or Ryan about the sporting goods store, did you? If they went and checked it out or what?”
“Nothing,” Steve said.
“Give one of them a buzz and see what’s up. I’m going to give Tech a quick ring and let them know what we’re looking for on that phone.”
“Sure,” Steve said.
He pulled his phone from his pocket and dialed. I did the same. I got an answer within three or four rings.
“Tech Center. Wade Woznacki.” Wade led our tech unit, and another three or four guys worked under him.
“Hey, it’s Harrington. How are we looking on that phone that Gomez passed off to you guys?”
“Phone? When was this?”
His response didn’t inspire a lot of confidence.
“Like an hour or two ago. Today.” I leaned against the front of the coroner’s van.
“I’m just stoking your coals. We have it here. We’re working on it. The call log from the phone is printed. Same with texts. We had to do a little poking and prodding to get into the emails and instant messages, but I think we got everything now.”
“In front of you?” I asked.
“Yeah, right here. I was going to get into contact with one of you guys as soon as we had it all wrapped up nice with a bow.”
I looked up the alley. Steve, a phone pressed to his ear, was lifting lids on dumpsters. It didn’t seem like too bad of an idea. I walked to the first set of garbage bins on the left-hand side. The building they butted up against was a coin Laundromat. I flipped the lid of the bin and stared down inside—completely empty aside from roaches and dark-colored goo.
“All right, Wade. What do we have from a woman named Grace Mercer?”
I let the dumpster lid slam and walked farther down the alley. Steve was continuing with his dumpster search forty yards ahead.
“We have a ton of stuff from her. Actually she was the last person to message him. Do you want an account of the calls, texts, instant messages, emails, or the nudes that she sent him?” Wade asked. “Or maybe the nudes that he sent her. Because we have all of that.”
“So there was definitely some kind of relationship going on there,” I said.
“The texts end with love you fairly often. Sounds like a relationship to me.”
“Okay. Anything in those call logs or text logs that looks interesting?”
“Yup. I guess first thing is, the guy, Ludwig, knew that this Grace Mercer was married. We actually have a decent amount of back-and-forth messages between the Mercer woman and Ludwig that mention her being married, her husband, etcetera. The topic of her getting a divorce came up fairly often. There’s also some mention of what Mercer’s husband would do if she asked for a divorce and what he would do if he found out she was having an affair.”
“Those would fall in line with what a cheating woman would talk to her boyfriend about,” I said. “Is there anything from last night around midnight? That’s around the time that we think Ludwig was killed.” I walked to another dumpster behind an open area, strewn with garbage, that was separated from the alley by a half-fallen-over fence.
“Gomez gave me the estimated TOD and told me to keep eyes open for anything around that time. Well, we have a total of seven messages after twelve. All were from Grace Mercer to Nick Ludwig. We also have a couple of phone calls that came in this morning.”
“Read the messages to me,” I said.
“I will. First, though, let me say that none of these were responded to.”
“All right,” I said. I raised a dumpster lid and found nothing but some old boxes and a children’s bike, which I thought odd. There was no purse, and nothing that looked like it had anything to do with our woman. I let the lid drop. The next set of dumpsters on my side was almost a block away. Steve was crossing the alley ahead of me and walking to them, so I turned around and started back to the scene.
Wade continued. “The first message says, ‘Sorry I had to run. It won’t be like this forever.’”
“Are these starting from midnight and going on?” I asked.
“Yup. That one was at twelve ten. The second message, at twelve seventeen, said, ‘I’m not sure if I’ll beat him home, so we may be together sooner than planned.’ The third message said, ‘I beat him. I love you. I’ll see you tomorrow.’ That third one was right around twelve thirty.”
“All right.”
“At one fifteen, there was a message that said, ‘He never came home,’” Wade said. “At two in the morning, she wrote, ‘He still isn’t here, and you still don’t want to talk to me. You must be asleep. Sweet dreams.’ The rest of the messages are from this morning. We had a single question mark that got sent a few minutes after eight as the sixth message. Then at eight twenty-five, she wrote, ‘I hope everything is okay. I’m going to leave in about ten minutes. I’ll call you as soon as I’m on my way to work.’”
“So from what we can tell, she was either under th
e impression that he was still alive or was sending the string of texts to cover her tracks in the case that she was the one who did it,” I said.
“That’s what it seems like. That and her husband seemed to be missing or not coming home or whatever.”
Another thought had dawned on me. She’d sent a text saying that she would be on her way to work, and she most certainly wasn’t there. From what we were told, she hadn’t shown up at all. “Hmm,” I said. I’d gotten back to the coroner’s van and leaned against the front bumper.
“Something strike a thought?” Wade asked.
“You said you had a couple calls as well. Does the call from her show up in his phone log? The one from this morning that she mentions in the text?”
“Nah, no call from her. The only incoming calls he had this morning were two from a local number. They called twice. And one from an out-of-state number. We ran those. The two local calls are from a sporting goods store, and the out-of-state call comes back to a Delores Ludwig. The origination was Colorado. It was his mother.”
I let out a big breath. The plot thickened. “Whatever report you’re putting together there, toss it on my desk in my office. I should be back at the station in an hour or two.”
“You got it. We’re going to put in for the actual phone records from the carrier as well. You never know, there could have been some correspondences that were deleted.”
“Got it,” I said. “I’ll check in with you later if I have any questions on the report.”
“Sounds good,” Wade said.
“All right. Talk to you later.”
“Yup.”
I clicked off from the call.
Steve, still on the phone, headed back in my direction. He took the phone from his ear and dumped it back into his pocket at twenty feet away. “Anything?” he asked.
“Yeah, you?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
CHAPTER 14
We’d gathered in the big conference room, having called for a meeting as soon as everyone was back at the office. I wanted to get the team together, on the same page, and get a course of action. The meeting would consist of Colt from the crime lab, Wade from Tech, Captain Halloway, myself, and the rest of the team—Steve, Garcia, and Ryan.
I sat at the middle of the large walnut conference table that took up the center of the room. My back was to the room’s rear wall, which held a bunch of blank whiteboards. The captain stood near the doorway and glass front wall of the conference room. He worked a single-serve coffee machine. Ryan and Garcia were sitting across from me. Colt and Wade had walked in and taken seats at the far end of the table.
Lieutenant Dave Ramirez, our night shift lead, walked in and closed the door behind him. Dave was a few inches under six foot and slim. We’d asked him to come in so the night team could pick up the investigation where we left off for the day.
“Is everyone here?” Captain Halloway asked. He walked from the coffee machine and took a seat at the table. The rest of the team—aside from Dave, who’d just walked in—had already taken seats.
“Looks like it,” I said. I turned my attention to Dave, who was pulling out a chair at the far side of the conference table. “I gave you the highlights of what we have going on here, but if you have any questions, toss them out there and we’ll get them answered as we go.”
“Sure,” Dave said. He sat, leaned back, and put a foot up over his other knee.
“Okay. Where are we with hard evidence?” Halloway asked. He looked at Colt.
Colt stared at a couple of sheets of paper in front of him on the table. “No prints at the murder scene match anything in IAFIS. We’ll have to get the prints on Mr. Ludwig from Skip and cross-reference them for a match. We did get another set of prints from the place, female by the size. They were everywhere. Master bedroom, wineglass in living room, kitchen, bathrooms, everywhere. The thinking is that they belong to Mrs. Grace Mercer. Yet without her prints to check against, we can’t say that for certain.”
“The blood?” I asked.
“I wouldn’t hold my breath there,” Colt said. “We have a couple of drips that are spread out from the sidewalk up toward the front door. Those are the ones that we believe to be from our attacker. We have samples, but until we have a suspect to check them against, it’s pretty much useless.”
Captain Halloway cleared his throat. “All right, so we’ll keep working, and if the science can confirm what we end up finding, great. No hits on any prints, though. Correct?”
“Nothing so far,” Colt said.
I looked over at Garcia and Ryan. “Steve said you talked to a couple people at Ludwig’s store?”
“Yeah,” Garcia said. “He left work at three o’clock yesterday afternoon. He was scheduled today at nine. Obviously, he didn’t show.”
“What about coworkers?” I asked. “Did anyone know what his day-to-day was like? Who he spent time with? Friends? Where he went outside of work?”
“It didn’t seem like he had many relationships outside of work with anyone other than the operations manager,” Garcia said.
“And their relationship was of the ‘out for beers after work’ variety,” Ryan added. He made air quotes with the comment. “The last time they went out for beers was a week or so ago. Beer and wings at the Wingstop, the chain wings-and-sports-bar place.”
“I’m familiar,” I said. “What else did this guy say? What was his name?”
“The operations manager’s name is Jason Hough. He basically said that he knew Ludwig was having some kind of relationship with a married woman that he’d met at the store.”
“She was a customer?” Steve asked.
“I guess at one point,” Garcia said. “This Hough guy said Ludwig had been seeing her for the better part of the last year.”
“Okay. So that’s all we found out from his workplace? He met her at the sporting goods store and had been seeing her for almost a year?” I asked
“That was really about it,” Detective Ryan said. “I mean, some of the staff had mentioned things like he was kind of arrogant, wasn’t the easiest to work for, things like that. I don’t know. Nothing really important aside from the tidbit of relationship information.”
“All right,” I said. “We got some pretty intriguing information from Ludwig’s cell phone. Wade, why don’t you run through that with everyone.”
“Sure,” Wade said. He swiped his hand over his bald head, leaned forward over his notes, and went through the same highlights with the team that he and I had gone through.
“Let’s get that bullet pointed,” the captain said. “And let’s try to get it chronological.”
Halloway stood from his seat and scooped up a marker from a whiteboard tray.
The first thing he wrote was: Grace Mercer and Nick Ludwig were having an affair. Holloway followed with: Ludwig knew she was married.
“What else have we got?” he asked. “Before the killing.” He turned back toward the table.
“Chris Mercer was somewhere,” I said. “Out of town. She was leaving Ludwig’s to try to beat her husband home from wherever he was.”
“But we don’t know where he was,” the captain said.
I shook my head. “His employee said he was out of town on business. The ‘out of town where’ got answered with a shrug.”
“I could probably call over to the airport, talk to Mathers over there, and see if he was on a flight,” Ryan said.
“Okay. Do that when we wrap up here.”
“Sure,” Ryan said.
“Okay. So do we have any whereabouts of this husband?” Halloway asked.
“This morning. In his boxers and rubber gloves in the backyard,” I said.
“Um,” the captain said. “Okay, what time was that?”
I dug through my notes and found what the neighbor had said. “Nine or nine thirty.”
The captain moved one whiteboard over and jotted that down. “Nothing else before the killing?”
No one said anything.
“All right.” The captain wrote: Killing of Nick Ludwig at midnight. “Now what?” he asked.
“Unreturned text messages,” Wade said. “I have them in transcript here.” He tapped the papers in front of him.
“Grab a marker and write them over there.” Halloway jerked his head to a board on his left. “I want to have everything up here so we can all sit and look at it.”
Wade got up with his papers, grabbed a marker, and started.
The captain wrote: unreturned text messages.
“She said that she was going to call Ludwig in a text this morning. That was when?” I asked.
“Eight twenty-five,” Wade said. “She said she was going to call him in ten minutes.”
The captain wrote that down. “But she never called?”
“Correct,” Wade said.
Halloway wrote: she never called him at 8:35 a.m.
Wade finished writing the text messages and retook his seat.
“That it?” Halloway asked.
“Then neither reported to work when they were supposed to, or at least were expected to,” Steve said.
Halloway wrote: no-show to work. “Then what?” he asked.
“I think that’s about it,” I said. “Aside from Chris Mercer in his underwear outside, having words with the neighbor.”
“What was the problem?” Dave asked.
“That he was outside in his underwear. The neighbor asked him to put on some clothes if he was going to be standing outside. I guess Chris Mercer told him no but in not so nice words. The exact verbiage I never got,” I said.
“All right. So after nine thirty, roughly, we have no account of either Mercer?” Dave asked.
“Correct,” I said.
“Vehicles? At the house or no?” he asked.
“We couldn’t see in the garage. Unknown right now.” I stared at the boards from left to right. I read the text messages that Wade had jotted down. I read the bullet points that the captain had written. “We need a wellness check. We need to get inside of the house and see what the hell is going on.”
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