Time of Death

by Shirley Kennett

  Dawn.

  She was awake, watching him. “It’s half past five. In the afternoon.”

  Sunset, then.

  She cuddled next to him, and he noticed that she was naked, too. “Do I detect a certain naughtiness in your attire?” he asked.

  “You mean my lack of attire. Definitely naughty.” Her hand stroked him and very quickly, his erection tented the blanket.

  “Mmm,” she said, “looks like you’re up to the task.”

  “What task?”

  In answer, she put her leg over him and then sat up, straddling him. She slowly lowered her hips. He slid into her warm, moist embrace, and there were no words left to say.

  Chapter 41

  SCHULTZ WAITED IN HIS car while PJ went into a convenience store. They’d been heading to work when she’d spotted the store and asked him to pull in, saying she had to buy something that was none of his damn business. He knew enough to park and wait meekly in the car while she purchased whatever it was that women bought when they said things like that.

  PJ walked out the door, but stopped and started fiddling with something in her bag. Schultz had taken the opportunity to fill up his gas tank, and he was still parked at the pump when she came out. He heard the roar of an engine, tires squealing, clutch popping. Swiveling his head, he couldn’t spot the approaching vehicle, but he knew it was there. The sound was unmistakable.

  I’m gonna get some punk for dangerous driving.

  He turned the key and started the Pacer, while reaching for his radio. He was going to ask Dispatch to send a traffic cop. Schultz’s days of writing tickets were long gone, but a guy could still have a little fun.

  PJ stepped down off the curb into the parking lot. From out of nowhere, a black Blazer roared toward her.

  It was too late to get out of the car and knock her out of the way. He’d never make it in time. He honked the horn, and she looked at him and waved cheerfully.

  The Pacer was idling. He threw it into gear and lurched forward, leaving most of the car’s rubber on the pavement behind him. PJ finally noticed the Blazer, and leaped back on the sidewalk in front of the store. The car pursued her, swerving crazily and almost losing control, and ended up ready to ram her through the plate glass windows.

  The Pacer’s front bumper crashed into the passenger’s side of the Blazer. Both cars jumped the curb. The impact threw Schultz forward, but he’d only struck a glancing blow to the Blazer and he didn’t completely lose control of the Pacer. His seat belt, something PJ had recently talked him into wearing, bit painfully into his abdomen but kept him in place. The Blazer’s front end nosed into the window, and a shower of glass exploded into the store. The two vehicles came to rest.

  Schultz looked at the driver, who was wearing a ski mask. Their eyes met. He couldn’t make out anything, not the color of the eyes, nothing. The driver’s gaze held his for several seconds, then suddenly the Blazer was moving. It was in reverse, dropped roughly off the curb, and pulled away from the collision site. The driver yanked the wheel around and sped away, missing the rear end of the Pacer by inches.

  Schultz looked over at PJ. She must have tripped, because she was sprawled on the ground, the contents of her bag widely scattered. Two customers were on their way to help her, and the store clerk was in the doorway with a phone in his hand. Store customers were gathered around those who had been injured by flying glass. He hesitated, since procedure said his first duty was to protect and aid the injured, but there seemed to be plenty of help already at hand. PJ sat up, looked at him, and waved at him furiously to follow the Blazer.

  That’s my gal.

  He backed off the curb, hearing a scraping noise from the undercarriage, and maneuvered to the parking lot’s exit. There was a break in traffic, so he didn’t slow down. He threw the Pacer out onto Chouteau Avenue, turned sharply, and sent the rear wheels into a wide slide. He corrected for it and stepped on the gas. He could see the Blazer ahead of him, and strained to get a look at the license plates. He called for backup, describing both Blazer and situation, and tried to keep the fleeing car in view without doing anything to endanger other drivers. Schultz rumbled for the magnetic rotating beacon to slap onto the roof of his car, until he remembered it was on the floor in the back seat.

  A blue-and-white cruiser went by, its lightbar flashing. Schultz decided to leave the chase to the officers who had working lights and even a siren. He pulled over to the edge of the road. Still wired from the crash and the brief chase, he stepped out to inspect the damage to the front of the Pacer.

  The bumper was mangled. The front portion of the hood had accordioned inward, and would need bodywork and painting. Fleet Services would, no doubt, total the car. Then there was a clanging that sounded like the Pacer’s death knell. Leaning heavily with one hand above the wheel, breath pluming from his mouth, he bent over to see what the noise meant.

  His entire exhaust system, from manifold to muffler, was lying on the street. Using his cell, he phoned Dave for a ride and then reluctantly informed Fleet Services that he needed a tow. Using the radio in his car, he found out that PJ had a skinned knee from her fall, was treated at the scene by a paramedic, and was on her way to Headquarters in a cruiser. Several people inside the convenience store had been hit with flying glass, none seriously injured. Another attempt on PJ’s life. He sure hoped the driver got caught. It had to be the same person who’d pushed her car into traffic.

  All in all, a crappy drive to work.

  PJ went into her office and locked the door. Nearly getting run over had shaken her more than she’d let on to the officers at the scene. The earlier incident of getting pushed into traffic was definitely not an accident, then. She had almost convinced herself that the car that did the pushing had some kind of mechanical problem, like a stuck gas pedal. That didn’t seem very likely now. There wouldn’t be two stuck gas pedals. Besides, she’d seen the Blazer change direction and come bearing down on her, something she’d surely be seeing again in nightmares.

  She thought about the suspects—persons of interest, really—one by one, and tried to imagine which of them was after her, and why. Something said to her during an interview, a careless remark, later regretted? Or perhaps she’d seen a clue and not recognized it, but whoever was after her assumed that she knew more than she did.

  She looked at her notes and tried to remember word-for-word what she’d been told. Closing her eyes, she replayed all the visits she’d made, trying to remember details of her surroundings. The only thing she came up with was seeing the garden cart in use at May’s house. That had given her ideas for a VR scenario, and led to the discovery of the cart with blood in it, blood that belonged to Arlan.

  The gardener! He knew I saw him working with the cart. If he was involved, he might have thought I saw something suspicious on it, like a bloodstain.

  She heard her doorknob jiggling.

  “Boss, you okay in there?” It was Anita’s voice.

  “Yes, I’ll get the door. Don’t know how that got locked.”

  In the office, Anita eyed PJ closely.

  “Nothing’s wrong, Anita. I’m fine except for my knee.” Her pant leg was torn and a little bloody, and inside was a neatly wrapped dressing put on by the ambulance attendant.

  Probably thinks I was in here crying.

  Before Anita could open her mouth to ask questions, PJ launched into her theory that the gardener was out to get her.

  “The first attempt happened within a couple of hours of me seeing the gardener using the cart,” PJ said. “Then the blood-stained cart is found and somebody tries to run me down.”

  “Sounds plausible,” Anita said. “I’ll get some background on the guy. Schultz already got a start on that, I think. I didn’t come in to talk about your recent brush with death, though, or even Schultz being an asshole, whining about his car.”

  That got a smile from PJ.

  “I came to inform you of two more homicides.”

  “Oh, God,” PJ said. “Th
is is a slaughter. We’ve got to find the killer.”

  “You haven’t even asked me if they’re connected yet.”

  “Well?”

  “Paired murders, like the teacher and her neighbor. This was a couple in Crestwood, off Sappington Road. Gregory and Cheryl Royalview. The wife was shot once in the head. Something interesting about her was that there was a condom in the trash, but the semen didn’t belong to her husband. We’ll be checking for a match in CODIS. The husband was mutilated, then stabbed about a dozen times in places that didn’t kill him immediately. He bled out. He was awake for it, the ME says. At least until he went into deep shock. The killer got control initially using a taser gun. Think our killer has turned to rape, too?”

  PJ puzzled over it for a minute. “It doesn’t seem to fit, but this case already has so many weird elements, who knows?”

  “There’s a fine answer from the shrink,” Anita said. “I could’ve made that pronouncement.”

  “There you go,” PJ said. “You’ve found a new calling. I’m saying it doesn’t make sense that a killer who’s been so careful about leaving forensic evidence would suddenly leave the mother lode, his semen.”

  Anita nodded. “Eventually even the most careful slip up, especially where sex is concerned. It would be great, wouldn’t it?”

  It occurred to PJ that they were talking about the rape and murder of a woman as “great.” She winced, but had to admit it would be a break in an otherwise luckless case.

  “Crestwood, that’s South County, isn’t it? Blows the dual comfort zone theory for downtown and North County.”

  Getting news second-hand didn’t seem so bad when the deliverer was Anita. She had an open attitude and fully included PJ in every discussion.

  At least the discussions I know about.

  “So that means the sociopath is out?” Anita said.

  “No,” PJ said. “It could be someone who just defies profiling. As helpful as the techniques are, sometimes you just have to wing it. We could be dealing with other types of mental problems, such as a dissociative disorder resulting from early childhood trauma. Another possibility would be schizophrenia, which commonly shows up in the late teens or early twenties, and can have a genetic component. Both of those can involve violent behavior. Who found the bodies?”

  “Greg’s parents. By then the couple had been dead about a day.”

  “My heart goes out to them.”

  A child’s death. Any child’s death is an unimaginable thing. It must shatter a parent’s life. Her thoughts tried to turn to Thomas’s experience, to imagine all the ways that her son could have been hurt, all the ways that the episode could have ended tragically, but she firmly kept her focus on work. Time for that later.

  “Do I need to go out there?” PJ asked.

  Anita shook her head. “The Crestwood PD’s on it and you can see the crime scene pics and autopsy information. Unless you’re really eager to go, in which case I can give you a ride.”

  “I’d like to see my son and then get some rest. It’s been a wild twenty-four hours.”

  “Go, Boss. Give Thomas a hug for me.”

  “He’s not much into hugs these days. But I’ll tell him you were thinking of him.”

  After Anita left, PJ worked a little longer in her office, hoping Schultz would show up and announce that he’d been assigned a new vehicle. With both of them lacking transportation, it was going to be hard getting around. In the morning, she’d rent a car.

  Should have done that already. What was I thinking? I can’t tie Shultz down ferrying me around.

  She considered starting the development of a new scenario, Shower Woman’s, and see if she could get some insight from that. The murder of June’s look-alike might have information the team hadn’t wrung out of it yet.

  She was drained, though, emotionally and physically. There was no way she was going to make any significant progress tonight on something that required an ounce of creativity. PJ left a message on Schultz’s voice mail, called a cab, and went to Lilly’s house.

  She woke Thomas up, even though it was eleven o’clock on a Thursday night and he had to go to school in the morning. Lilly fixed them both hot chocolate and left them alone in the kitchen. PJ had a long talk with her son about gronz_eye and didn’t play down the attack at her house. He needed to know it all, and they talked like a couple of adults. She shared her concerns about someone being out to get her because of her current case, and told him how much she missed him. He accepted it all, but seemed saddened by it, and the attacks on her. For the umpteenth time, she wondered if she was doing the right thing having a job like hers and trying to raise her son. She was thinking of some way to broach this subject with him when he asked about the amount of damage she’d done to his Millennium Falcon model.

  She left for home, traveling in another cab, the idea of walking the twelve blocks seeming about as possible to her as walking to Mars. At home, she climbed the stairs, her skinned knee stiff but her bruises, miraculously, beginning to feel better. She fell asleep clutching Schultz’s pillow and smelling onions.

  Chapter 42

  EARLY FRIDAY MORNING, ANITA came by and whisked PJ off to a low-priced car rental company downtown. She wheedled her way into a rental only days before Christmas, and came out with the keys to a new Ford Focus in Sangria Red. Awed by the array of goodies on the dash, she pushed buttons, slid levers, and turned dials until she was familiar with the controls. Mirrors adjusted, she ventured into downtown traffic, wishing she had a CD handy to try out the player. All that was missing was the new car smell.

  PJ felt a lot better this morning and ready to tackle two projects at work. One was the Shower Woman scenario, and the other was contacting Jasmine Singer, the maternal aunt of May and June. She was also expecting some progress reports today on an assortment of other interviews that had been done by Dave and Anita. Busy women don’t have time to reflect on things like black cars bearing down or deadly, six-foot insects in the house.

  She stopped at a bakery and bought two dozen doughnuts with red and green sprinkles for Christmas. At Headquarters, she had plenty of offers to help carry in the boxes, but graciously declined them all because she didn’t want to pay off the helper in goods. Her team converged on her office and swarmed over the doughnuts.

  “Hey, leave me some of those,” she said. “At least one.”

  “Make some more coffee, will you?” Anita said.

  PJ sighed and did as she was told. “Ready to get down to business now?”

  “Sure, Boss,” Dave said. “We’ve finally worked our way through the list of attendees at May’s open house who might have planted the bloody knife. We had to make phone calls to Europe and Australia to do it. Some of those people don’t believe in ‘home for the holidays.’ ”

  “Let’s hear the abbreviated version without the travelogue,” Schultz said. He was using a napkin to catch the doughnut sprinkles, and doing a very poor job of it.

  “We didn’t come up with any leads. Nobody there saw anything suspicious. Background work on all the attendees didn’t come up with anyone with a connection to Arlan, other than the people we already know about,” Dave said.

  “People like May and Frank,” PJ said. He nodded.

  “I’ve been talking to friends of May, June, and Fredericka, plus the victims’ friends,” Anita said. “All three of the women seem to have a lot of acquaintances but no best friends. There was a general consensus that Fredericka was having an affair with Arlan, but little else. None of these women opened up to anybody.”

  “How about friends of Frank? He hasn’t been ruled out as Arlan’s killer.”

  Anita looked at her notes. “A tough but fair businessman, a good father, a man with a lot of outside interests like music and art. He was the type who could have gotten very upset if Arlan was pressuring him into something illegal. He was a real straight arrow.”

  “Except that he was engaged to June before he married May,” Dave said. “That’s a weird t
riangle if you ask me.”

  “Maybe he was still screwing June, and her husband found out about it,” Schultz said. “Could be blackmail. Arlan was trying to raise money for his pet project in Chicago. Maybe he saw a bundle of it because his wife spread her legs for her former fiancé.”

  “As kinky as Arlan was, I wouldn’t be surprised if he liked that idea. Probably had a photo album of it he secretly collected,” Dave said.

  “Our cup runneth over with motives,” PJ said.

  “Next up, the Chicago businessmen,” Dave said. “It’s rough getting anybody to say anything, but from what I can gather from second and third hand sources, the guys were ticked off but not riled up. They just wrote Arlan off as a loser and moved on to the next project. Never thought much of him in the first place and didn’t have high expectations.”

  “Okay, we’ll scratch them for now,” PJ said. “What about the tenants’ association that was angry with Frank?”

  Dave shook his head. “Tempest in a teacup. The tenants won. Frank had already backed off. They had no reason to kill him. With him dead, someone even worse might take over ownership of the building.”

  “My favorite guy is next,” Schultz said. “Thul Volmann, the interior designer trashed by Frank. Still an open situation there. Volmann had hired an attorney and filed a defamation of character lawsuit. I spoke to the attorney, and he seemed to have Frank dead to rights. All Volmann had to do was let justice be done, but he may have figured monetary compensation wouldn’t undo the damage to his reputation. People who work for Volmann say he’s vain, dictatorial, and has a quick, vicious temper. Makes you wonder why they work for him. Anyway, I’d move him up a notch in consideration for Frank’s murder. Connection to the other homicides seems nil.”

  PJ explained her theory about the gardener trying to kill her because she linked him with the cart.

  Schultz shook his head. “I thought there was something to it because this Jimmy Drummond, the gardener, worked for a landscaping company run by Arlan. I found the guy and sweated him a little. Not only is he Mr. Upright College Student, but he’s got alibis for the times that PJ was attacked, and they checked out.”