Pilgrim almost said, But no problem screwing your boyfriend on it. Luckily he stopped himself.
“One more question,” he said, “then I think I can have Chief Benson close this case and remove the couch.”
She nodded, clearly relieved.
“What was the name of your boyfriend?”
“I don’t see how that would matter?”
Pilgrim smiled. “Just making sure all the details are in order is all.”
“Craig Marshal,” she said. “Craig S. Marshal. He was a graduate student at Northwestern. I never talked to him again, either.”
“Got it, on it,” Carrie said in his ear.
Pilgrim nodded and turned for the door. “This should be over shortly, Mrs. Bluehaven.”
As he stepped back into the heat of the front yard and she closed the door solidly behind him, he had a hunch this was far from over.
And his little voice on cases was seldom wrong. Carrie just might be right. This might end up being one for the book.
Four
He nodded to Officer Dennis and headed for the limo with only one more look at the couch as he went past. The heat actually felt good after being with that woman. She was one cold human.
But on the other hand, the couch was starting to get a real smell to it. And not a good one. He knew that smell anywhere. Something inside that couch was very, very dead. And the hot sun was not helping the issue at all.
As he climbed into the limo, Carrie was working the computer station on the right side. It had two large screens that dropped down from the ceiling and a full desk and keyboard that slid out from under the wet bar. Her fingers were flying over the keys while at the same time she was talking into a headset to someone, more than likely an assistant at the office.
From their car they could get just about any information they wanted. He had had it outfitted better than most offices. And both he and Carrie were damn good at hacking into places they shouldn’t be hacking into. He just didn’t allow them to do it without darned good reason.
After a moment she finished her conversation, thanked the person on the other end, and turned to him.
“The boyfriend vanished completely on October 4th, 1984,” Carrie said, confirming what Pilgrim had feared had happened. “No sign of him was ever found.”
“I have a pretty solid hunch where we are going to find him,” Pilgrim said. “Did our couch-sender actually die?”
“Yes,” she said. “Liver cancer from a lifetime of hard drinking. The couch was removed already wrapped as per instructions from the garage of the home and delivered as instructed. His death triggered the automatic pick-up and a neighbor let the movers into the garage. He has no executor. And no family as far as I can find. And not much of an estate beside the house.”
“Great work,” Pilgrim said, taking his phone and dialing the private line to Chief Benson.
“You think we have a body?”
“The smell in the sunshine around that couch isn’t getting any better,” he said.
“The husband killed the boyfriend?” Carrie asked.
Pilgrim could only shrug as Chief Benson came on the line, but for some reason Pilgrim doubted that the husband had done it. He had no proof either way, or even a body yet, actually, but there would be shortly. That sun and heat on the couch was going to make it perfectly clear very quickly where the body was located.
Pilgrim told the chief about his suspicions that the couch was an actual crime scene. “A very cold case crime scene,” he said, “that is heating up by the moment.”
“Why the hell do you always do this to me?” Benson asked.
“You keep calling me,” Pilgrim said before the chief could hang up.
Carrie just shook her head at his lame joke.
Pilgrim had Carrie move the limo down the street and out of the way before the excitement started.
Ten minutes later the rest of the police started arriving. A number of police took up stations around the entire house and in the back yard while others taped off the area around the couch, then slowly worked to figure out exactly what was in the couch before hauling the entire thing to the crime lab.
While they waited, both he and Carrie worked the computers and phones digging up every bit of information they could about the woman and the lost lover and the man who had sent the couch.
Pilgrim actually talked with three of Thomas’s friends and the bartender where Thomas liked to drink. Thomas only told the bartender that one day his wife had just left him for no reason. But all of his friends said that when she left he had never been the same. He hadn’t seemed to get over it even after twenty-plus years.
That fit her story.
But something still just didn’t feel right to Pilgrim.
At that moment Chief Benson knocked and opened the back door of the limo, crawling in with a sigh as the air-conditioning hit him. He was a stout man built like a longshoreman who always wore a tie and blue shirt and jacket. Even in the heat he hadn’t taken off the jacket.
“I got to get the city to spring for one of these,” Benson said, then laughed.
Carrie offered him a regular Pepsi in a can, the chief’s favorite, then went back to her computer search.
“Thanks,” he said, smiling at her. “Nice outfit.”
“Keep your eyes up,” she said without glancing at the chief.
Benson laughed and turned to Pilgrim. “So what more have you dug up?”
“I’m sure that the woman inside will want us to think that the sender of the couch murdered her boyfriend. She’s setting us up for that. Take a listen.”
He replayed his conversation with the woman for Benson.
“Wow, cold bitch,” Benson said when it was finished.
“With enough plastic surgery,” Pilgrim said, “to keep a doctor in new golf clubs for a long time.”
“Figures,” Benson said. “You ought to meet her husband. Short little guy who chases every skirt he sees. So what’s bothering you, Pilgrim?”
“That obvious?” Pilgrim asked.
Carrie snorted and kept her attention on the screen in front of her.
“Like an open book,” Benson said, taking more of his Pepsi.
“Well,” Pilgrim said, “first off, if Thomas had killed the boyfriend and hid his body in a wrapped-up couch, he never would have kept the couch this long. Too much risk.”
“True,” Benson said. “It would have ended up in a landfill a long, long time ago. You just don’t keep the evidence of a murder you committed in your own garage for decades.”
“Exactly,” Pilgrim said.
“But I have seen stranger things,” Benson said.
So had Pilgrim, but he kept going. “When she let me in she refused to even look at the couch on the lawn. Like she knew what was in it.”
“Not enough to even get a warrant, counselor,” Benson said.
Pilgrim suddenly had another idea. “Carrie, can you find what day the woman of the house flew from Chicago to Portland back in 1984? She said she went within a day or so, but I’m betting she hung around.”
Carrie nodded. “Good thinking.”
A moment later she said, “Got it. She left three weeks after the boyfriend vanished. Not the next day as she claimed.”
“So you think she killed the boyfriend and got the husband to help her cover it up?”
“More than likely,” Pilgrim said. “You just have to get the motive out of her. But either way she’s involved with a murder. It would take two people to move that couch into a garage and wrap it with plastic.”
“Looks like I had better go read someone her rights,” Benson said, “before she sneaks out the back door.”
“Take back-up,” Pilgrim said as he climbed out of the limo with the Benson.
“No worries there,” Benson said, laughing.
“Well,” Carrie said, climbing out of the limo to stand in the heat beside Pilgrim, “it seems like we solved The Case if the Intrusive Furniture.”
P
ilgrim nodded. “I think the sun and heat helped.”
“So what do you think actually happened?” Carrie asked.
“Not a clue,” Pilgrim said, “and I’m not sure anyone will ever know all the details with the former husband dead. He protected her and himself for a lot of years, even though he wanted to pay her back once he was gone.”
“You think he still loved her?”
“My guess is that he loved the idea of who she had been,” Pilgrim said.
“You know,” Carrie said, “it’s not often we solve a cold case.”
“Especially on such a hot day.”
Carrie just moaned and Pilgrim smiled.
He glanced around at the neighbors now starting to gather and watch from a distance behind the crime scene tape. “At least now the world is going to know what was really inside that pretend shell she’s kept up all these years. And that’s going to hurt her more than jail time.”
“So true,” Carrie said.
Up around the old couch the crime techs had started to work at the back, but Pilgrim had no doubt what they would find.
The entire neighborhood would remember this smell.
Afternoon summer heat and a body that had been wrapped in plastic for twenty-eight years just did not mix well.
About the Author
Bestselling author Dean Wesley Smith has written more than one hundred popular novels and hundreds of published short stories. His novels include the science fiction novel Laying the Music to Rest and the thriller The Hunted as D.W. Smith. With Kristine Kathryn Rusch, he is the coauthor of The Tenth Planet trilogy and The 10th Kingdom.
He writes under many pen names and has also ghosted for a number of top bestselling writers.
Dean has also written books and comics for all three major comic book companies, Marvel, DC, and Dark Horse, and has done scripts for Hollywood. One movie was actually made.
Over his career he has also been an editor and publisher, first at Pulphouse Publishing, then for VB Tech Journal, then for Pocket Books. He is now an executive editor for Fiction River.
Currently, he is writing thrillers and mystery novels under another name.
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