“Get back to the ‘Stepford’ house. There’s got to be something going on there that wasn’t obvious on the surface.”
“Better yet, I think we need to bring them in,” Ruben said. “Put some pressure on them.”
Plus he just liked having them under his control. Having everything recorded for future reference and as evidence. Something a suspect tells you in their living room seldom held up in court.
Nicole shook her head. “I think it would be better in the home. Their guard will be down there.”
Ruben clenched his teeth. That was Kent talking through Nicole.
“Captain?”
“I agree with Torres. Get them in here.”
Nicole lowered her head in acceptance, but Ruben knew that she chafed at the captain overriding her. However, she would never outwardly register that complaint.
Maybe through sheer time and effort they could retrain Nicole to think like a cop, rather than an inflated-ego profiler.
* * *
Nicole knew the game being played here. Ruben and Glick were on the same page regarding “by-the-book” police work. They didn’t like it when she went off the reservation, even if it got results.
Her phone vibrated. She glanced to the screen. It was Kent. She had been feeding him the information as it filtered in. “The kids are your way in.”
“Fine, we’ll bring them in,” Nicole said. Two could play at this game. “But I want us to be the ones to pick them up at their home.”
Ruben shrugged as Glick nodded. “Fine. Just be sure to get all of the interviews on tape.”
It didn’t take them long to get to the Ashes’ home. Not when she made every light between the station and their destination. Nicole walked into the Ashes’ home. It smelled of grief. The dishes were unwashed, laundry was lying about. Clearly, no one in the house had showered since they heard the news. It did not result in a pleasant smell.
“I’m not sure why we need to go to the station,” Mr. Ash stated. “We’ve told you everything we know.”
“It’s just routine,” Nicole said. “We need to know as much about Megan as possible, and you knew her best.
“Well it is a good thing we already had a babysitter lined up to go look at caskets,” Mr. Ash stated, handing a package to the teenage girl. “Run these up to the boys. Johnny said they needed batteries for their Gameboy.”
The girl took the package and headed up the stairs. Mrs. Ash came from the kitchen, her eyes swollen and the skin under them looking nearly bruised. “We won’t be long? I want to get the boys to bed early tonight.”
“No longer than an hour or so,” Ruben explained.
An upstairs door opened and a young boy’s voice called out. “Thanks, ‘D!’ You’re a life saver.”
Both Nicole and Ruben’s necks snapped around as Mr. Ash smiled and yelled back. “No problem.”
“D?” Nicole asked.
Seeming not to know the hole he was digging himself in, Mr. Ash nodded. “It’s the kid’s nickname for me.”
Ruben looked to Mrs. Ash. “We might be a little longer than I first guessed.”
* * *
Ruben sat with his chair pushed back and his hands crossed over his midriff, glaring at Mr. Ash. Nicole stood behind the man, her turn to be the pressure point.
“I don’t… I don’t understand why you would accuse me of such horrible things.”
They had tried to break him with verbal pressure alone. The father had been adamant he hadn’t done anything wrong. They usually were.
Ruben pulled out the diary from an evidence bag. “Then explain this.”
Mr. Ash put a hand out to look at it, then drew back. He didn’t want to see what was in there. Ruben shoved it to him, clicking open the metal lock. He split the cover to open the diary up to a page.
“You say you didn’t hurt your daughter? How about you read that page then tell me how innocent you are.”
The man’s eyes scanned the page. His face screwed up, distorting his features, and then his eyes filled with tears which splashed down on the page. Nicole leaned over him.
“Well? What do you have to say now?”
“I don’t believe it,” Mr. Ash said, shoving the diary away. “We loved each other.”
* * *
“Define ‘loved’ for me,” Nicole asked.
The man’s stance changed from sorrow to fury. “We shared everything!” he shouted.
“Define ‘everything,’” Nicole pressed.
“But she wanted me to do it. She enjoyed it,” Mr. Ash insisted. “These are lies.”
Ruben pushed the diary back at him, flipping through the pages. “Really? Hundreds of pages in your daughter’s handwriting, talking about how violated she felt. How you marred her?”
“A father is supposed to teach his daughter things,” Mr. Ash tried to explain. “How to ride her first bike. Why not bring her to her first orgasm? You can’t see the beauty in that?”
Disgusted, Nicole pushed off the table. “No. No, I can’t.”
“Why did you kill her? Was she going to tell her boyfriend?” Ruben asked.
“I didn’t kill her!” Mr. Ash screamed. “I loved her!”
“Yeah, we got that,” Nicole said. “But then how did she end up dead?”
“I don’t know!” Mr. Ash insisted.
Nicole was going to push, but a knock came at the door and Captain Glick peeked his head in. “A word.”
* * *
Ruben exited the interrogation room with Nicole.
“The wife has lawyered up for both of them,” Glick explained.
Nicole kicked at the floor, scuffing her shoe. “At least we’ve gotten him admitting to molesting his daughter.”
“Not so fast,” Glick said. “She was of age, and without a complainant and with no penetration, that is going to be hard to make stick.”
“We’ve got the diary,” Ruben said.
“Hearsay,” Glick said. “And no way to authenticate it.”
“We can’t let him get away with this,” Nicole said. “He’s a medical laboratory tech. He has access to chemicals and poisons.”
“Unless we can put those in his hands, I’m not sure what use that knowledge does us. We are just going to have to wait for the expanded tox screen to come back and to find out what was under her fingernails.”
“This should be enough to get DFCS involved. Get those boys out of there.”
Glick nodded. “Yes, their threshold of involvement only need to be suspicion, it doesn’t require the “shadow of a doubt” standard.”
Ruben breathed a sigh of relief that those poor kids weren’t going to be in that twisted house any more. “I would like to be there when they are removed from the home.”
Nicole nodded. “And we’ve got to interview them.”
“Don’t you think they’ve been through enough?” Glick asked.
“They know something. Kids are so much more perceptive then we give them credit for.”
“Just make sure that there is a lawyer and child advocate in the room with you.”
“Of course,” Nicole agreed.
Ruben looked through the one-way glass to Mr. Ash, who had picked up the diary and now clutched it to his chest.
That was one sick bastard.
* * *
Nicole sat on one of the kid’s chairs as Johnny and Tommy colored in some Hot Wheels pictures. She’d learned from Kent to get down on the kid’s level and not rush them. No matter how she wanted to press, she had to let them come to her.
“So you guys like cars, huh?”
“I’m going to be a race car driver when I grow up!” Tommy exclaimed.
“Not unless you can stop crashing on the Gameboy,” Johnny chastised.
Nicole had to resist the urge to just ask her questions outright. Usually in an interrogation you went for the jugular, hammering suspects with questions to keep them off balance and make it difficult to remember their lies.
If Kent was right, it turned
out that children wanted to tell the truth. You just had to give them the opportunity to do so.
“So your dad spent a lot of time with Megan?” Nicole asked, trying to keep the subject as non-offensive as she could.
Johnny shrugged, but he dug his crayon into the paper. “Yeah.”
“In her bedroom?” Nicole prompted, needing to get to the bottom of things without scaring them off.
It was Tommy who answered this time. However, he seemed oblivious to the undercurrents of what he said. “Yeah, it was ‘father-daughter’ stuff.”
Nicole looked to Johnny, who refused to meet her eye. “Do any of your other friends’ dads spend so much father-daughter time together?”
He just shook his head, still avoiding eye contact.
“Does he spend special father-son time with you two?” Nicole asked.
“No!” Johnny barked. “Never.”
“Okay, okay,” Nicole said, her hands up in retreat. She’d hit a nerve. Which confirmed the fact that Johnny was aware that his father’s attentions were not a good thing, but she couldn’t spook the kids. Who knew what else about the family dynamic he knew?
“And what about your mom? Did she spend any extra time with Megan?”
Tommy snorted. “Are you kidding me? The Witch doing anything fun?”
“The Witch?”
“That’s what we call Mom, only we usually say ‘W,’” Johnny explained. “She thinks it’s for Juanita.”
“But really it’s for Witch.” Tommy chuckled at the family joke.
Although it was no joke. Nicole looked through to one-way glass. Ruben was on the other side. Now they knew the “W” that Megan wanted away from. Rightfully so.
“Okay, thanks,” Nicole said. “You’ve been really helpful.” She turned to the children’s guardian. “You can take them now.”
“What’s going to happen to Mom and Dad?” Johnny asked.
“I’m not sure, but we need to get you somewhere safe until we figure it out.”
“Can Aunt Maddie come and get us?” Johnny asked.
The guardian nodded. “She’s been contacted. She is flying in from New Mexico.”
Nicole tousled Johnny’s hair. “See, she’ll be here by this afternoon.”
The boy gave a strained grin, but Tommy whooped. “Yes, that means ice cream sundaes!”
Nicole was glad to see one of them was happy. It was always tough taking kids into custody. You needed to get them out of a dangerous situation, but foster care could be fraught with its own dangers. Nicole was glad that a family member was coming to get them. Although, with this family tree, Nicole was a bit suspicious of Maddie. Could the sister of the man molesting his own daughter and thinking he was doing her a favor really be completely sane?
But she didn’t want to dampen Tommy’s enthusiasm and Johnny’s constrained optimism.
“I’m sure that can be arranged,” Nicole said, watching them leave with the caregiver.
Ruben opened the door. “We’ve got our ‘W’ in interrogation room 1.”
Nicole took a deep breath. Inter-family crimes were, at times, the hardest to prove.
Glick followed Ruben in. “The lab results just came back. The substance under Megan’s fingernails and on her sheets was prostatic fluid.”
“Prostatic what?” Ruben asked.
“It is the fluid that the prostate creates,” Nicole said. “Usually, you only see it in pre-ejaculate, though.”
The Captain nodded. “We’ve got a subpoena to collect Mr. Ash’s fluids for comparison.”
“And how exactly are they going to collect those?” Ruben asked.
“Look, there are some things in this job I need to know,” Glick said. “This is not one of them.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Nicole said. “As long as it proves Mr. Ash was in Megan’s bed. It corroborates Megan’s journal and his own confession,”
“Well, there’s a problem with that,” Glick said. “Turns out Mr. Ash was on anti-psychotics, surprise, surprise, which he stopped taking when he found out Megan was dead. His attorney is stating his client wasn’t in his right mind when he talked to you. He is petitioning the court to get it thrown out.”
“Whoa,” Nicole said. “He was perfectly lucid when we talked to him.”
“Did you ask him if he was on any meds?” Glick asked.
“No,” Ruben said. “It isn’t part of our SOP.”
“Well, it may have to be now. This is the second confession invalidated due to missed medication.”
Nicole loved the justice system, but sometimes, just sometimes, it was idiotic. If someone confesses to something that they actually did, what did it matter what meds they were on?
“So, we really need a confession out of the mother,” Glick stated. “She’s clean of meds.”
Nicole nodded. Although getting a woman living with a child molester for decades was going to take some work. Plus, it didn’t exactly make any sense that she would kill Megan. Usually, if a mother finds out her husband is committing incest, she kills the husband. Not the daughter.
Nicole had her work cut out for her.
* * *
Ruben stood outside the interrogation room watching Nicole question Mrs. Ash. She had been at it for over an hour. The woman refused to budge off her story that they had a perfect family. She shrugged off the diary. She didn’t care what her husband confessed to. Her lawyer had very little to say, given how vigorously Mrs. Ash defended herself and her family.
Glick entered from the squad room, voices and chatter floating in with him. “Tox just came back. Lead poisoning. They found it in Megan’s cereal, as well.”
“Like Nicole said, poisoning is a woman’s tool.”
Ruben texted Nicole the information. She pulled out her phone, read it, and then typed something, but it wasn’t back to him. Probably forwarding the information to Kent. How he could help in this from thousands of miles away, Ruben wasn’t sure, but that wasn’t going to stop Nicole from having faith in the profiler.
“Any match on the prostatic fluid?” Ruben asked.
Glick shook his head. “I guess they are having some problem.”
“Like what?” Ruben asked.
“I don’t know,” Glick said. “Joshua just sent me a bunch of frowny face emoticons.”
Yep, that sounded like Joshua.
Ruben watched through the glass as Nicole leaned back and folded her arms over her chest. Not a good sign. Knowing that the murder weapon was lead was of no real help. Or even the fact that it was in Megan’s cereal. Of course Mrs. Ash’s prints would be all over the box. She was the one who served breakfast. Unless they found a container of lead powder in Mrs. Ash’s house with her and only her fingerprints, they couldn’t prove anything. And, looking at the shrewd woman, Ruben doubted very much they would get so lucky.
It was down to Nicole, but at the moment, it looked like the momentum was in Mrs. Ash’s direction. She was leaning forward, her finger tapping the metal desk to make her points.
They had already gone through the mantra of suspects. “How dare you accuse me?” “How could you ask me these questions when my daughter’s body isn’t even cold?” “I am going to sue the department.” “If anything happens to my children while in your care, I’m going to kill you.”
All the normal stuff. Self-righteous indignation pretty much ruled the day.
* * *
Nicole felt like she was stuck in a room with a broken record. Mrs. Ash had denied any involvement in every possible way, giving alibis when none were needed. Her lawyer had tried to shut her up several times, but clearly Mrs. Ash was used to running the show.
She had hoped the woman would run off at the mouth, but so far, Mrs. Ash had stuck to her story, however lame the denial may have sounded.
Nicole’s phone vibrated at her hip. It was a call, though, not a text. She ignored it. It would roll over to voice mail. Sure enough, a few seconds later her phone pinged, indicating that there was a message waiting. Then
the phone rang again.
If it were an emergency, Ruben would just walk in the door, which pretty much left only one other person to phone urgently.
“Sorry, I need to get this,” Nicole said, grabbing her phone. Sure enough, “unknown caller.” She answered it. “Hello?”
“Stalemated, I take it?” Kent’s smooth voice asked.
“You could say that,” Nicole said, smiling at Mrs. Ash’s lawyer. It was very poor interrogation form to take a call.
“Pretend to hang up but leave the phone on the desk so I can hear.”
“Okay, goodbye then,” Nicole said, setting the phone down and turning off the screen but leaving the call intact.
“You know after this, you really are going to have to admit how much you need me,” Kent said.
Of course, Nicole couldn’t answer him, and keep their cover up.
“We need to strike at the heart of the motive,” Kent explained. “So repeat everything I say.”
Nicole’s skin crawled with gooseflesh. There was something so wrong and yet so provocative when she was the one to act out Kent’s mental traps.
“How did it feel?” Kent asked. Nicole repeated the question to Mrs. Ash.
“What feel?” the woman responded, perhaps for the first time slightly off balance. That was how fast Kent worked.
“To have your husband spend his nights in Megan’s bed. Did your sheets get cold?” Kent coyly asked in her ear.
Nicole tried to convey the same oily quality to her voice.
“I have no idea what you are talking about,” Mrs. Ash contended, but Nicole noticed that the woman pushed off away from the table. As Kent would say, distancing herself from the truth.
“How did it feel to know that your husband preferred your daughter over you?” Kent demanded. Nicole echoed the words.
“She was young and hot. And what were you? A shriveled up old woman?”
Mrs. Ash’s cheeks blotched with color and her fingers balled up into a fist.
Nicole took it from here without Kent’s help.
“Do you know what that ‘W’ stands for? It isn’t for Juanita, it’s for Witch. That’s what your boys call you every day. Even your boys hate you. They use ‘D’ for Dad, but ‘W’ for you.”
The Harbinger Collection: Hard-boiled Mysteries Not for the Faint of Heart (A McCray Crime Collection) Page 35