The Devil's Eye

by J. R. Rain

  Rick scratches at his beard. “I dunno. That girl was wound pretty tight. Domineering father like that? Kid could have snapped. Both kids.”

  “His grades weren’t good enough,” I say, running down the psychopath checklist. “And there’s no pattern of animal abuse, bedwetting, or fire-starting.”

  “Look at Mrs. Book Learning… someone’s been studying the Macdonald Triad.”

  I chuckle. No, I hadn’t been studying it, but all homicide investigators know the Triad―a basic test to determine predictive violent nature―like the back of our hands. I say, “Anyway, none of those kids have any of the markers.”

  “That girl would’ve peed her pants if we shouted at her.” Rick shakes his head. Bedwetting is, of course, one of the predictive factors associated with the Macdonald Triad.

  “Growing up, my friend Isabelle was like that around cops, too, for a while. We had a classmate in our freshman year of high school get walked out in cuffs. No one even thought Devon could break the law. He looked super clean-cut. Isabelle thought cops would just, I dunno, randomly show up and grab a kid. That whole year, she was terrified the police would take her away, too, and she’d never see her boyfriend, me, or her parents ever again.”

  “Wow. What’d the kid do?” asks Rick.

  “I dunno. No one ever told us. Rumor accused Devon of doing everything from robbing a place to stabbing a guy to stealing a car. He came back a month later and carried on like nothing happened. Couldn’t have been anything too bad. Probably nothing more than getting caught with weed or something.”

  “Bummer for Isabelle.”

  I resume driving as the light changes. “She got over it, but she used to freeze up around cops. We had a resource officer walk down the hall by us once, and she collapsed in a heap, sobbing, because he made eye contact. She thought he was coming for her.”

  “Oof.”

  “Of course, that reaction makes him walk over to check on her, and she almost had a legit panic attack.”

  “Poor girl,” says Rick, shaking his head. “Kids and their irrational fears.”

  “Well, he’s why she got over it. Once she realized his interest came from being worried about her panic attack, she felt dumb for thinking the police just showed up and grabbed kids out of the blue without reason. Not to mention, she’d seen something on the news about corrupt judges and prison for profit. Overactive imagination of a fourteen-year-old.”

  “Ugh.” He sputters air through his lips. “So, if Marco’s on the level, that means he saw two killers. Two men. You think some dude is missing a diamond earring?”

  Despite myself, I laugh. “Yeah, maybe.”

  Rick shakes his head. “Nope, I ain’t buying it. No way. That teeny little thing you found isn’t a ‘dude earring.’”

  “Oh?” I smirk at him. “What size of gem makes it officially a ‘dude earring’?”

  He shrugs. “Ever see those football players? Now those are dude earrings.”

  Another damn red light. Grr. I step on the brakes a little too hard, making Rick lurch forward and grab the console.

  “Easy. This thing’s a little more sensitive than that truck of yours.”

  “I know how to drive. I’m just pissed at the light.”

  “Red’s attracted to red.” He laughs at his own joke.

  For a moment, I thrum my fingers on the steering wheel. “Dr. Ferrante said Manning most likely drank the drug.”

  “You think the kids were involved since they were drinking?”

  “They were drinking two months ago,” I say in a voice part sigh. “The murder was last week. That’s hardly a connection.”

  “Feed a pigeon once. Anyway, where are you going with this?”

  “Manning was a willing participant, at least as far as drinking the GHB went. These two men… would’ve had to have been friends of his. Acquaintances, maybe.”

  “Or maybe the killers slipped it in his drink at a local bar.”

  “Maybe,” I say.

  I shake my head. My hair clip decides to break loose and make a run for it the instant the light goes green. Shit. Using one hand to keep my eyes clear, I drive across the intersection and take the next possible right turn into a strip mall parking lot with an IHOP. Once I park, I half-climb into the back seat in search of the runaway clip.

  “Is your hair trying to send us a message from the Goddess or is it trying to kill us?”

  “Hah.” I rummage a bunch of wadded-up papers and hamburger wrappers on the floor behind my seat. “Damn, when was the last time we cleaned this thing out?”

  “No idea.”

  My hand lost under trash, I get an idea. “Rick?”

  “Those jeans are rather tight, you know.”

  Giggling, I root around another few seconds until I find the clip, then pull myself back to sit up front. “Thank you for not slapping my ass.”

  “Oh, I was tempted… but I didn’t want to wake up as a toad.” He grins. “Besides, Erin would kill me.”

  “I got an idea.”

  “Toad?”

  “No, smartass. And, yes, she would kill you.” I gather my hair up, whisper an apology, and clip it off my face. “What are the chances that a full-grown man gets dosed with GHB at a bar?”

  Rick shrugs. “Hard to say. Someone sly enough could slip something in anyone’s drink, especially if it was a crowded bar. What are you getting at? I can see you don’t like my answer.”

  “What if Manning got dosed with GHB right at home?”

  “The office woman said he never had anyone over.”

  “That she saw.” I back out of the spot, change my mind, and pull in again. “We’re already at IHOP. Lunch?”

  He nods. “So what’s your idea?”

  “I want to check his place again, properly.”

  He whistles. “All right. Well, now we got something more to go on.”

  “Or because we’ve got nothing else to go on, so we have to rubber-glove the apartment.” I kill the engine. “Greer won’t mind the expense.”

  “Let’s hope.” He opens his door. “Better that than spending two weeks canvassing every bar within twenty miles to see if anyone remembers Manning.”

  “Look on the bright side,” I say, smiling.

  “There’s a bright side here?”

  “Yeah.” Rick flips his notebook closed. “We could be trying to track down the guy blowing up clowns.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Picking Trash

  Being the oddball I am, I get a spinach omelet for lunch. At IHOP.

  Rick teases me about it for most of the ride back to Manning’s apartment. Our debate on the cosmic wrongness of eating not only breakfast food at noon but eggs at a place that specializes in pancakes―“It’s right there in their name!” argues Rick―and general acceptable lunch protocols finally winds down as we pull up to the leasing office.

  My great idea to check the trash for beer cans laced with GHB is a long shot but hey, who knows. A forensics crew is on the way. I figure if nothing else, they can dust the place for prints and run around with Luminol to check for evidence of latent blood. Even if the killer mopped it up, invisible traces remain that will make the Luminol glow blue. Granted, other bodily fluids make it glow too. Yeah, kinda gross, but what are you gonna do?

  After securing the key from Lou, the property manager, Rick drives us around and parks in front of Manning’s door. The mailbox is overstuffed and a medium-sized package has been left leaning against the wall under it.

  I hop out and approach, sifting the pile of what turns out to be eighty-percent junk mail, the rest bills. The package has UPS markings and a return sticker indicating they could not deliver it due to a nonexistent address. I flip it over and something inside clinks like small marbles in a vase. Uh-oh. Guess it’s not only undeliverable, but smashed. It’s addressed from Walter Manning to a Julie Murphy, with an address in Tacoma. Huh. Odd. That isn’t too far away; wonder why Manning didn’t just drop it off himself.

&n
bsp; Rick opens the door and I follow him in carrying all the mail and the package, which I set on the kitchen table. An odd feeling of interest comes over me, and I don’t quite take my hands off the cardboard box. The same way I fixated on that mangled stomach, the UPS package inserts itself into my forebrain. I pull a set of blue latex gloves out of my pocket and put them on.

  Rick wanders the place, not touching anything. “They ought to be here soon.”

  “Yeah.” I push on the box until the tape separates from the lid flap. “Shame how roughly people handle packages sometimes, isn’t it?”

  “What’s that?” Rick pokes his head into the kitchen from the hall.

  “Oh, nothing. This returned package looks like it got kicked around enough to pop open… and break whatever is inside.” I lift the flap to expose newspaper used as packing material.

  Rick wanders over, now interested, and lifts the other side of the cardboard lid with one finger. He twists his head and body so that he can read the address sideways. “Any idea who Julie Murphy is?”

  “Possible lady friend?” I say, and unearth a nine-inch tall ceramic owl figurine, surprisingly intact. “Hmm. This is pretty.” When I tilt it around to examine, it continues making faint tinkling noises. Definitely not broken. “Oh, wait a minute.” My eyes widen and I stare at Rick.

  “What? You’re setting up for a lame owl joke, aren’t you?”

  I’m too lost in my thoughts… and the possibility of what just might be inside the ceramic owl to think of anything funny. Hands shaking, I turn the figurine upside down and locate a plastic plug on the bottom about the size of a nickel. It takes some doing, but with the help of a butter knife, I get it open. “Okay, let’s see what we got.”

  “You already know, don’t you?”

  “Maybe,” I say.

  Holding it low to the table, I upend the owl and cup my left hand behind it. Little by little, I lift the head end, as if pouring.

  Eight diamonds spill out onto the table and roll to a halt against my fingers. The smallest one is about twice the width of a pinhead, the biggest, pea-sized. A scrap of paper hangs out of the hole, snagged.

  While I’m gawking at the diamonds, Rick snatches the paper and unfolds it, reading, “‘Don’t sell them all at the same time or place.’”

  I shift my gaze up to meet his. “Whoever this Julie Murphy is can’t be a professional criminal if Walter has to tell her that.”

  “Or she doesn’t even know he tried to send them.” Rick drops the paper on the table.

  “Possible.” A spark fires in my brain. “Hey, his sister was named Julia, with an ‘a.’ You think?”

  “Murphy could be a married name,” says Rick.

  “That, or it’s one hell of a coincidence.” I picture the diamond from the ritual circle sitting in my palm among grains of soil. “The stone I found in the woods. Either Manning or his killers must’ve dropped it.”

  Rick eyes the little cluster of diamonds on the table. “Let me grab a bag for those.”

  After he returns from the car with an evidence baggie, I transfer the diamonds to it and fill out a log sheet. Three guys and two women from the crime lab arrive a few minutes later. I let them know we’re looking for beer cans or glasses with potential traces of GHB, as well as fingerprints of anyone who may have been in the apartment or any major blood evidence on the floors. I wind up chatting with one of the techs, Keith, who remarks that the depth of blood seep in the ground at the forest site is consistent with the murder having happened there. So much for the ‘killed elsewhere’ theory.

  “Hey.” Rick points at the kitchen counter.

  I twist away from the forensics guy and follow my partner’s pointing finger to a wooden knife block. The largest one appears to be missing, judging by the size and position of the empty slot. I tug the next one up enough to look at the edge. They appear reasonably sharp, and Dr. Ferrante thinks the murder weapon had been ‘somewhat sharp,’ due to a lot of tearing instead of cutting.

  “These look a little too sharp to fit what the ME observed,” I say.

  “Maybe Walter used the missing one all the time and dulled it compared to the rest.”

  My partner has a point. I next check the dishwasher just in case, and find no knife. I feel the familiar sense of excitement as clues and motive start coming together. Truth is, I live for this feeling.

  One of the women from the forensics team edges past me and takes the whole bag from the kitchen garbage, seals it with duct tape, and carries it off. If the kitchen knife is the murder weapon, that means the killer had to have been here. Or, maybe Manning lost it years ago. After all, the knife block doesn’t look that new.

  No, I think. It’s all adding up.

  Or so I hope.

  “Hey, Detective?” calls a man, Wilkins, I think. “I got something in here.”

  Rick and I both turn and stare at a fortyish guy with spiky pewter-colored hair coming in from the interior hallway.

  “Blood in the bathroom, but it doesn’t look like a murder scene,” says Wilkins. “There’s also a giant knife in the wastebasket.”

  “Well, there goes that,” I mutter. Dammit. Still, we are close to an answer. I can feel it.

  We follow Wilkins into the main bathroom. Blue blotchiness glows inside the sink, following a trail of dribbles up the side and down the front of the cabinet to a puddle on the floor. The ghostly shapes of several bare footprints surround it.

  “Looks like your guy probably cut himself and ran in here to clean up,” says Wilkins.

  Rick shakes his head. “Ferrante didn’t find any wounds on his hands.”

  “The injury doesn’t have to be on his hand,” I say. “Manning’s entire torso was a damned mess. He could’ve fumbled the knife and suffered a wound somewhere the ME couldn’t find because it had been shredded by the killer.”

  “Wow.” Rick looks over the glowing Luminol spots. “You think a guy can be that clumsy?”

  “Isabelle’s husband wound up in the hospital once from trying to reheat leftovers.” I glance sideways at Rick. “Men plus kitchen equals moderate to severe injuries.”

  Wilkins smirks. “I’m a rather fine cook, thank you very much.”

  I laugh.

  “So,” asks Rick. “You’re sure this is accident blood and not evidence of a crime?”

  “Well, so far, we haven’t seen any traces of blood anywhere else, but your dead guy was pretty lonely.”

  “Lonely?” I ask.

  Wilkins wags his eyebrows at me. “Yeah. The Luminol in the bedroom is… well, if you go in there, put on your sunglasses.”

  “Oh.” I nod. “That kind of lonely.”

  Rick grabs my shoulders lightly from behind and sets his chin atop the fingers of his left hand, looking at Wilkins. “She’s a precious little innocent.”

  “Hah.” I frown.

  Wilkins excuses himself and gets back to the search.

  “What are you thinking?” asks Rick.

  I start back toward the kitchen. “I’m thinking I want to talk to Julie Murphy.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Next of Kin

  We get back to the station a little after 3:00 p.m.

  It’s not even Friday yet and I am in dire need of a weekend. The blood from the bathroom is likely to be an accident, since they didn’t find anything else on the floors or walls. That, plus the knife in the wastebasket, feels like a man’s habit of punishing inanimate objects for hurting them. I’m thinking a ‘how dare you cut me! Into the trash you go’ situation. We took the knife anyway and sent it over to Dr. Ferrante for testing, just in case.

  Rick starts making the rounds, calling local medical centers to see if Walter sought treatment for such an accidental injury. While he does that, I run the address from the package. It takes me only a couple minutes to realize he transposed two digits in the zip code. Geez. You’d think the shipping company would’ve been able to catch and fix that. Lucky for me, they’re either lazy or strict.

>   I find a match in the motor vehicle system for a Julie Murphy and wind up with the usual horrible driver’s license photo of a bored/tired late-twenties woman with blonde hair up in a clip staring at me. According to her file, she’s twenty-six, receiving food stamps, and has a three-year-old daughter. I also discover she’s married to Brett Murphy, who is currently in county lockup on a drunk and disorderly.

  Might as well try calling.

  The phone rings five times before a whispery-nervous sounding woman says, “Hello?”

  “Mrs. Murphy?” I ask.

  She hesitates a few seconds but says, “Yes. Who is this?”

  “I’m Detective Madeline Wimsey with the Olympia Police.”

  “Oh.” Her voice loses some of the whispery quality, tinted with optimism. “Is this about Brett?”

  “I’m afraid not. I have a few questions for you about another issue. Do you know anyone named Walter Manning?”

  “Walt? Yeah. He’s my older brother. Why? Did he get in trouble again?”

  I raise an eyebrow. “Did you expect him to?”

  “Well, not really, but my husband’s out of work for a while now and things are kinda tight. Walt wanted to help me out, but he doesn’t make much money and I know that tone he had in his voice the last time we spoke.” She sighs. “I’m afraid he’s going to do something stupid. He’d go back to jail if it helped me and Heather. Walt insisted he was gonna help me out. Called me a couple days ago and said he took care of it, but I don’t know what he meant.”

  I assume Heather is her daughter. So, Walter did try to send those diamonds to his sister, but for a little error on the address, she didn’t get them. Better for her at least. “Mrs. Murphy, we need to talk in person. Would it be okay if I stopped by?”

  “Umm, is something wrong?”

  “I’m going to head to your place right now, okay? We should be there in about a half hour.”

  “All right,” says Julie, clear worry in her voice.

  When I hang up the phone, Rick hovers by me with his blazer hanging over his back on two fingers. “Walter got treatment at Providence St. Peter’s two days before his death. He had a four-inch cut on his abdomen that required stitches, but the wound had been shallow. From what he told the doctor there, he dropped the knife in the kitchen. It bounced off the sink and got him on the way down to the floor.”