by Lee Killough
“Not a clue,” Lamb replied.
“Do you have a high metabolism?”
He said dryly, “I’d guess I show up plenty warm when I’ve been running full out.”
So would anyone, Zane reflected, but Lamb showed hotter than average and Allison expected the killer to, also. Interesting. Calling her to give her a quick update on the status of the crime scene, he considered asking her about that, but stuck to more relevant questions. “Can you go see the wife? I’ll put in a call for the duty chaplain to meet you there.”
Did he hear a sigh at the other end? Her voice moments later betrayed no resignation or irritation. “Of course. I’m through at the hospital. Travis will be fine.”
“What could he tell you about the killer?”
“Nothing helpful. I’ll see what the wife can tell us.”
The DMV came back with three vehicles registered to Frank and Sandra Cromer: a 2000 PT Cruiser, a ‘99 Caravan, and a ‘93 Corvette. The victim’s key ring held car keys for a Chrysler.
Zane held them up. “Let’s check the Basin for this Cruiser.” His thought after Demry’s death remained valid: the Basin lot’s lights and security cameras made it the most logical place to park. And it was only two blocks from this crime scene.
Five minutes later the a triumphant voice on the radio said, “We’ve located the victim’s vehicle at HB.”
“I’m on my way.” Zane swept the items from Cromer’s pockets back into the bag and shoved the Polaroid in his hip pocket. Outside, Dasra Phadatare seemed about to go idle. “Grab your kit,” he told the tech. “We have another site.”
At the Basin, Carl Russell and Brian Swann waited near their find. “Hard to miss it, once we got here,” Swann said.
The Cruiser sat directly beneath a light pole and down away from other cars in the lot belonging to night personnel at the Basin and the crews of shrimp boats. Cromer had probably chosen the spot so the light would discourage would-be thieves. If anything, the light shining down on that candy apple red only advertised the vehicle. The security cameras on light poles along the chain link fence separating parking area from the quay would not have discouraged a good thief, either. He could pop the column and boogie before the security guard finished dialing 911. For Phadatare, however, the location was ideal, letting him examine the vehicle without having to call for lights. Zane studied the car while the officers helped Phadatare set a wide circle of cones around the vehicle and string crime scene tape through the slot in the tops. But after being prudent enough to park here, Cromer had left his window open. Did that mean this was where the chase began, giving him no chance to close it?
Zane glanced toward the cameras. “I’m going to talk to the security guard. Let’s just check the ground around the vehicle. We’ll process the vehicle itself downtown.”
As he drove around the Basin to the offices on the south side, Zane saw one camera, then another, track him. At the offices, the door buzzed open as soon as he approached it.
The burly guard came out of the security room to meet him. “So you really are a detective now, Kerr? Does your interest in the Cruiser out there have anything to do with all the cruisers up Warehouse and Fortuna?”
“Yes and yes. How were the Keys?” The last time Zane talked to Duane McKay, the security guard was leaving for a fishing vacation. His burnished cheeks and peeling nose attested to long hours in the sun.
McKay grinned. “Great. It’s hard coming back to work.” He sobered. “It was really hard coming on duty tonight and learning about Charlie. The Basin won’t be the same without him. He was a great guy. What’s with the Cruiser?”
“It’s a murder victim’s vehicle.” Zane followed McKay into the security room and found the monitor showing the Cruiser. Phadatare circled it just inside his barrier tape, sweeping a flashlight beam back and forth across the pavement. “Did you see it arrive?”
McKay blinked. “The guy is dead? Shit. That’s not how I expected his evening to end. Did she kill him?”
So there definitely was a woman involved. “She might be a victim, too. What do you mean murder isn’t how you expected their evening to end?”
McKay grinned. “Well...they were getting it on! I thought they were going to do it right there up against the car and was sorry we only tape inside the fence.”
Zane frowned. That sounded as if the killer had not come with Cromer. “How many people were in the car?”
“Just the two of them.”
So...the killer followed them. Or he was already here. In which case, maybe the woman set Cromer up. “Tell me what happened.”
McKay dropped into his swivel chair and leaned it back. “The car pulled in. Being the only one in that section of the lot, it caught my eye. This Susan Anton kind of babe jumped out of the passenger side and ran around to the driver’s door.”
A jolt like electricity shot through Zane. “You mean she was tall and blonde?”
“Exactamente.” McKay warmed to his story. “She drags out the driver. They must’ve been playing around on the way here because I could see he’d already stepped his mast. She plastered herself against him from lips to knees and grabbed for his butt. But performing in a spotlight was a little more of a walk on the wild side than he could handle, it looked like. He pointed the direction of the cameras. When she peeled out of her shoes and pantyhose, though, he went from mizzenmast to mainmast and pointed at the rear door. Except she wasn’t interested in any back seat. She wrapped a leg around his waist and groped under his coat like she planned to rip it and his shirt off him. At which point I’m thinking go, go and even though there’ve been so many cops around this evening please don’t let one come along now and spoil the show. Then all of a sudden she grabbed inside his coat and jumped back waving what looked like his cell phone.”
Explaining why the phone lay beside the body and had been wiped.
“Taking it pissed him off. He started chasing her around the car. But she just kept screwing around, laughing and making him play tag. Then she took off at a run across the road and into the alley between Fortuna and Warehouse!” McKay rolled his eyes. “Jesus. She had to be high on something or a total ditz. He wasn’t any better. He runs after her! Me, I’d have said screw her...she can keep the phone and find her own way home.”
Except the threat of losing the address book, calendar, maybe pictures and notes from the dinner could be enough to make someone forget everything but recovering it. This woman played on that. Which meant she had set Cromer up for--
Zane’s thought slammed to a halt. Wait. “McKay, did she put her shoes back on?”
The guard shook his head. “No. She took off fucking barefooted!” McKay peered up. “Hey, you okay?”
Zane felt slugged in the gut. Demry and Cromer’s killers had been barefooted. But the blonde Demry met had been Peter Makepeace. He pulled out the composite of Blondie. “Did she look like this?”
McKay nodded. “Pretty close anyway. I don’t get closeups with these cameras.”
Damn. He had liked Makepeace. They needed to talk to the waitress again. She stated Blondie left Benton’s well after Demry, but could she be mistaken about the time interval? Where had Makepeace been tonight?
Zane’s radio crackled. Carl Russell said, “There’s nothing around the vehicle.”
Nothing? “Did the woman come back for her shoes?” he asked McKay.
McKay shook his head. “Not that I saw...and what with the excitement off west, I kept an eye on those monitors.”
Zane clicked his mike switch. “Do you see shoes anywhere there?”
“Just a minute.” Russell came back on the air a moment later. “Phad says there’s a pair of high heels and some pantyhose on the front seat.”
Giving, maybe, DNA! They could also play Prince Charming to a suspect’s Cinderella. “I’ll call for the vehicle to be transported downtown.” Once he had done that, he needed to meet with Allison. Breaking the news about her cousin’s involvement was not something he wanted to
do on the phone.
14.
“Peter?” Allison’s gut knotted. “He’s no killer.”
But what other conclusion did she expect Kerr to draw once the security guard described the female with the victim? Boom went the Peter grenade. Where are you, you miserable bastard! You see the mess your stunt has created? And what it’s gotten you into?
Across the bay from the Basin parking lot where they sat on the fenders of their respective vehicles, the masts of moored boats bobbed in the moonlight, silhouetted against streetlights and hotels across the boulevard, each bob a little higher. Tide still coming in. Quicksand growing deeper.
“I can understand you not wanting to believe he’s guilty,” Kerr said. “But what are the chances that Demry met another tall, blonde he/she immediately after leaving Benton’s?”
She countered, “Why would Peter confess to being Blondie if he killed Demry, and planned to kill again? I’m confident we’ll find his fingerprints don’t match to any on Cromer’s car nor his DNA in the shoes and pantyhose.”
“That’s a little hard to prove when he isn’t here to fingerprint him or take a DNA sample.” Kerr paused. “I think we ought to get a warrant for his arrest on suspicion of murder.”
Her mind scrambled for an excuse to avoid that. “No, not yet. Let me ask around the family first. Maybe he had to go out of town on a repo job. I’ll contact the company office in the morning.”
Kerr eyed her. “Would you drag your feet if he weren’t family?”
A legitimate question, and she could afford to answer honestly. “If I thought for one second that he did this, he could be my mother and I’d go after him with everything I have! What’s happened to these men is unspeakable and I want their butcher off the street! But I know Peter didn’t do it. There’s another blonde around.”
He eyed her skeptically. “The woman in your psychic impression?”
That worked for her. “Maybe.”
“Do high body temperatures run in your family?”
Her breath caught. “Excuse me?”
He rubbed at some spot on his trousers. “You wanted the chopper pilot looking for someone who showed super-bright on infrared. Lamb did. I’m just wondering if it runs in the family.”
He thought too much. “The killer isn’t a member of my family, and I couldn’t have thought it was Peter when we scrambled the chopper because we didn’t know anything then about the blonde the security guard saw. Let’s give Peter...” She glanced at her watch. “...twelve hours. If he hasn’t come in on his own by then, we’ll ask for the warrant.”
Kerr frowned. “This monster’s on a roll. Three men in three nights, assuming your vision about Surrette was real. You know we’re gambling with the life of some other man tomorrow night.”
“I know.” Ice clunked in her gut. Despair washed after it. If the hunter could take Cromer with them in shouting distance, how were they ever going to save tonight’s victim? “There’s still time before closing to talk to the people at the bar Cromer visited. If he met this blonde there, they had a better look at her than the security guard did. Maybe they can give us something helpful.”
When she talked to Cromer’s wife, Mrs. Cromer--crushing the chaplain’s hand in hers and struggling to hold herself together while she answered Allison’s questions--had been certain that the venture capital people her husband took to dinner, sampling the cuisine of a chef there who wanted to open his own restaurant, included no blonde women. The names he mentioned to her all sounded male. She knew of no plans to go anywhere after dinner. Cromer told her he expected to be home sometime between ten-thirty and eleven. His office would know the names of the venture capital people. It all only confirmed what Allison already knew, that the hunter chose her entertainment where everyone else in town went for theirs.
Kerr slid off his car. “I’m on my way.”
He had barely pulled away when Allison thumbed the mike switch of her radio. “I need to forty-three with Gary Golden.”
They met in the Amelia Bliss Zoo parking lot. Pulling up with her window opposite his, Allison said, “Would you like to hear where Peter’s little stunt has landed us?”
Listening to her tell him, his normal cocky glow withered. “What are you going to do?”
She leveled a finger at him. “You are going to tell Peter he has to come in before I’m forced to swear out a warrant for him.”
Gary stiffened. “You can’t arrest him!”
“I’m not left with much choice.”
He ran a hand back through his hair. “But I don’t know where he is. I told Marlena that and I swear to you, too, by the Mother of Life and the souls of our ancestors, I don’t know. Peter said he had somewhere that he and Misty could lie low...that no one in the clan knows about...in case you were really steamed.”
She stared at him in disbelief. “If he thought I’d be angry, why did he do it?”
Gary licked his lips. “He–well, okay, we thought Kerr wouldn’t tell you for a while, that he’d be off chasing evidence against Manning, and by the time he told you, you’d have Blondie out of action. Even though the humans wouldn’t know what happened to Demry’s killer, the case would move to the back burner and go cold, and since Peter hadn’t made a formal statement–”
“That what...everyone would just forget about it?” She fought an urge to haul him out through the window of his unit and shake sense into him. “Damn it, Gary, you know better than that! I don’t care how seduced you are by Earth Now rhetoric, you’re a cop. You know police procedure. You know cop mentality. And you know that no matter how weak and contemptible humans might seem to your EN buddies, they’re not stupid. And Kerr most certainly is not! So you start digging for Peter. You have until thirteen hundred hours. If he has a snug little den somewhere he may have taken other girlfriends there. As soon as you finish the shift, you look up every one of them you know and talk to them. If you don’t know already, find out the names of his human buddies at work and you ask them, too.”
Gary frowned. “Why don’t I give you the names?”
She curled her lip. “Right. So I can spend time tracking Peter that I need to use finding the hunter? Whose capture will protect this clan, I remind you. No, you helped make this mess. You track him down. You get his sorry butt in to me. And,” she finished through bared teeth, “you find him!”
His patrol unit crept out of the parking lot, tailpipe tucked between its rear tires.
Allison leaned her forehead against hands folded on top of her steering wheel. Yes, she needed to find the real Blondie...but where did she look next? How did she keep Kerr on the right track without letting him in sight of the whole truth? How long could she keep juggling.
15.
The lights burned brightly in Ident’s garage. Beneath them, Ident techs worked on both Cromer and Cherry’s vehicles. Standing on a ladder to position himself directly over the police cruiser’s hood, Dallas Sweet photographed the blood and footprint. Dasra Phadatare brushed fingerprint power on the driver’s door.
Peering over the ET’s shoulder, Zane could see a palm print appearing on the rear edge of the window frame. Hopefully it was the killer’s, left as he slammed the door on Cherry. “When will you have something we can enter into AFIS?”
Phadatare answered without looking up. “Detective, I will tell you what I told Detective Goodnight shortly ago...we will have prints when we finish. Check back in a few hours.”
Zane retreated.
Up in the office he found Allison at her computer, fingers flying across the keyboard. “What did you learn at the bar?”
“It’s where Cromer met...the blonde.” A nice compromise description that avoided naming Peter, identifying sex, or stating an opinion about guilt. Zane dropped into his desk chair and switched on his computer. “They remembered me from the other night better than they did Cromer until I showed them Blondie’s composite. Her--their call on her sex, by the way--they remembered.” He thumbed through his notebook to the page with
notes from Ice And Ivory. “She’d been in the bar about half an hour before Cromer came in, spending her time chatting up the pianist and male customers. She didn’t drink with any of them until Cromer, though. The waitresses don’t know why she picked him. They don’t think she was waiting for him. He looked surprised when she sat down. But after they started talking--a waitress overheard him saying something about celebrating a deal–in no time she moved her chair to his side of the table and was sitting with the hand next to him under it while he breathed heavily. They left with his suit coat buttoned tight and his hand on her butt.” Zane paused. “The MO sounds familiar, doesn’t it. There is one thing we haven’t heard about before...Blondie’s voice. The pianist says she had a British accent.”
Allison turned sharply. “Foreign. Yes.” She sounded pleased.
Zane shifted in his chair. “Does Peter Makepeace do accents?”
She sighed. “Yes.”
“Any of the family know where he is?”
“Not yet.” She clicked on Print, brought up a new blank form on her screen, and began another report.
“Are you so sure he’ll--”
“You better work on your reports so you can grab a couple of hours of sleep.” Her fingers raced across on the keyboard. “We’re going to be very busy tomorrow. I talked to Lieutenant Garroway a while ago and as you can imagine, he isn’t a happy camper. He wants this case resolved...or at the very least, measurable progress made on it to placate the brass and the media. As far as I know, the media isn’t aware of the decapitation, but that severed hand is sensational enough. The press conference will be a zoo. You don’t have to be there, so you’ll hit the realty offices to check recent rentals.”
Zane brought up a report form. “Did Viapiana turn up any witnesses around the crime scene?”
“No. Those whom the sirens didn’t send packing exhibited profound blindness and deafness.”
Was it his imagination or did he hear relief in her tone? Maybe she had doubts about Makepeace after all.