Mark continued. “She and Angelo targeted the Gomezes to get their apartment. That was their first abrin killing. And it went perfectly. Smooth. Undetected. But then Angelo died, and Mrs. Petrizzo went a little nuts in the head.” Mark blew out a breath. “The thing is, she was hell-bent on revenge for her husband’s death.”
“Even though he probably did die of natural causes when he wandered off,” Claire said, as she directed the running hose into the body. “No surprises here. I see the same hemorrhaging I did with the other victims. I’m just sorry I didn’t find those red seeds in Lisa, or Damon. We might’ve been able to save Brenda.”
“Oh, I didn’t tell you.” Mark said. “She managed to get Brenda to eat the seeds. Petrizzo told her they were candy. But the other victims drank their poison. We found abrin in the coffee. Looks like the old lady maintained a separate grinder for her special guests. She invited them in, made a pot of her brew, and a day or so later, they’re dead. Ties in with the fact that all the victims had carpet fibers from her apartment on their clothing.”
“Good work, detective.” Claire smiled. “But what made you look at her coffee?”
“She offered me some.”
Claire looked up. “Oh, no.”
“Don’t worry.” Now it was his turn to grin. “I knew better.”
“But how? Who would ever suspect a sweet little old lady? Especially one carrying a rosary around all the time.”
“I did.”
She blew out a heavy breath. “Thank God.”
“Speaking of which, or should I say ‘whom,’” Mark said, “according to Mrs. Petrizzo, God supposedly sanctioned this little killing spree.” He nodded toward the body on the table. “She kept ranting about how he guided her rosary and about sorrowful mysteries. You’re Catholic. Any idea what she meant?”
“Rosary mysteries. Wow. I haven’t heard that in years.” Claire’s gaze swept to the ceiling. “There are five mysteries per rosary, one for each decade. She was talking about meditations.”
Mark shot her a quizzical look. “Meditations?”
“If I recall correctly, certain days of the week are devoted to certain meditations—you’re supposed to reflect on each of the mysteries in between praying the decades. There are all sorts of different mysteries—Glorious, Joyful, Sorrowful. This lady was responsible for five deaths, right?”
“Yeah.”
She scratched at her chin with the back of her gloved hand. “Weird how that worked out. Five murders. Five sorrowful mysteries. It’s almost as if she planned them to match her holy meditations.”
Mark stared at the corpse’s wide open chest, watching as Claire removed the heart and placed it into a container to be weighed. He thought about the old woman’s cold-blooded devotion to her deadly rosary.
“Could be,” he said, “only this lady wasn’t sorry at all.”
MITT’S MURDER
BY JOHN LUTZ
THE JOGGING TRAIL IN SPEEDERS PARK WAS ONE OF THE area’s favorites among early morning exercisers. Softly asphalted paths wound through mature elm and maple trees, around a pristine blue lake whose banks were lined with white quarry stones. Speeders Park was nothing if not scenic.
It wasn’t officially named “Speeders Park.” It was called that, rather than the name of some long-dead city father, on its entrance sign, because the street that bordered its western edge was Sallab Road. Sallab was a beautiful straight and level stretch traveled by drivers just off the nearby interstate. Used to highway speeds, people with a tendency to go fast couldn’t resist the wide and level road. The local police had given out reams of speeding tickets on that stretch of road for so many years it had become a notorious speed trap. It didn’t seem to slow anyone down, but it did provide a steady source of revenue for the county.
Former major league catcher Mitt Adams stayed in reasonably good physical condition by jogging every morning on the park’s mile-long running and bicycle path, the one passing closest to Sallab Road. Mitt had been retired from baseball for ten years. He’d been stocky and immovable behind home plate and many a runner trying to score had come out sore and bruised, whether safe or out. Now pushing fifty, Mitt was still stocky and strong, though a bit paunchier. And he was still not a man to be run over, on or off a baseball diamond.
Mitt was in a different kind of diamond business now. He was public relations director and representative of Diamond Square, a company that wholesaled jewelry and industrial diamonds. Being a celebrity front man for the firm, he always wore a large diamond set in an eighteen-karat gold ring on his left hand. His World Series ring he wore on his right. He liked to watch the morning sunlight glint off both rings as he pumped his stocky arms while he jogged.
He wasn’t the only one who noticed this mesmerizing play of light.
Mitt had jogged most of his regular five miles and the former athlete was huffing hard when he rounded the slight grade beyond a stand of maples and began the stretch of path that paralleled Sallab Road. The killer watched from another copse of maple trees, less than a quarter of a mile ahead and toward the bend away from the road. When Mitt entered the trees, for a few seconds he’d be invisible from the road or from farther down the winding trail.
Here came Mitt, puffing like a miniature steam engine, legs and arms working like pistons, eyes squinted against the sun, perspiration pouring down his broad face from beneath a sweat band with his old team logo on it. The killer smiled. Mitt, team player to the last.
Sweat at the corners of Mitt’s eyes stung and obscured his vision. Seeing became even more difficult when he passed from bright sunlight into the shadows beneath the trees. His eyes didn’t have time to adjust as a dark form suddenly appeared before him.
Puzzled, Mitt huffed and puffed to a halt. The killer brandished a knife, and ordered Mitt to accompany him off the trail and into the trees. Mitt could hardly refuse.
As soon as they were in the shadows, Mitt barely saw an arm slash upward toward his midsection. Something long and sharp sliced like ice into Mitt, beneath his sternum, up, up into his heart. The pain was like an explosion, but brief.
Did I tag him? Mitt wondered inanely. Did I tag the bastard? He took three more steps, the third one when he was already dead, and crumpled to the ground a few feet off the path.
The killer glanced around, confident that he hadn’t been seen, then bent low and removed the diamond ring from the third finger of Mitt’s gnarled left hand. Mitt had lost weight lately with his regular jogging and was in great shape for a dead man, so the ring slid off easily. The killer ignored the World Series ring.
He wiped clean the long folding knife he’d thought he might have to use to remove the diamond ring, placed it and the ring in his pocket, then jogged off into the bright sunlight beyond the trees.
Mitt had died almost immediately. The killer was glad there hadn’t been much blood. Things had gone swimmingly, if you weren’t Mitt.
In his office at police headquarters, Captain Wayne Loman sat back and looked across his desk at the two people he’d summoned to get him out of deep doo-doo. When a local celebrity like Mitt Adams was murdered, the pols and public expected—no, demanded—action followed by results. Loman knew the best way to accomplish both those things was sitting right there in front of him in the persons of Miles Dougherty and Catt Balone. Dougherty had long been top dog of CSI in a major city in Florida, home of wacko crime, and Balone had been his assistant. Florida also being the home of wacko politics, both had been forced from their jobs for political reasons. Now they were in private practice here in the Midwest with their own investigative agency, Dougherty and Balone. Loman wasn’t too proud to ask for help.
Catt, a tall, curvaceous woman with attractive if predatory features, stared at Loman with her cool green eyes. Miles Dougherty was her physical opposite, short, dumpy, balding, amiable looking. He had a pleasing smile that seemed always present. He was about forty-five to Catt’s thirty-five. Loman knew that when he was about twenty-five, Miles Dougherty had
been a decorated Navy Seal.
“So whadya got?” Catt asked him, lounging in one of the two chairs angled toward the cluttered desk.
“Murder,” Loman said.
“Mitt Adams?” Miles asked, having kept up on the news.
Loman nodded.
“So whadya got?” Catt asked again. Same expression, feline observing mouse, speculating.
“As he did most mornings, starting about six-thirty, Mitt was jogging in Speeders Park. He was found by another jogger who noticed him lying off the path in the shadows and called nine-one-one on her cell phone. Mitt was stabbed to death by a knife with a long, thin blade, very sharp. His keys and a roll of bills were in a packet attached by a Velcro strap around his right ankle. The diamond ring he always wore was missing, but not his World Series ring.”
“A thief can fence a diamond ring without too much danger,” Miles said. “That World Series ring would arouse suspicion. Not too many fences would touch it.”
“A real fan might,” Catt said. She smiled, looking dangerously feline. “A Cubs fan.”
“What’s the ME say?” Miles asked. He kind of liked this, entering a case when the investigation was well under way. The first forty-eight hours had passed and the police had gotten nowhere. His smile was inward. Time for the real experts to show how it’s done.
Catt was staring at him. She knew what he was thinking. She always did. Sometimes she gave him the creeps.
“ . . . dead when he hit the ground,” Loman was saying.
“At least he didn’t suffer,” Catt said. Miles wondered if she was serious. Being stabbed in the heart was never a walk in the park. Or a jog. “For long, anyway,” she added.
“What’d your CSI people come up with?” Miles asked.
“Mitt was lying curled on his right side on the ground, right arm and leg bent beneath him. Minimal bleeding from the knife wounds, and from facial injuries sustained when he fell, indicated he was dead before he hit the ground. The weapon hasn’t been found. There were no discernable footprints in the area, which was on hard, grassy earth beneath some trees. There was some blood, though, and it appeared the killer stepped in it with the edge of one shoe. Probably didn’t even know he did it.”
“What kind of sole?” Catt asked.
“Smooth. No way to tell if it was composite or leather, with such a small sample. And there was no particulate matter in the blood other than what was indigenous to the scene.” Loman sighed. “I tell you, we’ve got nothing other than that the weapon was a long, thin-bladed knife.”
“And sharp,” Catt reminded him.
Miles wished she’d stop being sarcastic. But he knew she wouldn’t. This was the woman who’d raised her extended middle finger at a bossy police lieutenant at a murder scene while snapping on her white Latex glove.
“Might the person who discovered the body have stepped in the blood?” Miles asked.
“That would be a woman named Adelaide Clark, an emergency room nurse who jogs the trail in the park every morning before going in to work at Mercy Hospital. She says she never got closer than ten feet away from the body. She was pretty sure Mitt was dead. According to her statement, she backed away, trying not to disturb even the area around the body, before making her nine-one-one call. Records show the call came in at seven-twenty.”
Catt sat up straighter. “If she’s a nurse and was only pretty sure he was dead—”
“I know,” Loman said. “I’m just summarizing her statement. She admitted she was rattled.”
“Why? She’d seen dead bodies before, in her job.”
“It wasn’t what she was looking at,” Miles said, “it was whom.”
Catt nodded her acknowledgement and approval, maybe of his grammar. She much admired good grammar, even if she didn’t bother using it herself. “Starstruck, huh?”
“Mitt almost made it into the Hall of Fame,” Loman said.
“Caught two no-hitters,” Miles said.
“Two-forty lifetime batting average,” Catt said. “Hit seventeen home runs one decade.”
Miles grinned. Nothing and no one awed Catt.
“Killer leave anything at the scene?” he asked Loman. “Other than that very partial footprint?”
“Not a hair, not a thread, fingerprint, useful footprint, or any suggestion of any kind of body fluid,” Loman said. “Mitt jogged that same path regular like clockwork. The intersection at the northwest corner of the park’s a busy one, and there are cameras set up to catch speeders so we can get their license plate numbers and ticket them later. One of them’s aimed north, down Sallab Road along the edge of the park. The tape’s marked with time and date. The interesting thing about the camcorder is it coincidentally takes in the park’s only vehicular traffic entrance and exit. If the killer used his car to get in and out, we’ve got it on tape.”
“Too far away to read the plate numbers?” Miles asked.
“’Fraid so. We aren’t that lucky.”
“Let us work on the tape,” Catt said. “Maybe we can enhance it.”
“Will do.” Loman began swiveling back and forth in his desk chair. “The camera also caught a traffic cop handing out a ticket near the park entrance. Date and time stamped on the image. Seven-sixteen a.m.”
“In the time frame,” Catt said.
“Cop said he saw nothing suspicious along that edge of the park, and the speeding ticket went to an eighteen-year-old kid doing twelve miles an hour over the limit.”
“Crime scene still cordoned off with tape?” Miles asked.
“It is. I saw that the scene was kept undisturbed.”
“Knowing you were gonna call us,” Catt said.
“Well,” Loman said. “Suspecting.”
“Speaking of suspects,” Miles said. “Are there any?”
“Not per se,” Loman said.
“Very good,” Catt said, beaming.
“Then I presume no motive,” Miles said.
“One possible,” Loman said.
“Who we talking about?” Miles asked.
“The husband or lover of the woman Mitt was seeing behind his wife’s back.”
“How do we know there was such a woman?” Miles asked.
“Mitt’s wife told him,” Catt said, before Loman could answer.
Loman shook his head in mock admiration. “Women’s intuition. I marvel.”
“Give us some names,” Catt said. “Friends, business associates, neighbors, fellow joggers. Everybody but the killer. That would take all the fun out of it.”
After a look at the crime scene that was every bit as unrevealing as Loman had described, Miles and Catt went into interview phase with Mitt’s extramarital interest.
“I’ve already told all this to the police,” said Nora Cross.
Catt said, “You don’t know how many times we’ve heard that.”
They were in Nora’s third-floor condo. It was small but in a smart neighborhood, not far from Speeders Park. The furnishings were traditional and tasteful, lots of dark wood and mocha-colored leather, plush beige carpeting, wooden window treatments of the sort that used to be called venetian blinds. Catt and Miles sat on a sofa opposite Nora, who was posed prettily in a leather wing chair. The sofa faced the wide window. Catt decided she liked the bars of sunlight lancing in through the blind slats, even the illuminated swarming dust motes.
Nora, who should have dusted more often, was a starved looking blonde woman about thirty with haunted gray eyes. She looked like a smaller, younger Lauren Bacall. Thirty made her considerably younger than Mitt. She worked for a diamond retailer that had an account with Mitt’s company. She explained how a year or so ago, for her and Mitt, business had become pleasure.
“It sneaked up and surprised both of us,” she said, not sounding at all credible.
“Were you aware Mitt’s wife knew about you two?” Miles asked.
“Yes. Mitt was, too. It was the kind of thing none of us talked about. No one among the three of us wanted to upset the balance. Life
wasn’t working quite right for any of us, but it was working.” Her eyes misted up and a tear tracked down her cheek, but she didn’t wipe it away, didn’t even blink. Ignoring the tear might make it cease to exist. This was a woman who didn’t cry easily.
“Any idea who might have killed Mitt?” Catt asked bluntly.
“It wasn’t his wife. Linda wouldn’t hurt anyone. Well, maybe me, but who could blame her?”
“You have a very charitable attitude toward your lover’s wife,” Miles said.
Nora shrugged. “Love happens.”
So do trophy wives, Catt thought.
“Did Mitt seem upset about anything lately?” she asked. “Did he give any indication he might have known his life was in danger?”
Nora hesitated. “I didn’t tell the police this, because I don’t like stating anything other than what I know is fact. Mitt didn’t confide in me, but I got the impression something was very wrong at work.”
“What gave you that impression?”
Nora gave a slight but eloquent shrug. “Mitt might have been a big league catcher, but I knew the signs.”
“Was he worried about losing his job?” Miles asked.
“Nothing like that. More like he didn’t know what to do about whatever he thought was wrong.”
“You said ‘thought was wrong’,” Catt pointed out.
“Yes, I got the feeling Mitt wasn’t sure anything was wrong. That’s why I hesitated giving the police the name Mitt mentioned.”
Miles would have sworn he felt his ears prick up.
Catt arched an eyebrow. “Name?”
“Kerrington,” Nora said. “I heard Mitt mutter it one day when he was deep in thought. I think the man’s first name is Roger. I can’t be positive of that. Mitt and I had been drinking. We weren’t drunk, but liquor tended to loosen Mitt’s tongue.”
Catt wrote the name down in her leather-bound notepad. “What did he tell you about Kerrington?”
“Not much, really. But I gathered he was the fellow employee causing Mitt’s concern, and it might have had something to do with stealing from the company.”
At the Scene of the Crime Page 15