by Paul Bishop
The reasoning behind his feelings was something he didn't want to examine too closely. As in other unresolved relationships in his past, analysis might reveal personal faults to which he didn't want to admit. In the short run it was easier to accept the feelings and leave the reasoning locked up in a mental closet somewhere. You never showed any weaknesses, never gave anyone the edge.
When Fey and Colby had arrived at the security gates of the Oak Vista Estates, they found themselves doing battle with an overeager security guard worried the events of the evening would put his job in jeopardy. He insisted on checking their ID, and then radioed to another security guard, who was inside the complex with Reeves and Watts, to make sure Fey and Colby were authorized.
By the time the security gates were swung open to allow the detectives' beat-up sedan to pass through, Fey was fuming. “Wuss butt,” she said, referring to the security guard. “He'll let the press straight in as long as they promise to take his picture.”
On the other side of the vehicle, Colby was strangely quiet during this tirade. Fey looked over to see him staring out the passenger window at the opulence of the surrounding community.
“There's no way, Colby,” she said.
Colby brought his attention around to her. “I don't follow you.”
“There's no way you'll ever be able to afford one of these units on a cop's salary.”
Colby shrugged. “Why not? You live in a house on a couple of acres somewhere to accommodate your horses and all the flies they attract. Bet it cost you a bundle in the California real estate market.”
“I was lucky,” Fey said. “I bought the property before the real estate boom.” She felt angry because Colby had immediately put her back on the defensive.
“So, maybe I'll follow your example. I'll get married and divorced several times, take all my exes to the cleaners, and then I'll be able to move right in here. They'll be glad to have me. Having a real cop on the grounds would give the homeowners a sense of security. Plus, I don't need room for animals, and I don't gather flies.”
Fey bit back. “Don't flatter yourself. You're no real cop.”
The complex the two detectives were driving through looked like something out of Architectural and Landscaping Monthly. The exteriors of the two and three-story town homes were done in mock Tudor style and built over matching two-car garages. White stucco was crisscrossed with black oak beaming, and highlighted with old-fashioned red brick or silver-gray quarry stones. There were perhaps 150 units, each attached to another unit by one common wall. Not one of them cost under $850,000.
The grounds surrounding the units were green and rambling with babbling brooks, low split-oak fencing, and other lush, expensive to maintain, features. An army of grounds keepers were kept busy tending the roses, trimming the mature oak trees, mowing the extensive greenbelts, and tending the private nine-hole golf course running across the back length of the complex.
Fey saw an ambulance and the black-and-white police unit parked in front of 2008 Mirrorwood. Reeves was standing beside the vehicle, the driver's door open. Next to him was one of the complex's uniformed security guards.
Through the squad car's rear window Fey could see Rusty Watts sitting on the passenger side talking to a woman in the vehicle's backseat. Fey assumed it was the maid.
On the townhome’s front lawn, three men and two women all dressed in casual clothes or sweat suits stood in a group. Any of their outfits would have cost Fey two weeks' salary. One of the women walked up to the open door of the townhome, grabbed hold of the doorframe, and leaned in to peek inside.
There wasn't a glint of yellow crime scene tape to be seen anywhere. Fey could feel herself beginning to steam. Not the best frame of mind to start an investigation in which the first six hours were the most critical. She parked behind the ambulance. Both she and Colby climbed out.
“Get those people off the lawn, and get that woman away from the door,” Fey told Colby. Turning on her heel, she started walking toward the squad car without looking back to see if Colby was following her directions.
Reeves straightened up and smiled when he saw Fey approaching. Each arm of his blue uniform shirt sported a pair of chevrons identifying him as a training officer. “Howdy,” he said, in a put-on cowboy accent.
“What are you doing letting those people walk all over the crime scene?” Fey demanded, opening up with both barrels.
Reeves's smile turned to a look of confusion. He swiveled his eyes toward where Colby was herding the citizens off the lawn like a collie with too many sheep to tend. “There's nobody in the crime scene. It's upstairs in the bedroom.”
“How long have you been on this job, Reeves?” Fey didn't wait for an answer, plowing straight on. “Didn't Cahill send you a message to tape off the scene?”
“It wasn’t needed. We closed the door to the bedroom. It was enough to keep everybody out.”
“How did you ever become a training officer?” Fey did not have much tolerance for incompetence. “This whole complex is a crime scene. Now, get off your dead ass, dig some crime scene tape out of your trunk, and get this area protected. And if I find you've smudged any prints by closing the door to the bedroom, I'm going to initiate a personnel complaint so fast, you'll be doing freeway therapy before the ink is dry on the paperwork.”
Freeway therapy was the term for the unofficial department discipline of transferring an offending officer to the farthest division from his home. Reeves looked aggrieved and pained, as if he were a child being disciplined by an overbearing parent for no reason. He turned to slowly do Fey's bidding.
Fey knew Reeves would now start spreading the word about what a bitch she was, but it didn't bother her. She'd lived with it all her career.
If a male detective had chewed Reeves out, Reeves would have been seen to be at fault. The male detective would have been admired as a kick-ass, no-nonsense copper doing his job.
However, because she was a woman, other male officers would rally to Reeves's defense. Fey's outburst would be put down to PMS or some equally moronic placebo. It wouldn't matter if Fey was right, or Reeves was nothing more than a lazy drone who never did more than he had to in order to get by. Only gender stereotypes would matter—Reeves was a macho, fun-loving guy. Fey was a frigid bitch who complained about every little thing.
Fey leaned into the interior of the police car. She smiled at the woman who was smoking in the backseat, then looked at Watts. He was also smoking a Marlboro cigarette.
“Do you have a crime scene log started?” she asked Watts.
“You bet.” Watts held up a sheet of paper attached to a clipboard. In a neat, precise hand, he had notated all incidents since he and his partner had discovered the body. Each entry bore a time notation.
Fey looked at the list and handed it back. “Good,” she said. “I can even read the thing.” She smiled. “Log in the arrival of my partner and I, and keep the list going until I tell you differently.”
“Okay,” Watts said. He was still a rookie and eager to both please and learn. Fey had seen him around the station and felt he had potential. Reaching over, Fey took the cigarette out from between Watts’ fingers and took a long drag. “Filthy habit,” she said.
“I know.”
She took another hit and handed the cigarette back. “Did you light one of these up in the residence?”
Watts shook his head. “Who do you think I am? Reeves?”
Fey laughed for the first time since Cahill had handed her the squeal. She felt some of the tension flow out of her.
“No,” she said. “I wouldn’t insult you.”
Colby materialized behind Fey's shoulder and started flashing his ivories at the maid in the backseat of the police car. She was a young and slender Latina with curly black hair and a scared look in her eyes.
“Did you get the names of the looky-loos?” Fey asked Colby when she became aware of his presence.
Colby displayed a handful of field interview cards. “They didn't take
kindly to being questioned, but I charmed them all.”
Fey rolled her eyes. “How about the ambulance crew?”
“It's Kyle Digby's crew.”
“Great. Digby knows what he's doing.”
“Digby said he walked a straight line to the body to check for vitals. Said it was a foregone conclusion. Victim's carotid was severed. Blood had spurted everywhere. Digby declared the victim dead on the F-six-sixty form.”
“Okay, keep it to attach to the death report. Any of the other crew go inside?”
“Digby said only him. He knows how you like to keep the scene as virgin as possible. Kind of like your reputation.”
Fey didn't rise to the bait.
Turning back to Watts, she said, “Get on the radio and whistle up another patrol unit to help secure the location. I want to go inside and have a look before the coroner and SID show up.” She nodded toward the woman in the backseat. “The maid?”
Watts nodded as he picked up the radio mike. “Yeah. Lucia Cortez.” He handed Fey an FI card with the woman's basic information filled out neatly in the assigned boxes.
Fey pulled back from the front seat of the police car and opened the rear door and slid in next to the maid. Colby took Fey’s place on the front seat.
“Hello, Lucia. I'm Detective Croaker. This is my partner, Detective Colby. Do you speak English?”
“Yes.” The maid bit the word off as if she were scared to let further sounds burst from her mouth.
Fey could tell the woman was extremely nervous. Her eyes kept bouncing around the interior of the squad car, making her seem like a frightened animal looking for an escape route.
Fey noticed Colby turn up the intensity of his smile when he noticed how lush the maid's body appeared to be under her tight black-and-white uniform.
“Knock it off, Colby.”
“Yes, ma'am,” he replied, turning up the wattage another notch.
Fey ignored him and returned her attention to the maid. “Lucia, I'm sure this was a terrible shock, but I need to ask you a few questions, okay?”
“Okay,” the maid said, cutting off the word again with a firm clamping of her mouth. She'd finished the cigarette she'd been smoking and seemed at a loss of how to dispose of the butt. Fey took it from her and handed it to Colby, who put it in the gutter.
“How long have you been in this country, Lucia?” Fey asked. The immediate fear in the woman's eyes confirmed Fey's instincts. “It's okay,” she told the woman, placing a reassuring hand on the maid's arm. “We don't care if you are here legally or not. You aren't in any trouble, and we aren't interested in deporting you.”
“You no send me back?”
“No,” Fey said. “When we are done here, I'll have somebody drive you to wherever you're living.”
“But I have other houses to clean today. I get fired if I don't turn up.”
“It's okay,” Fey said. “Tell me who you are working for and I'll have somebody talk to them and make sure they understand. All right?”
The woman nodded. “Okay.”
“Now,” Fey said. “What time did you get here today?”
“Eight o'clock. My boyfriend drop me off outside.” With the mention of a boyfriend, her eyes flicked again to make contact with Colby's.
“How did you get into the house?”
“I have a key. I let myself in by the front door. I called out to Mrs. Goodwinter, but she no answer.”
“Mrs. Goodwinter? She’s the woman you work for, the woman who lives here?”
“Yes.”
“Is there a Mr. Goodwinter?”
“I not know. Mrs. Goodwinter, she live alone.”
“How long have you worked for Mrs. Goodwinter?”
“This is only second week. She only move in. I come on Tuesday and Thursday for four hours, and then I go and clean for Mr. and Mrs. Barstow down the street.”
“How did Mrs. Goodwinter come to hire you?”
The maid shrugged. “I see her moving in two weeks ago. I come over and ask her if she need anybody to do her cleaning. She tell me to start the next Tuesday.” She looked at Colby again and self-consciously ran a hand through her hair. She recrossed her legs, and there was a whisper of black nylon.
Fey glared at Colby. She returned to questioning Lucia. “What did you do after you entered the residence?”
“I thought Mrs. Goodwinter might still be asleep, so I went upstairs to check.”
“You didn't start cleaning?”
“No. I didn't want to make no noise and wake up Mrs. Goodwinter and get her mad at me.”
“Okay. You went upstairs to the bedroom. Then what happened?”
Lucia began to cry. “The door. It was a little open. I opened it the rest of the way and then I saw her on the bed.” The maid put her hands up to her face and began to cry harder.
Fey put her arm around the woman. “It's all right,” she said.
When Lucia calmed down a little, Fey asked her, “Did you go any further into the room?”
“No. I was too scared. I run down the stairs and outside.”
“You didn't call the police?”
“No.”
Fey looked over at Watts.
“The radio call came out as an unknown trouble, woman screaming. There was no PR or call-back number,” Watts explained.
Fey spoke to Colby. “Use the mobile phone and call communications right away. I want the nine-one-one tape with the call on it and the printout with the address of the original call.”
Colby grunted and slid out of the car.
“Are you sure the person you saw on the bed was Mrs. Goodwinter?”
“Yes.. No...I think so.”
Fey patted the woman's arm again. “Thanks, Lucia. I'm going to want to talk to you again later, okay?”
“Si...Yes. Okay.”
Fey climbed out of the backseat and walked around the car to the passenger side. She signaled to Watts, who climbed out to talk to her.
“Take care of her,” Fey said. “I don't want anyone else talking to her. I don't want her to leave the scene. She might split on us and we'll never find her again. Don't let her out of your sight.”
Watts looked confused. “You think maybe she did it?”
“No, I don't,” Fey said. “But I'm not going to take a chance on being wrong.
Chapter 3
Fey stood on the threshold of the victim's residence. Colby stood behind her slipping plastic bootees over his Italian loafers. Carefully, Fey took a pair of latex gloves out of her pocket and pulled them on as if she were a surgeon preparing for an operation. A small satchel was slung over her right shoulder.
Taking a deep breath, she cleared her mind of all exterior input. This was the moment of an investigation in which Fey felt almost down to the core of her being. The split-second high before plunging into the deep end of a dank and seemingly bottomless pool.
Time was ticking.
It took six hours from the time a detective first received a murder call-out until the best chance of solving the case disappeared in a heartbeat. Twenty-four hours later the case began to slow down. After forty-eight hours the main leads were cleared off the desk and you began to start looking for anything you might have missed. At seventy-two hours the bell rang and the time on all your options ran out.
Beyond seventy-two hours, solving the case became a long shot. A crapshoot. A needle-in-the-haystack proposition.
Seventy-two hours and time was ticking.
Fey checked her watch and made a mental note of the time. Colby would be following along behind her, making a hard copy of the same thing on his clipboard. He would already have notes of the time they had received the original call, how the call had been made, and who had made it. As they continued, he would be noting down the outside and inside temperatures and the weather conditions. All of these things could turn out to be no help at all, or they could turn out to be crucial at a trial held months or years later. Notes were far better in court than blurred memories, o
r memories influenced by every crime scene a detective had ever worked.
Fey stepped under the crime scene tape. Reeves had gone out of his way to string it everywhere like a dog marking his territory.
It was time to go to work.
The inside of the town house was opulent and beautiful. It was as if pages of an interior decorating magazine had been clipped out and given life. Large burnished squares of Italian tile with rough gray grout slid underfoot, leading the way into the spacious open floor plan currently in vogue.
Exposed beams crossed the high ceilings to tie in with the Tudor exterior. Across the back of the house, large windows and French doors spilled light through gauzy eggshell draperies. The tiled floor was decorated with expensive throw rugs ranging in styles from Aubusson to Oriental to Persian. Couches and chairs with lots of cushions were seemingly scattered at random, but were actually placed at aesthetically strategic spots. The beige textured walls sported rounded corners as if the house were designed to be lived in by someone who had to be kept away from sharp edges.
Fey memorized it all with a glance before walking in a careful line directly from the front door to the curved stairway. With her hands down by her side, she walked slowly, looking ahead to where her next foot would fall, making sure no piece of vital evidence would be disturbed by her passage.
Behind her, she could feel Colby correctly dogging her footsteps like a child following his father through the snow.
At the top of the stairs, Fey stopped again to take in the surroundings. She was conscious of the weight of the gun hanging snugly in its holster under her arm. She tested the air as if she were an animal sensing for danger. There was almost no probability the suspect was still on the scene, but it was always a possibility.
When Fey had first been assigned as a detective trainee years earlier, she had come across a murder suspect hiding on the shelf of a walk-in closet twelve hours after he'd done the dirty deed. The incident had been like lightning striking, a once-in-a-career instance, but the chance still had to be considered.