Croaker: Kill Me Again (Fey Croaker Book 1)

by Paul Bishop

  “The uniforms ran a DMV on the new Beemer in the driveway. It's registered in the name of our victim. If it is her name. I'd say she was running from something, but she didn't run far or fast enough.”

  Fey's silent words echoed in her head again. Who were you?

  “She's run before,” she said. “The ID and the rest of this setup is too sophisticated for a first-timer. Go upstairs and tell Carter to get a second set of prints off the corpse and run them through FIN.” The Fingerprint Identification Network would kick out a match if the victim had been printed anywhere for any reason such as military, criminal, professional licensing, and so forth. “Also tell him we need a dental chart. Maybe we'll get a line on her from her teeth.”

  “You suck eggs this way, Grandma,” Colby said. His grin was as vibrant as ever. He moved without hurrying toward the stairs.

  One day, pal, Fey thought, your dentist is going to be handling you as a trauma case.

  Chapter 5

  After setting the litter box on the back seat of the detective sedan, Fey waited outside until Colby and Harry Carter finally came down from upstairs. Reeves had at least done the job of stringing the crime scene tape properly the second time around. After he'd roped off as much of the house and grounds as he could, he had set up a second buffer of tape a little farther out. The public and the press would be kept behind the second buffer, but other police officers and brass could enter the VIP area. It was a technique to keep the crime scene protected while insuring other officers on the scene didn't have to mix with the general public. It also provided an area for the police brass to preen themselves and to be seen importantly doing nothing.

  Fey had checked in with Mike Cahill, who was standing in the VIP area along with the two other detectives assigned to Fey's homicide unit—Vance Hatcher and Monk Lawson.

  Hatcher was tall and blond with a potbelly stolen from a stove. He favored old-fashioned polyester leisure suits, loud ties, and penny loafers. One of his shoes had a tarnished penny stuck in the slot. The other didn't. Despite appearances, he had the highest clearance rate on the team.

  Standing next to Hatcher, Monk Lawson looked as if he came from another planet. Shiny black skin, muscles still compact from his days as a top collegiate sprinter, hair sheared close to his skull with a stylish razor slash running through it. He wore a purple shirt with a peach tie under a lavender suit. For some reason, he and Hatcher got along well.

  “How did the Schaffer case go?” Fey asked him as she stepped into the VIP area. She could see a lot of the neighborhood residents gathered behind the second buffer of tape. Among them she also recognized the faces of several reporters from the local television stations. Bad news didn't travel anywhere near as fast as sensationalized news.

  Lawson shrugged. “Pretty much a piece of cake. Our witnesses were nailing him all the way down the line. His lawyer called a time-out, took his client aside, and came to us on bended knee for a deal.”

  The homicide unit was also responsible for investigating ADW cases, assault with a deadly weapon. Reginald Schaffer had taken a baseball bat to his neighbor's head when the neighbor let her poodle crap on his perfectly manicured lawn. Almost killed the woman. Did kill the dog.

  “We cut the deal?”

  Lawson smirked. “We figured, why should we? Juries don't like people who are cruel to animals. If he'd have hit the broad, he might have had a better chance. But when Schaffer smacked the dog out of the ballpark, he signed his fate. We turned down the deal, and Schaffer copped out anyway.”

  “Sounds like he didn't have much of a choice.”

  “Rock and a hard place.”

  “Good job,” Fey told him. Lawson simply nodded.

  Fey turned to Hatcher. “How about you?”

  “I got the Taylor spousal abuse filed, but the district attorney referred it over to the city attorney's office. We only got a misdemeanor count filed.”

  “What! His wife took twelve stitches under her eye from where he punched her.”

  Hatcher held up his hands placatingly. “What can I say? The DA felt it was provoked.”

  Fey shook her head in disgust. “She tries to stop her husband from spending the rent money on booze, and it justifies him popping her one? She should have known better than to provoke him. She should have at least waited until he came home drunk before making him punch her out.”

  “Come on, I didn't reject the filing,” Hatcher said, still on the defensive. “I argued the case, but you know the DA's mentality in these situations.”

  “I know it, all right,” Fey said. “It's the same mentality as believing every woman who wears a short dress is asking to be raped.”

  “How come you never wear short dresses?” Colby asked as he walked up with the coroner on his tail.

  “I don't want to distract you from what little work you do,” Fey retorted quickly. Monk Lawson laughed. Like Fey, he didn't care for Colby. Monk's mother and four older sisters had raised him to respect women. Colby's sharp tongue might score a lot of points with some of the other guys, but Lawson looked on him with disdain.

  Lawson liked Fey. He found her to be a fair and sympathetic supervisor. She could be tough when she had to be, but she didn't throw her weight around needlessly. Lawson also respected her because she didn’t seem to notice he was black. As long as he did his job properly, she didn't send any extra flack his way.

  Colby, on the other hand, had a chip on his shoulder the size of a redwood. Lawson knew it pissed Colby off to work for a woman. Somehow, Colby had it in his head the situation belittled him. Colby had never been directly disrespectful toward Lawson over the issue of race, but Lawson believed sexism and racism had much in common. If Colby was overtly sexist, he was most likely racist as well, only he hid it better.

  “What have you got for me, Harry?” Fey asked the dapper coroner, who was now standing next to Colby.

  “I'll have more later, naturally, but right now I can say your stiff has been dead for about eight to ten hours.

  From the type of wound, you're looking for a weapon with a sharp point, but not a knife.”

  “Ice pick?” Fey asked.

  Harry shook his head. “More like a screwdriver. Flat-head, not Phillips.”

  “What else?”

  The coroner shrugged and consulted a small notebook. “The weapon was used in a slashing motion. Right to left, making your suspect most likely right-handed. Carotid artery was flayed open. Victim bled to death in about ten seconds. The suspect probably caught some blood splatter. The victim shows evidence of recent sexual activity. I may be able to tell you later how recent, and if it was forced. Otherwise, the big news is she definitely dead.” He looked at his watch. “Time for me to go to lunch. I have a date.”

  “Thanks, Harry,” Fey told the coroner. “Will you be handling the autopsy?”

  Harry checked another page in his notebook. “I've got two others lined up for this afternoon.” He thought for a moment, looked at his watch again. “If you want to be there, how about tomorrow morning around ten? If not, I'll have the results typed up for you and sent over by late tomorrow afternoon.”

  “I'll be there,” Fey said.

  Harry bobbed his head in acknowledgment

  Two coroner's assistants brought the body out of the townhome's front door wrapped in a black body bag. Press cameras began to whir, and the gathering of citizens behind the second barrier began to surge forward imperceptibly. Everyone wanted to see something even when there was nothing to see. It was the same phenomenon as mile-long traffic jams for fender benders already off to the side of the road.

  “What's your next step?” Cahill asked Fey.

  She thought about it for a moment or two. “If you want to give the press a statement, Colby and I will go back inside and do the crime scene search.”

  “What about the maid?'

  Fey nodded toward Lawson. “Do you have time to take a formal statement for us?”

  “No problem,” he replied. “I've got
a couple of lukewarm leads on the Bradshaw caper to run down, but those can wait until this afternoon.”

  “Great. When you're done with the maid, you can send her home, but make sure we have some way of contacting her again.”

  Lawson turned on his heels with military precision and moved off in the direction of Reeves and Watts’ squad car.

  “Do you want me to help with the search?” Hatcher inquired.

  “I think we can handle it,” Fey told him. “I don't want too many cooks. Can you head back to the station and get today's paperwork handled? Make sure we don't have any surprise bodies in custody.” Hatcher was a detective two and therefore the unit's second-in-command. He was in charge when Fey took a day off or was on vacation.

  “Do you want me to split the new cases between Monk and myself?”

  Aside from murders, suicides, other suspicious deaths, and ADWs, the homicide unit also investigated spousal batteries where someone was in custody, kidnappings, and various other felonies.

  “Yeah. Leave Colby and me clear to work this for a while. When we get done here, we'll all gather back at the station for a powwow.” Fey looked at her watch. “Say, three o'clock?”

  “Sounds fair. I'll tell Monk.”

  Because all of the unit's detectives were tied up investigating a fresh murder didn't mean the rest of the unit's workload screeched to a halt. There were still citizens who didn't care how busy the detectives were, continuing to keep hitting each other with blunt instruments, shooting at each other, chasing each other around with knives, kidnapping each other, and basically raising hell in general. Murder took precedence, but life and crime rolled on.

  Back inside the townhome, Fey and Colby prepared for a major systematic search of the premises. They split up the rooms on the second floor, with Fey taking the crime scene bedroom, the master bathroom, and one of the spare bedrooms. Colby took the two other bedrooms and the guest bathroom. When they were done, they would switch rooms and check each other's work.

  Fey felt like a voyeur as she pawed through the dead woman's bedroom drawers. Searches were the worst kind of privacy invasion, looking for dirty little secrets in the nooks and crannies of another person's life. Fey always felt there was something perverse about the process, as if she were a sneak thief rummaging around for a pair of dirty panties with which to abscond.

  She also had a bad feeling about the whole case in general. It was too antiseptic. Almost staged. A place for everything, and everything in its place. Either the victim was incredibly anal-retentive, or she'd had the money to go out and order everything brand-new to fill up the drawers and cupboards. A life assembled by the numbers – I'll take four of those, two of those, and three of the others. Oh, and give me a couple of those red ones over there.

  The dresses in the closet were a uniform size eight, with shoes to match each outfit. None of the shoes showed any signs of wear. The clothing was expensive, mainly in blacks, reds, and maroons. There were a half dozen white blouses, a dozen pairs of slacks, a couple of casual summer dresses, three business suits, and two formal gowns. The clothing was top quality, even down to the two sets of designer sweats.

  In another drawer there was enough lingerie to stock a small Victoria's Secret. It ran the gamut from skin-flick kinky to modest weekday-labeled panties. It boasted of an active sex life, but like the clothing in the closet, the lingerie appeared brand-new.

  The only thing in the bedroom with any apparent history was the jewelry in a large fabric-covered chest. There were a couple of unique pieces Fey thought might be traceable if they had trouble getting a line on the victim.

  Again, there were no address books or Christmas card lists. No compilation of tax returns or monthly bills, not even a payment book for the new BMW. Fey had a feeling the car had been bought for cash. There were no photo albums, no memento knickknacks, no used ticket stubs, no cherished stuffed animals. No detritus of a life lived.

  From all appearances, Miranda Goodwinter's life was as limited as a blow-up doll sitting on the shelf of an adult bookstore. Somebody used her as a depository for sexual lust then deflated her and casted her aside. There didn't seem to be anything else. She'd been alive, and now she was dead.

  And dead was nothing more than dead.

  Who were you? Fey asked silently again, looking at the rumpled sheets where the body recently reposed.

  She stripped the sheets from the bed, turned the mattress over, checked under the bed and in the nightstand. No clues, and no murder weapon.

  In the master bathroom she found fresh, name-brand makeup, an unopened box of sanitary napkins, toothpaste, a single toothbrush, various hairbrushes, and assorted other products. There were no prescription drugs, no illegal drugs, and still no clues.

  “Anything?” Colby asked, sticking his head in the door.

  “No,” Fey replied. “How about you?”

  “Sterile, baby, sterile. This place has been picked wholesale out of a catalog. The victim, whoever she was, didn't bring anything with her from any sort of past life. It's like she didn't exist before she moved in here.”

  “Let's do the downstairs.”

  Splitting up the rooms again, Colby drew the living room, the den, and the attached garage. Fey took the family room, the kitchen, and the laundry room.

  In the kitchen there were three glasses in the sink and a bowl of chips and dip on the counter. The dip was rapidly souring. Fingerprint powder had been splashed over everything in sight.

  The refrigerator yielded milk, a couple of grapefruits, three bottles of good champagne, and a half dozen cartons of yogurt in various flavors. Not exactly the cook-at-home type, Fey thought.

  The cupboards were mostly empty except for a brand-new set of pots and pans. There was a new set of glasses and an everyday set of china and silverware.

  Under the sink was a trash basket. Fey spilled it out on the floor. The only thing of interest was two empty champagne bottles of the same brand as in the refrigerator.

  A little bit of luck popped up out of a kitchen drawer filled with the receipts for all the furniture and decorating. Fey set those aside with the empty champagne bottles to deal with later. They might be all they had to work from in trying to reconstruct the victim's background.

  There was nothing on the notepad beside the phone. Fey ran the lead of a pencil sideways over the top sheet, but there was no residue from anything previously written on the page above.

  With a deep sigh, she turned her attention to the laundry room. There was a new washer and dryer in matching pastel colors. Next to them on the floor was the first sign of normal life Fey had encountered, a large plastic basket with dirty laundry plopped into it.

  Fey opened the front-loading door of the dryer. A big fluffy white towel spilled out. Fey pushed it back in and shut the door again. She checked the washing machine tub. Empty. Methodically, she checked the contents of the washing powders and soaps on the shelf above the appliances. Nothing.

  Looking at the laundry basket, Fey bent down and picked through the soiled underwear and towels.

  Almost automatically, she again noted the underwear was expensive. It should have been hand-washed, not dropped in with the towels to be run through the normal cycle. Maybe the victim was planning on separating the items later.

  Fey looked at the towels again. She took off a latex glove and felt them with her bare hand. She brought a bundle of the towels up to her nose and inhaled. The commercial term springtime fresh ran through her mind. The towels were clean.

  Feeling her pulse increase, she turned back to the dryer and opened the door again. The white towel spilled forward. Fey grabbed it and pulled it clear.

  She crouched down to look into the drum. “Crap,” she said under her breath.

  Chapter 6

  “What do you have there?” Colby asked loudly. Fey's concentration had been so centered she hadn't heard him approach.

  “For hell's sake, Colby!” His voice had startled her. “Are you trying to give me a heart
attack?”

  Colby grinned. “Keeping you on your toes.”

  “You're getting awfully close to stepping on them. When you do, I'm going to cut you off at the knees.”

  “I love it when you talk dirty,” Colby said in a high voice.

  Fey ignored him, turning back to the dryer. Colby bent down to look in as well.

  “Oh, crap is right,” he said. With the latex gloves still on his hands, he reached into the drum and began to pull out banded stacks of fifty and hundred-dollar bills. There seemed to be a never-ending supply.

  As the stacks grew in front of the dryer, Colby turned to Fey. “What do you say, Frog Lady?” he asked. “Fifty-fifty?”

  Fey couldn't quite believe he was serious. She'd felt the young, flashy detective was bent, but this was a bit too obvious.

  Colby suddenly upped his offer. “Okay, you're the boss. How about sixty-forty?”

  When he still didn't get any response from Fey, Colby reached back into the dryer and pulled out another handful of banded bills. “There's still a lot of money in here. How about I promise to keep my mouth shut for a seventy-thirty split? Can't be fairer. I've got bills to pay and an image to keep up.” He reached back into the dryer again and pulled out two non-monetary banded bundles.

  Fey's face had turned seriously red during Colby's monologue. When he turned to face her with the two new bundles in his hands, she was about to boil over.

  He grinned. “A joke, Frog Lady,” he said. “Believe it or not, I've got more money than I'll ever need.”

  “Stop calling me Frog Lady. You’re beginning to seriously piss me off. Maybe you do have more money than you need, but I doubt you have more than you want.”

  It was Colby's turn for a reddish flush. “You may think you're a hell of a detective, Frog Lady.” Colby emphasized the derogatory nickname, knowing there was nothing Fey could do as long as he didn't use it in public. “But you know nothing about me. One of these days, you'll climb down off your high horse long enough to see things as they really are.”