Dead Calm

by Annelise Ryan

  “Such as?” John asks again.

  “I’m not at liberty to discuss that at this time,” Hurley says. “May we please come in?”

  Lansing scowls at the request, and I can tell he wants to tell us to get lost or put our request where the sun doesn’t shine. Apparently, Hurley senses this, too, because he then adds, “I can get a warrant if you prefer.” Hurley’s blue eyes turn steely as he and Lansing engage in a stare-down. It amazes me how quickly that blue can change from friendly and welcoming to blood-curdling coldness.

  John’s whole body sags as he capitulates. “Fine,” he says, stepping to one side and opening the door wider.

  We go inside quickly before he can change his mind. As John shuts the door, Hurley and I turn to face him.

  “Mr. Lansing, do you have a car?” Hurley asks.

  “We do. But it’s not here. We only have the one car, and Meredith took it to work.” He stops, and his mouth drops open with dawning. He squeezes his eyes closed and looks like he’s about to cry. “I guess she didn’t take it to work last night though, did she?”

  “What kind of car is it?” Hurley asks.

  “It’s a 2009 Ford Focus. Bought it used two years ago. It has a lot of miles on it, but it runs okay.”

  “Are you sure it isn’t here?” Hurley asks.

  John arches his eyebrows in surprise. “Why would it be?” Hurley shrugs. “Maybe she was picked up?”

  John makes a face. “That would be ballsy,” he says. He walks over to the front window that overlooks the parking lot and pushes the curtain aside. “It’s not here,” he says glumly.

  “Is the registration for it in your name or your wife’s?” Hurley asks.

  “It’s in Meredith’s name. She’s the one who bought it. The title is in her name, too.” John doesn’t sound particularly happy about this fact, and it’s not hard to imagine that he and his wife had a lot of arguments about money or the lack thereof. When it comes to motives for murder, love and money rank right up there at the top of the list, and John Lansing is steeped in both.

  Hurley takes out his phone and hits a speed-dial number. “Hey, it’s Hurley,” he says to whoever is on the other end. I’m fairly certain it’s Stephanie, the police department’s day dispatcher. “Can you look up a 2009 Ford Focus registered to Meredith Lansing and give me a plate and VIN number?” While he’s waiting, he reaches into his jeans pocket and takes out a pen and the small notebook he carries with him everywhere he goes. After a half minute of us standing around trying not to look at one another, Hurley says, “Yep, go ahead.” He jots down the information while propping his phone between his ear and shoulder. When he’s done, he says, “Got it. Thanks. Can you pass this info on to Junior and ask him to check the hospital parking lot? Devonshire already ran all the plates that were out at the motel, and this one wasn’t among them.”

  He listens for a few seconds, says thank you, and then disconnects the call.

  John rakes a hand through his hair and says, “Is there any way you guys can bring the car back here for me?”

  Hurley gives him an apologetic look. “It’s going to be seized as evidence for now.”

  John stares at him in disbelief. “What? Why? How am I supposed to get around or do anything if I don’t have any wheels?”

  “Sorenson isn’t that big a town,” Hurley says. “Do you have a bike?”

  John doesn’t answer; he just stares at Hurley with an expression of incredulity.

  “There’s also the cab service,” I suggest. “They’ll take you anywhere in town for two-fifty.”

  John shakes his head in dismay. “Grrreat,” he says, sounding like a pissed-off Tony the Tiger.

  “Do you have a home computer?” Hurley asks.

  John gives him a tired look. “It’s in the spare bedroom, down the hall.” He leads us in the right direction, walking like a man making his final march on death row.

  As we follow, I notice that the rest of the apartment, like the living room, is neat but showing some wear and tear. The walls are in need of fresh paint, the hardwood floors are scuffed and scarred, and what furniture I see looks like mismatched hand-me-downs or garage-sale fare. The room in question is one of three off the main hall; the third is a bathroom. The master bedroom is at the end of the hall, and the door is open. The bed is unmade on one side, while the other appears neatly tucked. This makes sense given that Meredith worked the night shift. We do a quick but thorough survey and filming of the room, opening nightstand and dresser drawers—Meredith has a nice collection of lacy, frilly underthings, I note—and closets. It’s standard fare for the most part, with nothing that would appear to be of evidentiary value.

  It doesn’t take long to scope out the bathroom. It is small, but adequate. We find the usual potpourri of hygiene products for both men and women, though John’s are minimal. The medicine cabinet offers no surprises, just a few over-the-counter pain meds and one prescription. I take the prescription bottle out—it only has four pills in it—and take a picture of it. It is for Meredith, a supply of sleeping pills. This doesn’t surprise me since I know Meredith worked nights, and it’s not uncommon for night-shift workers to have trouble sleeping during the day.

  We move on to the second bedroom, which is clearly being used as an office. It has a battered wooden hutch with a desktop computer, a wicker chair that looks like a leftover from someone’s lawn furniture, and a nicked, pressed-wood bookcase painted—badly—in white. There aren’t many books in the bookcase, and most of them are textbooks related to laboratory training and the medical field. The rest of the space on the shelves is filled with knickknacks, photo albums, candles, and a handful of framed photos.

  “Can you get me the life insurance policy for your wife?” Hurley asks John.

  He nods and walks over to a corner of the room, where he picks up a metal lockbox from the floor. It isn’t locked, and when he opens it, I see several hanging folders with tabbed labels. He pulls out one that reads INSURANCE and hands it to Hurley, who then hands it off to me.

  “We also need to look at what’s in the one labeled retirement,” I say to John. “Given that Meredith was working with Craig on her plan.” As her husband, John stands to inherit his wife’s retirement fund as well as the life insurance. To a guy who’s been unemployed for two years, living with a wife who likely controlled the purse strings, that has to be appealing.

  John gives us a perturbed look but pulls the file and hands it to me. As I flip through the contents, Hurley starts rummaging through desk drawers. He finds more hanging files, the labels marked with items related to household bills. He pulls out the one for the phone bill and sets it on top of the desk.

  I find the life insurance policy for Meredith and wince when I see that it was also issued by Patty Volker. John was correct about the policy, as well as his own, which is also in the folder. Both are for ten thousand, not a huge amount, but a major windfall for someone like John who is unemployed and broke, especially when you take into consideration the additional work policy. Not to mention that John might also have been mad as hell that his sugar mama was doing the nasty with someone else, someone with much better financial prospects.

  I take Meredith’s policy and set it atop the phone bill folder, then, after flipping through the financial forms and reports in the retirement folder, I add it to the pile as well. John stands to gain another seventeen grand from that fund.

  Hurley wakes up the computer once he’s done going through the drawers, and the monitor reveals a desktop filled with icons. I see several that are games and guess that this is how John spends a lot of his spare time—something I imagine he has plenty of. There are also icons for a variety of websites, including some gambling sites, a dozen or so word-processing documents, some financial software, and a number of online shopping sites.

  “What did Meredith use for an e-mail server?” Hurley asks John.

  “Gmail. That’s what we both use.”

  Hurley launches the Internet, and i
t opens to the Google home page. He clicks on the Gmail icon and gets a prompt for a user ID and password. He turns and gives John a questioning look.

  “Her user ID is MeredithL,” he says, “Capital M, capital L.” Hurley types it in. “The password is vampire, all lowercase,” John adds at the appropriate moment. This makes me smile. It’s the perfect password for a lab technician.

  Hurley types it in and gets an error message. “Are you sure there aren’t any capital letters in it?” he asks.

  “I don’t think so,” John says, scratching his belly.

  Hurley tries different variations anyway, using caps and adding numbers. None of the attempts work.

  “She must have changed her password,” John says, his face growing dark. “Makes sense, I guess, since she apparently had something to hide.” He looks away, staring out the window, his cheek muscles twitching angrily.

  Hurley’s phone rings, breaking the tension a smidge, and both John and I stand by, staring at him, as he takes the call. Aside from his initial, “Hurley here,” when he answers, he says nothing for a minute or so. Then he thanks the caller and hangs up.

  “We found your wife’s car in the hospital parking lot,” he says, and I wince at his use of the term your wife’s car, since I sense that John is already feeling battered and emasculated with regard to the marital financial situation. I wonder if Hurley is unaware of this jab, or if he did it intentionally. He likes to keep people emotionally labile during an investigation, but he can also get so focused on details at times that he doesn’t think about how things might sound when he says them.

  John digests the information for a few seconds. “So, this guy she was with probably picked her up at the hospital?”

  Hurley nods.

  “She was trying to hide her tracks,” John says miserably. I don’t think the man can get any lower, but I’m wrong.

  Hurley changes topics and says, “We’re going to need to take this computer with us.”

  John’s look shifts to one of irritation. “Why? It’s my computer, too.”

  “You can probably get it back at some point,” Hurley says in an effort to calm him. He leaves out the fact that it might be months, or even years, if ever.

  “Probably? I can probably get it back?” He lets out an irritated huff and shifts his feet like he wants to pace, except the room isn’t big enough. “Do you know how long we had to save just to be able to buy that damned computer? First you confiscate my car, and now my computer. Do you people think I’m made of money?”

  I feel for the guy, but there isn’t much we can do to placate him. “You could use the computers at the library in the meantime,” I suggest. “They’re free.”

  “And almost always in use,” he snaps. “Believe me, I’ve been there and done that.”

  “Sorry,” I say with a shrug. “But I imagine that the life insurance money will be enough to buy you a nice new computer. And a car.”

  Hurley and I both watch John’s face closely as he gives me a look of distaste, maybe even disgust. But something about it feels forced, and beneath the heat of our scrutiny, he suddenly turns away and storms from the room.

  I give Hurley a look, my eyebrows raised. He nods. We now have a primary suspect. Hurley follows John, who has escaped into the bedroom. I hear him tell John he needs him to strip so we can collect his clothes as evidence. An argument ensues, during which John demands to know why he’s the one being treated like a suspect when some asshole killed his wife, and what his clothing could possibly have to do with anything. But in the end, he capitulates and provides the clothing. Hurley also tests John’s hands for GSR, a test that comes up negative. This doesn’t mean John didn’t fire a gun. He could have fired one and washed carefully afterward, or been wearing protective gear of some sort, like long-cuffed gloves.

  While the clothing and GSR drama is playing out in the main bedroom, I shut down the computer, disconnect the peripherals, and label each piece with an evidence tag. I do the same with the files, placing them in evidence bags.

  Hurley emerges from the bedroom carrying John’s clothes, and the two of us haul all of our evidence to the front door. We pass John along the way. He is leaning against the doorframe into the kitchen, his arms folded tightly over his chest, his lips drawn thin and tight. He is giving us what my mother calls the evil eye, and as we head out the door I hear him mutter a few choice words behind us.

  CHAPTER 9

  We load up the car with our evidentiary cargo and head back to the police station. Hurley pulls into the underground garage area where Jonas has his lab. Jonas pulls in with the PD’s evidence van as we’re unloading our booty from the car.

  “I was just about to call you,” Hurley says to him.

  “Why?” Jonas asks, opening the van’s side door and removing a box of bagged evidence. I can see the gun from the motel room, four cell phones, a couple of bullet casings, and several other bags that contain fibers of some sort.

  “Four phones?” Hurley says, his eyebrows shooting up as he eyes the motel room evidence haul.

  Jonas nods. “Turns out Craig and Meredith both had burner phones as well as their regular phones. I took a quick peek, and it looks like the burner phones were used exclusively between the two of them.”

  “I want you to do the phone forensics ASAP,” Hurley says. “See what sort of train of contacts you can establish between the two of them. I want to know how long they’ve been seeing one another, and whether or not there was any animosity between them. I also want to know about any text messages between either victim and their spouse.”

  Jonas nods. “I’ll do that first thing.”

  “I also want you to dust the casings you collected and any bullets remaining in that gun for prints. See if you can find any prints other than Craig Knowlton’s.”

  “It sounds like you think the scene at the motel was a setup,” Jonas says, looking intrigued.

  Hurley nods. “We have several indications that suggest Craig Knowlton was left-handed,” he explains. “And since the gun was found by his right hand, I doubt he shot himself.”

  “Any potential suspects?” Jonas asks, setting his box of evidence on a table and then removing its contents.

  “Either of the spouses could have done it if they knew about the affair,” Hurley says. “When you look at the phones, check to see if either of the victims had GPS activated. It would be helpful if we could track their movements. When is Knowlton’s car getting here?”

  “Should be any moment,” Jonas says.

  “It has GPS capabilities,” Hurley says. “See what you can dig up from it, too.”

  Jonas nods again.

  As if on cue, a tow truck arrives and idles just outside the garage door with Craig Knowlton’s car loaded onto the bed. With both the evidence van and Hurley’s car parked in the garage, it can’t deliver its cargo. Hurley goes to move his car out of the way while I wait with Jonas. The tow truck’s passenger door opens up, and Laura Kingston hops out.

  “Hey, Mattie,” she says, practically skipping into the garage. Laura is an annoyingly cheerful person. I’ve never seen her look or act depressed, or even serious. She’s consistently bubbly, smiling, and upbeat. When I first met her, I found this trait charming. Now it grates on my nerves at times. No one can be that happy all the time.

  “What a case, eh?” she says as she approaches. She manages to take a breath before releasing a rapid-fire barrage of speech. “Quite the intriguing situation. Clearly someone thought they had cooked up the perfect murder, but they weren’t as smart as they thought they were, were they?” She doesn’t give us a chance to answer. “Yep, they screwed up royally with that left-handed business, and now we get to catch ourselves a killer. Did you know that only ten to twelve percent of people in the world are left-handed? And it’s twice as common in men as it is in women. In fact, four of our last seven presidents were left-handed. Being left-handed means you have a greater risk of developing psychosis, but it also means you are more like
ly to choose a career in the creative arts. Lefties also tend to drink more alcohol than right-handed people. And left-handers even have their own celebratory day. Did you know that? I love this job! I love nailing these smug bastards who think they’re smarter than everyone else. And we will get them, won’t we? We always do. It’s foolish to think you can pull one over on us. We can—”

  “Laura!” I say loudly, trying to be heard over the sound of the tow truck’s winch and motor.

  “Oops!” she says with a silly giggle. She clamps a hand over her mouth for a second. “There I go again,” she continues, dropping her hand. “Sorry. I know I get carried away at times, but I just get so excited by this stuff and I can’t seem to help . . .”

  I give her an overly dramatic, exasperated look, and her self-awareness manages to kick in as she realizes she’s rambling an apology about her rambling. The hand once again covers her mouth, and this time she leaves it there.

  “It’s okay,” Jonas says to her. “I admire your enthusiasm.”

  Judging from his goo-goo–eyed expression, it’s not Laura’s enthusiasm that Jonas admires, or at least it’s not the primary thing.

  “Jonas,” I say, “why don’t you have Laura move your van? There’s another car that’s going to be here shortly. Meredith Lansing’s car is being towed from the hospital lot.”

  Jonas nods and tosses Laura the keys, and we are granted a few minutes of blessed quiet.

  “None of these phones is password-protected,” Jonas says to me after a while. He has gloved up and removed Meredith’s and Craig’s phones from their evidence bags. “That should make this a snap,” he goes on. “I’ll let you know what I find.”

  “Those computers won’t be quite so easy,” Hurley says, nodding toward the Lansing and Knowlton computers. “They’re all password-protected.”

  “I’ll do what I can,” Jonas says. “I might hand the computers off to Arnie. He typically has better luck with those than I do. If we can’t figure them out, we’ll have to send them off to Madison.”