Heartstone

by Phillip Margolin

  She stopped and looked back and forth between Marcus and Shindler, waiting for some word of approval. Marcus gave it to her.

  “We appreciate your help. Now what did you see or hear?”

  “Well, I live near the entrance to the park. My backyard runs right into the woods at the edge of the park. We used to get a lot of prowlers. Kids mostly.

  “John-that’s my husband-he’s a salesman and he’s away a lot. He was worried that someone might break in while he was away. We’ve been burglarized twice already. So he bought two German Shepherd guard dogs.

  “Last night, I was sleeping, when the dogs woke me. They were out in the yard. I let them roam out there and they have a large doghouse. They’re on a leash, but it’s pretty long.

  “Anyway, I got up and looked outside and I saw a girl running away. It was dark, and she was almost off of the property when I looked, but I’m certain it was a girl and she seemed to be coming out of the woods. At least, she was running from the woods.”

  “About what time was this, Mrs. Pullen?” Shindler asked.

  “I thought about that and I really don’t know. I didn’t look at a clock, but I did go to bed at midnight, so it must have been after that.”

  “Well, thank you, Mrs. Pullen. This officer will take a detailed statement from you and we will be back in touch later. I appreciate your taking the time to come up here. If we had more good citizens like you, our job would be a lot easier.”

  The woman blushed and shrugged.

  “I just thought it might be important.”

  She turned toward the ambulance again.

  “The radio said he was…was stabbed?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She shuddered.

  “The park used to be a nice place to live. In the last few years, it’s gotten so bad we’re thinking of moving.”

  She shook her head and Shindler and Marcus walked away. Marcus spotted a short, slender man in civilian clothes standing halfway across the meadow. He called out to him. The man looked up and waved and Marcus signaled for him to meet them by Walter’s car.

  “Giannini,” Marcus asked when they reached the vehicle, “did you go through the car?”

  “First thing,” Giannini answered.

  “Did you find anything that suggests that there was a girl with the boy?”

  “I’m afraid so.” Giannini glanced at the plastic bag that still sat on the hood. “You’ve seen the purse? There was a woman’s coat in the back seat and I found a button that looks like it came from a woman’s blouse on the front seat. Mort found a piece of broken fingernail with nail polish on it on the floor of the car below the steering wheel.”

  Marcus sent Giannini back to the field.

  “A girl, too,” Shindler said.

  “It makes sense. A good-looking kid like that out here in Lover’s Lane on a Friday night. There would have to be a girl.”

  “Then where is she?”

  Shindler turned to the young officer who was watching the property bag.

  “Has that purse been checked for I.D. yet?”

  “Yes, sir. The purse belongs to an Elaine Murray.”

  Shindler mulled this over for a moment. Then he ducked his head inside the car and fiddled with the catch on the glove compartment. The metal door flopped down. There were some road maps, a triple A book and a package of Trojans. He remembered that the kid had one in his wallet.

  “You don’t think it’s possible that the girl killed him, do you?” Shindler asked.

  “It’s possible, but she would have needed help.”

  “And, if she wasn’t involved…”

  “Then, my young friend,” Marcus said, “we have something more than murder.”

  Harvey Marcus had been on the force for eighteen years. When Shindler had transferred to Homicide, Marcus had taken him under his wing. He had been fascinated by the shy and awkward young detective who seemed so lost inside his large, ungainly body. Marcus and Shindler had been partners for three years now and Shindler was still a mystery to Marcus. Marcus had noticed his partner’s emotional response to the boy’s body. He was surprised by it, but this was not out of character for Shindler, whose moods shifted unpredictably and who could be intensely emotional one minute and icily intellectual the next.

  Shindler was a solitary man. He was a bachelor. A twenty-four-hour cop. He could be charming when his job required it, but Marcus had never seen him with his guard down in a social situation. Once, Ruth, Marcus’s wife, had tried to fix him up with one of her fellow teachers. Marcus had warned her, but she had insisted. The evening had been a disaster. Roy had squirmed through dinner, saying almost nothing. He would not speak to Marcus for two days.

  “This is it,” Marcus said.

  The Walters’ house was a two-story, white suburban ranch constructed of brick. A beautifully manicured lawn sprinkled with a few large shade trees framed it. Shindler parked the car and they followed a slate walk to the front door.

  A young-looking woman in her early forties opened the door. Shindler felt his stomach tighten and his throat go dry. After all the times he had done it, he had still not found an easy way to tell the survivors about their dead.

  “Mrs. Walters?”

  “Yes,” she answered through the screen door.

  He held out his badge.

  “I’m Detective Shindler and this is Detective Marcus. We’re with the Portsmouth Police.”

  In the space of a second, the woman’s face showed fear, hope and puzzlement. She stepped back and ushered them in.

  “Is this about Richie? Have you found him?”

  “Yes, it is. Is your husband home?”

  “Of course. I’ll call him.”

  She walked a few steps down a hallway carpeted in powder blue and called her husband. Shindler looked into the stylishly furnished living room. Everything was done in soft yellows and blues. There was a comfortable-looking sofa.

  “Can we sit down?” he asked. She would need to when he told her why they had come. There was a bar in one corner. That was good.

  “Mrs. Walters, where did your son go last night?”

  Before she could answer, a tall, thin man with a balding head and a warm, self-confident look entered from the hallway. He was a man who was used to being in charge. Even so, Shindler thought, that look of self-confidence would have to have been put on this morning. He had to be nervous about his son’s disappearance.

  The detectives stood up.

  “Dear, this is Detective Shindler and Detective Marcus. They’re here about Richie.”

  There was an anxious note in her speech. Mr. Walters shook hands. He had a firm grip. Businessman or lawyer, Shindler mused. He looked like he would be capable of handling his wife’s and his sorrow.

  “I certainly appreciate this quick service,” he said.

  “Pardon?” Marcus asked.

  “We only called in about Richie an hour ago,” Mr. Walters explained.

  “I see. When did you last see your son, Mr. Walters?”

  “Friday night. He had a date and he left the house about eight o’clock.”

  Mr. Walters paused. For the first time, a flicker of doubt intruded on his self-confidence.

  “Is there something wrong? Is he hurt?”

  They never imagine the worst. They never ask you if he is dead. They just prod a little, not really wanting to know.

  “Who was your son out with?”

  “His girlfriend, Elaine Murray. They were going to a movie. He often comes in late and we don’t hear him. I thought he might be sleeping late. He always closes the door to his room when he is sleeping, so I didn’t know if he was in or out. Then I checked his bed and it hadn’t been slept in.”

  Mrs. Walters stopped talking. Somewhere during the speech her hand had entwined with her husband’s and they had moved closer together.

  “Why did you call the police? It’s less than a day since he went out.”

  Mr. Walters looked relieved.

  �
�I told Carla we should have waited,” he said. Carla Walters turned toward her husband. She was beginning to think that he had been right. That she had overreacted.

  “I…Maybe I was foolish. But I called the Murrays and Elaine hadn’t come home either.”

  “I see,” Shindler said. Now came the hard part. The part that he had been putting off. He tried to think of a diplomatic way of phrasing it. There was none.

  “I’m afraid that I have some very bad news for you.”

  He could picture what they were going through. It was the same vertigo that he had felt years ago when he sat with his family in their living room and a balding detective with tired eyes told them that Abe was dead. He had felt himself spinning then as the Walters must be spinning now.

  Shindler laid the autopsy report on Marcus’s desk and pulled up a chair. The Homicide Bureau of the Portsmouth Police Department was no different than any of the other detective divisions. It was a large, antiseptic room filled with old wooden desks at which sat poorly dressed men of varying shapes, ages and sizes. The only thing that they had in common was their cynicism.

  “It’s all in there. I had a chat with Beauchamp and he said he thinks that there must have been at least two people with two different weapons.”

  Shindler picked up the report. The autopsy had been performed by Dr. Francis R. Beauchamp, the County Medical Examiner. He had found multiple stab wounds to the body, a skull fracture and other abrasions involving portions of the body, all of which indicated that some type of severe altercation had occurred. There was blood on the body and stab and puncture wounds and there were abrasions and bruises around the scrotum. The head injury was a depressed skull fracture made from behind by some type of blunt instrument. The stab wounds were generally about one-half inch in length and about a quarter or an eighth inch in width. Some of them were three to three and one-half inches deep, penetrating to the diaphragm. A total of twenty puncture wounds were found. Death was due to internal bleeding into the left chest cavity as one of the puncture wounds had passed through the lung.

  “Beauchamp thinks that the wounds that did the damage were made by a sharp-bladed instrument. He thinks Walters was standing upright and that the killer approached from the front and left side to have made the death wound.”

  “What about the damage to the head?”

  “After. It was inflicted when he was down.”

  “You mean they beat him like that after he was dead?”

  Marcus nodded.

  “What kind of animals are we dealing with, Harvey?”

  “The worst kind, Roy. You see that sentence about the depressed fracture. Beauchamp explained that to me. There are two types of fracture, a linear fracture, in which the skull is simply split or cracked, and a depressed fracture in which the skull is physically driven into the brain, just like splitting a melon. Those boys did a lot of extra work on Walters and none of it was necessary. They must have known that he was dead, but they struck him on the head in several places. There was a prominent injury above the left ear where the wound gaped so wide that you could see the brain through the wound and another where the skull was so badly smashed that his brain actually spilled through the wound.”

  Marcus was speaking in low, clipped tones. Shindler was thinking of the boy’s head, the way he had seen it in the car. All that done after he was dead. Then lifting him and putting him in the car.

  “Have they found the girl yet?” he asked quietly.

  Marcus shook his head.

  “That park is nine square miles and it’s all timber and brush. There are hundreds of ravines and culverts in there that are overgrown with vegetation. If she’s dead and they’ve hidden her in the park, we might never find her.”

  The phone rang. Shindler answered it. He was grateful for the distraction. It was the secretary at the front desk.

  “There’s a Mr. Shultz calling with information about the Walters murder. Should I put him through?”

  There had been the usual number of nut calls that the police get on any publicized homicide, but Shindler was not passing over any possible leads.

  “Put him through, Margie.”

  There was a click and a man said “Hello.”

  “Mr. Shultz? I’m Detective Roy Shindler. I understand you have some information on the murder of Richie Walters?”

  “I’m not certain it will help, but my wife told me to call. We went to dinner Friday night at a restaurant just off of Monroe Boulevard. We finished very late. About eleven thirty we were walking to our car, which we had parked on Monroe, when we saw two cars racing each other. I noticed one, because it was very fancy. I think they said customed or customized. The other one, I’m not sure about. I really didn’t pay much attention to it.

  “This morning I read in the papers about that murder in the park. The car I saw sounds like the one they described in the paper. If I could see it, I could tell for sure.”

  “We can send an officer out to drive you downtown, if that’s all right.”

  “Sure. But I’m not finished. There was something else. The red car-the one I remember-it made the other car crash.”

  “It made it crash?”

  “Yes. I don’t know what happened, because we looked away and they were several blocks away when we heard it. But we heard a crash and the other car-the dark one-was spun around in our direction. I guess the car wasn’t damaged too bad, because it drove away in a little bit.”

  “Well, thank you, Mr. Shultz. That is important information. I’ll send an officer out to see you and to take a statement. Thanks, again.”

  Giannini had called them down to the lab fifteen minutes after Mr. Shultz’s call. They had found something at the scene and he wanted them to see it.

  “First, the small stuff. We found no prints in or on the car. The car had been wiped pretty thoroughly. We found a man’s sock under the car when we moved it and another man’s sock near the area where the dirt road enters the meadow. There were some fibers that we have matched with the socks that were found under the windshield wipers. It’s my guess that the killer used the socks like gloves and wiped the prints off of the car.”

  “Is there any way of tracing a person through the socks?”

  “Oh, we know where the socks came from. Walters was barefoot. I already had someone check with the family. They’re his socks.”

  Giannini glanced down at a sheet of paper he was holding.

  “Next, it looks like the motive wasn’t robbery. There was thirty dollars in his wallet and twenty in the purse. There was also an expensive camera in the back seat.”

  “You said that you had something important for us,” Shindler prodded.

  “Right.”

  Giannini walked over to a filing cabinet and rummaged in one of the steel drawers.

  “One of my men came across this stuff in some bushes near the base of the hill that leads down from the meadow to the paved road.”

  Shindler had a rough picture of the place. The dirt road wound upward from the paved road for a while, then straightened out into the meadow. If you did not use the dirt road, a straight line would take you down an embankment that had several steep sections. The embankment was covered with underbrush.

  Giannini pulled three items out of a manila envelope and set them on a table. There was a cigarette lighter, a blue rat-tail comb and a pair of feminine glasses. The glasses were constructed out of plastic and metal. The temples were made of yellow gold wire. The frames were reddish plastic on top and yellow gold on the bottom. The top piece curled up at the ends and was harlequin-shaped with rhinestone trim at the tips.

  “Dr. Webber?” Marcus inquired.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Detective Marcus. I called you from my office an hour ago.”

  The optometrist had been unlocking his door when Marcus approached him in the hallway of his office building.

  “I apologize for asking you to work on your day off, but this is very important.”

  “Of cou
rse. Come in. I wasn’t doing anything anyway and this makes for an exciting break in my routine.”

  The doctor turned on the lights and led Marcus through a small waiting room into a large office lined with medical books. The doctor sat behind a paper-covered desk and motioned Marcus into an easy chair.

  “Greg Heller told me that you helped him out in a burglary case a few years ago.”

  “Oh, that.” The doctor smiled. “Yes. He needed to trace a person through a pair of glasses and I showed him how to do it.”

  “I have the same problem that Greg had, but our situation is more urgent. Have you read the morning papers? The story about the boy who was murdered in Lookout Park?”

  “The Walters boy. Terrible. His family belongs to my church. I don’t know them well, but the boy was thought of very highly.”

  That was the general picture so far, Marcus thought. Nobody with a bad word about Richie Walters.

  “What I am going to tell you is just between us. We are going to let the story break soon enough, because we don’t think that we can keep it quiet for too long, but I want your word that you won’t leak what I tell you.”

  “Certainly.”

  “There was a girl with Walters and she’s missing. We are searching the woods and we didn’t want thrill seekers out messing up the investigation. We also wanted to give the people who have her, if she is still alive, a chance to make contact, if this is a kidnapping.

  “So far, we have only one clue to the identity of the people involved: a pair of woman’s glasses. I was hoping that you could tell me how to find the owner.”

  “Did Greg tell you what was involved the last time?”

  “No. He just said that you knew how to do it.”

  “I know, but it’s not easy and it’s not fast. Did you bring the glasses?”

  Marcus fished an envelope out of his overcoat pocket. He handed the glasses to the doctor.

  “Prescriptions are a lot like fingerprints,” Dr. Webber said as he rotated the glasses in his hands. “It is highly unlikely that you would find two people with identical prescriptions and identical frames.

  “We have four numbers to work with for comparison. When someone comes to me for glasses, I determine what his prescription should be. I don’t grind the lenses myself, so I send written instructions to the people who construct the lenses. When they receive my instructions, they take an unfinished lens. One that has not been worked on. The curvature of the surface of that lens is called the basic curve.