Danger in Cat World (Shawn Danger Mysteries Book 1)

by Nina Post

  Shawn put a hand on the smooth, cool mahogany bannister. The iron scrollwork underneath the bannister was elaborately complicated. He took another look around the huge entry hall, then bounded up the limestone stairs two at a time to the second floor, the fabric of his pants straining around the tops of his thighs when he stepped up. He would look around the first floor more after he looked at the scene. He would cover every inch of the house, in due time.

  On the second floor, Shawn nodded to the patrol officer guarding the crime scene. He took a quick look around the area first. He found four bedrooms — one a large centrally-placed master — each with their own bathrooms, and each room, even the bathrooms, had its own fireplace. Shawn had one fireplace in his house, and he felt lucky to have the one, even in a region of the country with hard winters. But there were probably servants to keep the fires stoked.

  Two of the bedrooms were for a guest or one of the aforementioned servants, though they probably didn’t call them servants anymore. The rooms were tidily kept, each similarly furnished with double beds made up with a practiced hand, and with oak nightstands, bureaus, and pants hangers.

  The other room was decorated with whimsical green wallpaper with a pattern like WiFi signals. The plush carpet had odd long marks running through it, in circles and nearly straight lines. There was a Japanese-style mat on the floor, a bureau, a few large balls, a weird old TV set, and a pot of dandelions. He thought it was a child’s room, but there wasn’t a proper bed. He shook his head — rich people — and went into the sitting room nearby, ducking around more yellow tape.

  Over the double mahogany doors of the master bedroom was a sign that read, In Good Times, Beware. “Interesting,” he muttered, heading into the primary crime scene.

  The body had been found in a room with cherry-wood wall paneling, an iron-grated stone fireplace, and Tiffany-style lamp globes on round tables. The heiress was prone over a puce-color velvet sofa that looked as enveloping as a puffy cloud. Blood had darkened the velvet under her shoulders. A red silk cushion rested on her right hip as though a housekeeper put the pillow there, hoping the guests wouldn’t notice the body. The victim’s red hair was neatly spread under her, and possibly arranged. Her eyes were closed. Had someone closed them?

  Shawn walked around the back of the sofa and leaned down. The back of her head was obscured, but he could see the edge of a large wound, the blood thick in matted hair. He’d have to wait for the ME to find out more, but it looked like someone had hit her with something heavy on the back of her skull. He put a finger on her artery to check for a pulse, as was his habit.

  One of the patrol officers brought Shawn an expired driver’s license he had found in a desk drawer on the first floor. Though the employee who called it in had identified the victim as Haviland Sylvain, it was good to have some official ID. People had made mistakes before.

  Five minutes later, the techs straggled up the stairs, toolboxes in hand. Shawn had them dust for prints and they looked through their square light boxes around the door, on the light switch, on all surfaces in the room. Though everyone knew their jobs, it was part of his to make sure that no aspect of protocol was missed, so he directed them to look for fibers and hair, for spatter, and for anything that could be the murder weapon. Besides, he wasn’t in the city anymore, and they didn’t get many homicides.

  One of the techs took video footage, and another photographed the scene, working inward from the outskirts of the room and finishing with close-ups and different angles. The most important part of any homicide was DNA evidence, and it was his job to make sure the collection process was irreproachable.

  Shawn directed the videographer to get close-ups with the evidence, then had all of the techs to repeat the process in the large master bedroom, which looked like a windstorm had raged through it.

  He had a patrol officer and a tech go downstairs with a still and video camera and fingerprinting gear to document any evidence of a break-in through doors and windows. “Check outside around the windows for ladder indents, too,” Shawn added. Then, to the patrol officers and the techs, “I want every room of this house dusted with powder and sprayed with Luminol.”

  One of the officers snorted a laugh. “Detective, this place has, what, twenty rooms?”

  Shawn focused on him, voice flat. “Twenty-four rooms. Better get started. Could take all week.” They sighed and grumbled and walked off. Shawn told one of the officers to start a background check on the victim and on Kendall Peterson.

  The medical examiner trudged up the stairs, gasping, her white-blonde hair swinging down in front of her face. “Man, those stairs are a bitch.” She put her hands on her knees as soon as she got to the landing and took a minute to catch her breath. “It’s as though…I have never… exerted myself…in my whole life…until just now.”

  She put a hand up in a wave as she straightened. “Hey, fellas.”

  Dr. Landry Evans was the acting chief in a three-county circuit. She worked alternating weekends with a second pathologist in a different county to achieve a twenty-four-hour autopsy turnaround time, a point of pride with her, Shawn knew. She performed approximately two hundred fifty autopsies per year, and still found time to throw weekly lunches for her staff in the grassy area behind the morgue and go on the occasional weekend driving trip to the Finger Lakes wine region.

  Shawn envied her ability to let work go, if even for a day — something he couldn’t do, and considered a superhero feat.

  She glanced sidelong at him. “Detective.”

  “Doctor,” Shawn said, with a slow grin.

  She gave him an approving look up and down as she addressed all of them. “I’m sure I’m stating the obvious, but this is a high-profile case that will probably get national attention. Let’s do our best work.”

  Everyone around them went back to talking or looking at what they had been looking at.

  “You’re here,” Shawn said. “That makes it high-profile, far as I’m concerned.”

  The ME snapped on a pair of rubber gloves. “Flatterer. You know, I made the best roast quail last night, and opened a terrific cabernet.” She smiled, with the implicit statement that he could have been there to enjoy it but really missed out.

  Shawn flashed a sidelong grin. “Let me make sure the techs are done, and then I’ll release the body to you.”

  “We’re finished,” the lead tech said in response.

  “I’ll hand it over to Dr. Evans, then.” Shawn nodded to her.

  The ME looked around. “This is a lovely sitting room. Too bad our lady here had to die in it.”

  A room just for sitting. He could sit anywhere. Why did they need a special room for it?

  She leaned over the victim, gently took her head and turned it to the side. “Well, her skull was crushed. That’s a lot of blunt force trauma right there. If that wasn’t the cause of death, it would have killed her eventually, possibly within hours. I’ll know more with time of death, and of course, the autopsy.”

  Shawn hypothesized that whoever killed his victim had an intimate relationship with her, or imagined they did. He tried not to sound too eager. “So it’s a homicide?”

  The ME cocked her head. “The only way this is an accidental death is if she fell down the stairs and someone brought her here. This looks like a homicide, but you’ll have to wait for my official report.”

  Only this ME could make official report sound sexy. Maybe other MEs could, too, but he didn’t know about them, and frankly, one was enough.

  The patrol officer and the tech Shawn had sent downstairs returned. The tech said, “An intruder could have come in through a hinged doggy door in the solarium downstairs, northwest corner. No fluids, no prints, no fibers around the door.”

  Shawn watched as Dr. Evans conducted her external and internal examination of the body. After several minutes, she said, “I estimate that time of death was at three a.m., based on lividity, coagulation, rigor, and body temp.”

  “Could a woman have done this
?” Shawn asked.

  “Yes, absolutely. As long as they were taller than five-six, five-seven.” She probed the wound with one gloved hand, brow furrowed. “The weapon was round in shape, maybe the size of a softball. But hard enough to do damage like this. And there’s a pattern here. A ridge and – ” Dr. Evans got a distant look in her eyes as she felt the victim’s head. “A concave area.”

  “Meaning what, exactly?” Shawn asked.

  She gave him a look. The You’re cute but not that sharp look. “Meaning that if this were a homicide, the murder weapon made these particular impressions. The good news is, it should be easy to match the weapon to the wound.”

  “If we had a weapon.”

  “Are you still using that trampoline?” She put her tools away.

  “Yeah.” He grinned at her.

  “You know,” she said, tilting her head at him, “the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System has reported approximately three thousand emergency room injuries from trampoline use each year in the past few years. The most common injuries reported were sprains, strains, fractures, bruises, and soft-tissue injuries.”

  “I’m not exactly doing flips.” Shawn crossed his arms. “And if I had a piece of candy for each time you told me that, I could make a donkey piñata.”

  “Just so you know.” Her lips made a slight upcurve of a smile.

  “If I’m not bouncing on it like my grandmother in the ocean, Comet is usually sitting on it. Neither of us are daredevils when it comes to the trampoline.” It occurred to Shawn that what he just said didn’t exactly radiate with masculinity.

  The ME finished her work, winked at Shawn, then left the scene to him as she did a few final things with her tools. One of the patrol officers, Ed, sketched and measured the area of the scene and the location of physical evidence in relation to one another, including the body. Shawn knew that another officer was sketching and measuring the road entrance and all paths, entrances, exits, and windows. Fortunately, the county department had about two-hundred-fifty officers, so they could spare a handful for his case.

  Once Ed had finished measuring the room, and was dispatched to help with fingerprinting elsewhere on the floor, Shawn was alone in the room with the body. He nodded to one of the officers standing outside the room, who nodded back, understanding that Shawn meant, I want to be left alone — don’t let anyone in here.

  Shawn studied the position of the body, the wound, and the victim’s expression, which to him looked like she had been disappointed, but not very surprised to see who was about to kill her.

  He looked around again, slowly, from just in front of where the techs said she was attacked, seeing everything in that room, getting a feel for it. His wanted to mentally recreate what had happened, and the scene would tell him what he needed to know. It was a quick kill, without much of struggle, judging by the limited spatter and the intact room. The victim probably barely knew what had happened. She probably saw the killer’s arm move — he preferred killer over perp. A perp could have stolen a handbag. ‘Killer’ was a reminder of how this perp had committed the worst crime.

  Maybe the victim saw the weapon, heard the sound it made, felt the sticky liquid warmth of her own blood before she knew what had happened. Shawn could feel it himself for a moment.

  He shifted his focus to the sofa. Whoever killed the victim had caught her and put her there, which suggested some strength, but again, not necessarily from a man. The heiress was slim and not very tall. A woman, especially one operating on a flood of adrenaline, could bean her hard enough to crack her skull, then hold her up before guiding her to the sofa.

  There was no blood on the Turkish rug — some spatter, but not enough blood to indicate the heiress had been prone on the floor. It aligned with how nothing in the room was broken. There wasn’t a chase around the room, or much fighting back. It was fast, it took her by surprise, and her expression in death seemed to say, ‘I should have known.’

  Shawn pictured the kill. One scenario: the heiress led the assailant out of her bedroom — whether invited or not — and into what she thought was a more neutral area. Maybe she was trying to get away from them. They argue. Maybe the killer imagined they had an intimate relationship with her, and she either rejected that, wasn’t aware of it, or thought it would resolve itself.

  And it did resolve itself, with her skull caved in.

  Maybe the heiress was in her bedroom when the killer came up to the second floor. They argued there first, then they followed her or forced her into the sitting room.

  Maybe the killer was telling the heiress about their feelings for the first time, or confronting her about it, in a place they were comfortable in. Maybe the place where they worked. The killer had probably been to this floor before, had probably been in all of these rooms. Shawn didn’t think this was the work of a stranger to her.

  “Detective?” A patrol officer leaned into the room. Shawn knew he had that creepy, thousand-yard stare. He waved off the cop without looking at him, and thankfully, he went away.

  Unless the house was on fire, he didn’t want to be disturbed.

  It was a small hiccup, and Shawn easily went back into his thoughts, like when he woke from a dream, for just a moment, and could go right back into it.

  The killer put their hand around the weapon, probably out of sight, as they argued. Maybe she had turned away, because they bludgeoned her from behind.

  Maybe she was trying to be kind, but it was a reality the killer didn’t like or was unwilling to accept.

  Maybe it was something else — an employee who was fired. Maybe the heiress looked away for just a second. Sometimes, looking away for a second was all it took to lose a child, to get your skull crushed, to crash your car.

  Shawn was wary of jumping to conclusions without evidence, without logical premises. He was wary of narrow thinking. And he was wary of excluding possibilities. Tunnel vision didn’t solve cases, it ruined them.

  The killer had obviously planned their entrance, premeditated killing her – or at least hurting her. They were careful, had worn gloves, hadn’t left any obvious evidence. They had picked this time for a reason, though it always seemed like homicide calls came in between three and four. He would have to work on the timeline, find the last person who had seen her alive and work from there. Oh, and find out what her schedule was. Maybe the killer knew she kept strange hours, would be up that late. Maybe they wanted her fast asleep, but she wasn’t, and that took them by surprise.

  The spatter indicated that she was standing in front of the sofa when she was attacked, and she never made contact with the floor. Maybe she fell to her knees and they picked her up from that position. Maybe they cleared her face of her hair, then placed her arms at her sides, because there was virtually no way she could have been attacked like that then just fallen on the sofa in that position.

  No, they arranged her.

  Did they bring their own weapon, or did they opportunistically grab one from the house? If the killer were breaking into the house to sexually assault her but not necessarily kill her, and was taken by surprise that she was up — if it hadn’t gone the way the killer had thought it would — then maybe they grabbed a weapon from the house.

  Right now he had a sackful of maybes.

  The patrol officer near the door poked his head around and Shawn held up a finger without looking at him. Just another minute.

  The killer would have entered her bedroom and caused the damage afterward. The ME had mentioned the victim was almost certainly killed in the sitting room, not taken there, and the techs had corroborated that with their evidence.

  Whoever killed the heiress would be angry that she had made them do it, had driven them to that point. Maybe they loved her, would say they never wanted to hurt her — at least not until they did.

  They’d probably say it was her fault.

  Shawn needed to talk to all of the house employees right away. There had to be several. It was time-consuming enough for him to clean
his own small house, especially the bathrooms and the kitchen. He liked the simple manual task of cleaning – it was a good way to think, to be in motion and do something that let your mind wander. But he wouldn’t want to clean the Sylvain behemoth. That would take a small army.

  Shawn rubbed his chin, idly admiring his close shave, though he could have done a better job on the left side. The killer was someone who viewed the house as a place of comfort. If it wasn’t a husband or a lover or an ex, it was one of the employees.

  But the Sylvain house was a whole different matter. A mansion with twenty-four rooms had to have servants, or a team of outside vendors, or it would look like Miss Havisham’s, full of cobwebs and dust. And the house was very clean. The photo downstairs was completely dust-free, as was the clock and the table. The house looked like it had a thorough cleaning at least once a week.

  After the techs collected their evidence, Shawn took out his notepad and listed every single object in the sitting room, from the contents of the cabinets to the things on the cocktail cart. Anything could be important later.

  He went into the master bedroom next and swept his gaze over the destruction. This would take a while. He stepped over to the painting on the wall. It looked like a late Matisse, and Shawn had no reason to believe it couldn’t have been. The glass was in shards on the oak floor and the painting itself looked like it had birthed something terrible that fought its way out with claws. If the killer were targeting what meant the most to her, it was possible he had touched the painting after breaking the glass. Shawn looked out the doorway and caught a tech’s eye, then gestured for him to come in.