“Come!”
He opened the door and entered.
“Afternoon, boss,” he said.
“Sergeant,” Bautista said. “Something I can do for you?”
Bautista was an extremely handsome Latino in his late thirties, lots of black hair, broad shoulders. In fact, he reminded McQueen a lot of the actor who played in the movie Desperado, and also Zorro. The kind women creamed in their pants over.
“I’ve got a request, Loo,” McQueen said, “and it may take me a few minutes to lay it out.”
“Really,” Bautista said. “Is it important?” Bautista spoke with a slight accent.
McQueen was about to answer when he replayed the question in his mind. At first he’d heard the man say, “Is it important?” but then he heard, “Is it important to the squad?” which meant, of course, “Is it important to me?”
“Well, sir,” he answered, finally, “to tell you the truth I not only think it’s important, I think it would be quite a feather in our caps—all of us . . . but especially you, sir, as squad commander.”
“Is that a fact?” The man sat back in his chair and regarded McQueen with interest for the first time. “Then perhaps I’d better hear all about it.”
Chapter 42
McQueen was still making his case to Lieutenant Bautista when Sommers stuck her head in the door. “Excuse me, boss.”
“Yes, Detective?”
“Dennis, we caught one. Sounds bad. A mother and a child.”
McQueen closed his eyes; dead kids were the worst.
“Go ahead,” Bautista said, reaching for McQueen’s files. “Leave those with me and I’ll review them. I’ll have something for you by the end of the day.”
“Yes, sir.”
He handed them over and left the office. Sommers tossed him his jacket. He caught it and followed her and Tolliver out the door.
A couple radio cars were parked out front with their headlights on, but not the turret lights. There were people in the sidewalk, looking at the house. Some were dressed, some were in robes. McQueen thought they must be freezing, but apparently morbid curiosity was enough to keep them warm. He pulled his car to a stop right behind Sommers and Tolliver’s car.
A uniform stepped up to intercept them, the 70 numerals on his shirt collar catching the sun. His name tag said “Daniels.”
“Who do we have?” McQueen asked, showing the cop his ID. Sommers and Tolliver had their shields out, as well. Once they’d showed their shields, McQueen and Tolliver hung them from their jacket pockets. Sommers took a stretch cord from her purse and hung her detective’s gold shield around her neck.
“Mother and daughter,” the cop said. “Kathy and Miranda Richards.”
“Who found them?”
“A neighbor,” the man said. “She said she and the victim were supposed to have tea together. When she didn’t show up she came over, found the door unlocked, and walked in on . . . them.”
McQueen nodded to the uniforms outside the door and he, Sommers and Tolliver went inside.
It was a small house, an A-frame in need of repair. These homes on Albemarle Road were not the cream of the crop, McQueen had noticed as he drove up.
Inside, however, despite the current state of the place, he could see it was a neatly kept house. Neatly kept, probably by the woman who was now lying on her living room floor, about five feet away from a small girl who appeared to be—to have been—three or four years old. The first thing McQueen noticed was the child’s arms. From fingers to forearm, her arms were red and blistered.
“What happened here?” he said aloud, to no one in particular.
He took in the scene, the woman lying on the floor near a splintered coffee table with the child five feet away.
“Could it be an accident?” Sommers asked.
“Lay it out for me.”
“She’s carrying the child, trips and falls, hits her head, maybe snaps her neck.”
“And the child?”
“Is thrown across the room.”
“And lands with enough force to kill her?”
“Kids are fragile,” Tolliver said.
“You have any kids, Tolliver?” McQueen asked.
“No, but—”
“Kids are resilient.”
McQueen walked to the child and crouched down next to her to examine her.
“Look at this.”
Sommers crouched next to him. Tolliver came up behind them and leaned over.
“This side of her head,” McQueen said, pointing with his right index finger. “Can you see it?”
“It looks like . . . Jesus, is that an indentation?”
Sommers looked around. “‘What did she hit her head on? Not the floor. The floor wouldn’t do that.”
“She didn’t hit her head,” McQueen said. “I’ve seen that mark once before, on an adult.”
“So what is it?”
McQueen looked at Sommers and her partner and said, “She was kicked.”
Sommers winced.
“Somebody kicked her in the head?” Tolliver asked. “Man, that’s cold.”
“Looks like it,” McQueen said, standing up. Sommers followed, and Tolliver backed off to give them room.
“What about her arms?” Sommers asked. “Those blisters look fresh.”
“Yeah.”
McQueen went to the mother now, and as he crouched down he asked. “The M.E.?”
“Officer Daniels says he’s on his way,” Tolliver said.
McQueen examined the mother as well as he could without touching her. At the same time he slipped a pair of rubber gloves from the pocket of his jacket and donned them. You had to figure crime scene contamination into outside scenes, but inside McQueen always wore gloves, and insisted others wear them as well. Bailey knew that, so she pulled two pairs of gloves from her pocket and handed one to her partner.
“Was she kicked, too?” Sommers asked, peering past McQueen at the mother’s body.
McQueen leaned over the body for a close look at the woman’s face and head.
“There was no need,” he said. “She was killed instantly when her head hit this coffee table.”
“God, with enough force to splinter the thing?”
“It’s a cheap table,” McQueen said, “but it was sturdy enough to do the trick.”
McQueen examined her arms.
“Looks like there might be bruises on her upper arms,” he said. “They can tell us better when they examine her closer.”
“So she was grabbed, and pushed,” Sommers recited. “She falls, dropping the baby, hitting her head. Then, whoever did this walks to the kid and . . .”
“Right,” McQueen said.
“Sonofabitch,” Tolliver said.
“M.E.’s here,” one of the uniforms said from the door.
“Let him in,” McQueen said. “Bailey, I’m going to have a look around.”
“We’ll talk to him.”
Sommers knew that McQueen liked to walk a crime scene, and she left her boss to it.
Chapter 43
McQueen went upstairs.
The downstairs had a small living room and an eat-in kitchen. Upstairs there were two bedrooms, one very small—the child’s—and one master. He went into the larger one first and was immediately aware of a male presence. Husband or boyfriend? The neighbor would be able to tell them, but he snooped around anyway.
Most of the dresser drawers were filled with a woman’s things, as was the night table by the bed. When he opened the closet it was crammed with dresses, sweaters and other feminine garments. All the way on the right side he found a few men’s shirts and a pair of trousers. On the floor, among the jumble of shoes, were a pair of men’s loafers. Just enough essentials to show a man made himself at home here, occasionally.
Next he went into the bathroom. Again, most of the things were feminine, but in the medicine cabinet was a man’s razor. There were three toothbrushes on the sink, two adult size and one tiny one.
Just
for good measure he went through the child’s room, but found nothing of interest, except that the child apparently was still sleeping in a crib. He did not know for sure if this was normal, or if the mother simply didn’t have enough money to buy the child her first grown-up bed. Now she wouldn’t have to worry about it.
As unsettling as the burn victim that afternoon had been, this kind of crime sickened McQueen more. The death of the woman was a crime and a shame, but the death of the child . . . that was a catastrophe.
He went back downstairs, where Sommers and the M.E. were talking.
“Here he is,” Sommers said.
“You called it right, Sergeant,” Dr. Bannerjee said. “It looks like the kick to the head probably killed the child, and your supposition concerning the woman appears correct, as well.” Without rancor he added, “You’re going to put me out of a job, if I’m not careful.”
“I don’t think that’s likely, Doctor,” McQueen said. “What about the child’s arms?”
“Looks like she was scalded, all right, probably with hot water—extremely hot water.”
“I haven’t been in the kitchen yet,” McQueen said. “I don’t suppose there’s a big pot on the stove?”
“No, there’s not,” Sommers said.
“Wouldn’t have to be boiling water,” the doctor said. “Tap water in the tub would blister a child like that, especially if she was in it long enough.”
“Could that have been a cause of death?” McQueen asked.
“Water that comes out of the tap can reach a hundred and forty degrees,” the M.E. said, “and a child’s skin is very soft. If he’d immersed her for, say, thirty seconds or more, it could have killed her.”
“Jesus,” Sommers said. She looked pale. It was the first reaction McQueen had seen from her since they had arrived on the scene.
“You okay?”
“Fine.”
“Where’s the neighbor?”
“In the house across the street.”
“Let’s go and talk to her.”
“Can I have them?” the M.E. asked, motioning to the bodies.
“As soon as a supervisor shows up, you can take them,” McQueen said.
“Great,” the doctor said. He seemed to spend a lot of his time waiting for patrol supervisors to finally reach the scene of a crime.
“Tolliver, why don’t you wait here for the duty captain?”
“Sure, boss.”
“What did you find upstairs?” Sommers asked.
“I’ll tell you on the way.”
Chapter 44
The floor plan of Cynthia Hathaway’s house was almost identical to the one they had just come from.
“It’s too big for me,” she said, as they all sat at the kitchen table, “since my Caleb died. But I don’t have the heart to move.”
She had insisted on making tea for all three of them and neither McQueen or Sommers had the heart to say no.
“When did Mr. Hathaway die?” Sommers asked.
“About twenty years ago.”
From the looks of Mrs. Hathaway she could have been anywhere from fifty to seventy.
“Kathy was so sweet,” she said. “She’d come over here three times a week just to have tea with me in the evenings. She knows—knew—how lonely I was. And Miranda, that child was just a delight.”
“Mrs. Hathaway,” McQueen said, “I found some things in the house that indicate there was a man in the picture?”
“The picture? Oh, you mean that . . . boyfriend of hers.”
She made a face when she said it.
“I take it you didn’t like him.”
“My Caleb would have called him a bum,” she said. “I called him a no-account.”
“Was there any particular reason you didn’t like him?” McQueen asked.
“The bruises.”
“What bruises?”
“She’d come over here to have tea with me and she’d have bruises on her arms, or on her face. Tried to tell me she fell down, but I knew different.”
“He hit her?” McQueen asked.
“A lot. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s the one that killed her tonight.” Suddenly the old woman took a wad of damp tissues from the pocket of her housecoat and pressed them to her nose. Her eyes moistened and tears trickled down her face. “That poor child. He killed them both, I just know he did.”
“Mrs. Hathaway, Miranda had burns on her arms,” McQueen said. “Had you ever noticed anything like that on her before?”
“Burns? No, but on occasion I saw bruises on the child, as well. I told Kathy I’d take care of Miranda, but she insisted on letting that . . . that boyfriend babysit for her.”
“Do you know the boyfriend’s name, ma’am?” Sommers asked.
“Yes, I do,” she said. “His name was Allan Hansen.”
“And would you happen to know where he lives?”
“No, but I’m sure it’s in Kathy’s phone book.”
“Do we have a phone book?” McQueen asked Sommers.
“I think they got it from the kitchen and bagged it as evidence,” she said.
“We’ll check on that, Mrs. Hathaway. Now, if we sent over a police sketch artist would you be able to describe him well enough for us to get a drawing?”
“You mean like on TV? Yes, I believe I could.”
“That’s good, ma’am. We’ll call you to make an appointment.”
“You have to get that . . . that monster for what he did to those . . . those sweet, dear people . . . that poor child . . .”
“We’ll get him, Mrs. Hathaway,” McQueen said, patting her hand, “we’ll get him.”
Outside the house Sommers said to McQueen, “I thought you said you didn’t make promises?”
“I said I didn’t make promises to suspects,” he corrected. “That old lady is not suspected of anything.”
“I stand corrected,” she said, contritely. “What do you want to do now?”
“Let’s go back to the scene and look it over,” he suggested. “I’d also like to get a gander at that phone book.”
“We’ll have to send it in as evidence, Dennis.”
“Maybe,” he said, “I’ll give you a little lesson in bending the rules, Detective Sommers.”
Chapter 45
By the time they all returned to the office Lieutenant Bautista was out. McQueen had wanted to finish their discussion, but that was going to have to wait.
McQueen sat at his desk and dropped the plastic bag containing the phone book on top of his desk. Tolliver, who had been parking the car, came in just as he dumped the book out. He joined Sommers in staring down at it.
“That’s evidence, Dennis,” she reminded him again, as he picked it up. “We’re supposed to log that in.”
“What’s it really evidence of, Bailey?” he asked. “That the woman had friends and family? The only thing we need this book to tell us right now is Allan Hansen’s phone number and/or address.”
He opened the book and flipped to the page that had the Hs, only there wasn’t one. It went right from G to I. “He tore it out,” he said.
“Then his prints are on that book,” she said.
“They’d be there, anyway,” he replied. “He was all over that house, Bailey. We’d have to expect to find his prints.”
“So what do we do now?” she asked. “Check all the utilities? Look for his bills?”
“Can you do that on the computer?”
“I can try.”
She walked to her desk and sat down. To her right was the first change Lieutenant Bautista made when he took over the squad. Somehow he had managed to get them a computer. McQueen had walked in one morning and found it next to Sommers’s desk. The fact that it had no brand name led him to believe that the lieutenant had probably made the arrangements himself, without going through the department.
According to Sommers it had everything a computer needed, and then some. To her it looked home-built, she said, by somebody who knew what he was doing. So th
at was either the lieutenant himself, or somebody he knew.
However they’d managed to get it, Sommers was glad it was there. She no longer had to run down to the precinct to use theirs every time she wanted to Google something.
While her fingers danced over the keyboard and the thing clicked and whirred into life, McQueen began to leaf through the book. If he called every number in it there was a possibility he’d come across someone who knew Allan Hansen. But he also knew from experience how outdated numbers and addresses in a phone book could become, so the entire exercise could turn out to be counterproductive—maximum time expenditure for minimum return. Christ, he was starting to think like a desk jockey.
McQueen sat back in his chair and sighed. He hated child killers, even more than he hated serial killers. There, he’d thought it. It was almost as good as saying it out loud. They had a serial killer, and he was playing games. He was killing in a different manner each time, but disposing of the body the same way. He knew he wouldn’t get a lot of support from profilers on this one. Serial killers usually used the same methodology, their victims tended to have great similarities, and they usually took some kind of a token, a “memento” of their kill.
But this one—Christ. The only real similarity they had was the scratch on the victim’s back, and for all he knew the killer was putting those there to throw the police off. Maybe they had no meaning at all, but McQueen doubted that. He thought he was on the right track, but if he was he was traveling it alone.
He was still wondering which case to give priority to when Lieutenant Bautista walked in.
“Sergeant, can I see you in my office, please?” he said loudly as he passed McQueen’s desk.
Sommers looked over her computer screen at McQueen, who stood up and gave her a shrug before following his leader.
“Close the door and have a seat,” Bautista said as McQueen entered.
McQueen obeyed. He saw the files he’d given the man sitting on his desk.
“You think we have a serial killer at work, stretching from last year to this latest victim.”
Cold Blooded (Dennis McQueen 02) Page 16