Carolyn G. Hart_Henrie O_02 (11 page)

I hurried down the main staircase.

Craig said he had arrived home at just after five on Saturday. He came in through the front door to the main hall. He called out for Patty Kay.

I stood in the main hall.

Yes, anyone coming in the front door—if he called out —should be heard in the kitchen.

I imagined his shout.
“Patty Kay? Patty Kay?”

No answer.

Craig made the natural assumption that his wife wasn’t in the kitchen. It made sense that he didn’t check the kitchen first.

When his call wasn’t answered, he went into the main part of the house, seeking her. Having no luck, he hurried upstairs.

Then he returned downstairs and went to the kitchen.

I pretended to be Craig, timing it, upstairs and back down.

Two minutes forty-two seconds.

I pushed in the kitchen door. A faint odor of burned chocolate lingered, overlain by a deeper, ranker smell. It was dim and shadowy. I was sure lights blazed when Craig arrived. I flipped the switches.

The sticky, smelly mess was shocking. I was surprised. The police were finished there. No yellow crime scene tape declared this room off limits. The police had their damning photographs and drawings and video film. Why hadn’t Craig arranged for the kitchen to be cleaned?

It was, I suddenly felt certain, just like Craig. He was waiting for someone to take charge, to tell him what to do. Although, to be fair, he’d had very little time for such practical concerns.

But I was glad. I was seeing the kitchen as the police had found it.

Three doors opened into the room, one from the dining room, one from the back hall, where I stood, and one from outside.

Dark, gooey bits adhered to the high ceiling.

Congealed pools of green and brown formed an irregular, alcohol-scented mass between the cooking island and the door to the backyard. It was easy to spot the smears where Craig had skidded across the spilled liqueurs.

I didn’t see either liqueur bottle. Or the cake tin.

I got my pad out of my purse. My fingers brushed the packet of photos Chief Walsh had given me. I pulled it out, found the kitchen shots, and compared them to the scene.

I studied the ceiling again. I estimated the trajectory of the cake tin when it was hurled.

It placed the tosser squarely in the middle of the spilled liqueur.

Unless, of course, the tin was thrown first, and the liqueur spilled after that.

Craig admittedly had a long smear of liqueur on one trouser leg.

That wasn’t nearly enough.

As I understood it, the police believed that Craig came home, he and Patty Kay quarreled, and, enraged, he lost control, crazily flinging the liqueur bottles to the floor, then heaving the cake tin at the ceiling. Or he tossed the cake tin, then knocked over the bottles. Meanwhile, presumably his wife ran from his mad attack out the back door and into the playhouse.

I ran through the possibilities in my mind.

And shook my head.

Both Craig and Patty Kay would have been splashed with liqueur in the first version.

In the second, crumbs from the cake tin that didn’t stick to the ceiling would have fallen on them.

But the clincher—to me—was the series of skid marks Craig left through the spilled liqueur. They ran in a straight line from where I stood, just inside the hall kitchen door, to the back door.

Not a single mark disturbed the sticky goo congealed near the cooking station, the point where the action should have occurred, because that’s where the cooking stuffs were. But there were no footprints, no streaks, just an unbroken sheet of dried syrupy liqueur.

That undisturbed residue told me Patty Kay wasn’t standing there when the cooking stuffs were spilled, that the liqueur bottles had been removed from the cooking island to a point near the back door, that the cake tin was heaved first and the tosser darted out of the way, then the liqueur was splashed against the cabinets and the bottles thrown—

I looked for the bottles (physical evidence that would have been removed by the police) in the official photos. One bottle sat on the kitchen table (courtesy of Craig, as I recalled) and the second lay unbroken on the floor near the cooking island.

If Craig had left that second bottle by the island, his footprints would necessarily have led away from the area.

They didn’t.

So the second bottle must have been tossed there.

Captain Walsh might discount my interpretation, but to me the lack of footprints proved without a shadow of a doubt Craig’s innocence.

Assuming, of course, Craig hadn’t mounted a dangerous double bluff to incriminate himself.

I considered that coolly. I didn’t think he was smart enough or had the guts. But I could be wrong. He might have a surprising streak of wiliness. Or would it be so surprising? Craig was obviously wily enough to use his undeniable charm to manipulate those around him, especially women. That kind of indirectness would fit in perfectly with a double bluff. So, yes, he was wily enough. Was he gutsy enough?

Of course, there was another overpowering, unarguable reason the police version couldn’t be true.

Not physical evidence this time, but an instinct as convincing and unalterable as any smear of blood or shred of cloth or fragment of hair.

I already felt I knew Patty Kay well enough to be sure that she never ran from any man.

And certainly not from Craig.

Patty Kay was a fighter.

If she had run, realizing her peril, it would have been to her car for a weapon.

No, Patty Kay hadn’t run.

She’d walked out to her death in the playhouse with someone she didn’t fear.

This carefully arranged scene, this deadly snare, was created after she lay dead or dying in the playhouse.

I checked the time. I’d taken two minutes there. It seemed reasonable Craig would have looked at this frightening scene at least that long. So now five minutes were gone.

I skirted the irregular stain and opened the back door.

Daffodils bordered the path to the playhouse. If Craig left a sticky trail from his skid across the kitchen, I couldn’t spot it on the dark flagstones.

The glass-walled playhouse had been built perpendicular to the house, facing a twenty-five-yard pool. A stand of huge chinkapin oaks framed the playhouse and the pool. To the right were the garages and the drive. I guessed the bright blue Lexus near the back door belonged to Patty Kay.

I took the time to walk—it must have been a hundred yards—from the house to circle behind the garages. I wasn’t surprised to find an old-fashioned alley there. Otherwise, Craig would have passed the police coming into the grounds as he sped away.

An owl hooted.

I had Craig’s keys in my pocket, but the playhouse door was unlocked.

Sticky stains from spilled liqueur are one thing.

Massive, congealed pools of blood are decidedly another.

This was beyond the scope of a cleaning crew. These rugs would have to be destroyed and replaced.

The rank smell sickened.

The playhouse was created for sunny times, for happy days. Golden white wood, glass walls, orange linen sofas and easy chairs—and white shag rugs.

Anger flickered within me.

Until now, I’d focused primarily upon Craig’s plight.

Now I was seeing where a vibrant woman had lain in her own blood, dying—and not by the hand of a stranger.

…
a time to die
.

It should not have been her time to die.

“I’m sorry, Patty Kay.” Yes, I said it aloud in that sunny, violence-marked playroom. Mark me a sentimental fool, if you will, but age grants some definite rights, and one is the willingness to be open about your feelings. I was sad and angry because life is so fragile, so fleeting, its loss so final.

I looked at those dark stains and I knew I was determined to find out the truth. Not solely for Craig now, but for Patty Kay too.

From the position of the stains, I figured Patty Kay and her murderer were facing each other when the shots were fired. Patty Kay was close to the north entrance. I stood by the west door that opened onto the deck. She’d staggered backward a few steps and fallen. The ballistics department and the forensics laboratory would have determined how far away her assailant stood from her when he fired. My guess was that the killer gunned her down, then left the playhouse through the west door.

In the police photos, Patty Kay lay on her left side curled in the fetal position. The door was wedged against her where Craig had pushed his way in. The stain on
Craig’s left sleeve was consistent with his having knelt beside her and lifted her head.

Actually, the fact that his shirt was stained at all was another compelling argument for his innocence. It had happened only because he tried to help her. If he had shot Patty Kay down, why would he have touched her, gone near that spurting blood?

But, as is so often true in life, there was always an answer that could be made. The prosecution could effectively argue that once the deed was done, Craig had reacted in horror to his own lethal act. He had knelt, they would say, in a futile, mad attempt to help her. But there was no undoing Patty Kay’s deadly injury. (In that event, wouldn’t his right sleeve have been stained? He would have come to her from the front, not the back.) The police rationale would fit in nicely with Craig’s running away, which could also be seen as a demonstration of his chronic unwillingness to face reality.

I’m not much for glib answers.

I felt certain there was more to Craig’s running than terror that he would be accused.

I didn’t see it as a confession of guilt.

But he was not an unsophisticated man.

He’d told me he ran because husbands are so often suspected when a wife is murdered.

True.

But he and Patty Kay were not on bad terms. So far as I knew.

There had to be another, stronger, more damning reason.

I tried to imagine Craig’s thoughts at that moment.

The shock, of course, would have been enormous. Murder is not a staple companion to small-town life, certainly not this rarefied kind of small-town life.

So Craig was stunned, shaken, overwhelmed.

Then sirens shrilled.

He decided to flee. To me it seemed evident his actions fit exactly the amount of time he had.

He took the gun with him.

Where was the weapon at that moment? Craig told me he’d picked it up out of the grass before he went into the playhouse and found Patty Kay there. Had he kept it in his hand when he lifted her head? It was possible, if he was carrying it in his right hand. He could have turned back to the open door, holding the gun, when he heard the sirens.

Actually, he could have run, not even realizing he had the gun in his hand—

No, no, no. He’d wrapped the gun in something.

That bothered me. Why? And with what? And where was it?

It mattered. It had to matter, because Craig was in the biggest trouble of his life, and he wouldn’t answer that simple question. Or what seemed to me to be a simple question.

Why wrap the gun, dammit?

Because he wanted to clean off his fingerprints?

Maybe.

What did he wrap it in?

Captain Walsh said they hadn’t found anything to match the snag of cloth on the pistol.

Cloth. Beige cotton.

I looked around. Webbed plastic bins sat on either side of this exit. One held a tall stack of vividly hued towels, orange and green and raspberry, purple, red, and navy. The other held soiled towels.

If Craig wanted to wrap the gun, hide it from view, wipe it clean, he had an ample supply of towels right at hand.

But the cotton snag was beige.

Not a Patty Kay color.

Beige cotton.

It didn’t take long for me to satisfy myself. There wasn’t a single piece of beige cotton of any sort in the playhouse.

Okay. Craig was standing there in a desperate panic, listening to the sirens come closer and closer. I’d think he’d run to his car, gun in hand, frantic to escape.

Why would he even start to think about wrapping the gun in anything at that moment?

I didn’t think he would.

So how to account for the snag of material on the weapon? And it definitely was wrapped in something when the two boys spotted Craig getting out of his car on the country road.

Maybe the answer was super simple. Maybe there was something in Craig’s car that he wrapped the gun in.

No. If it were that easy, he’d have had no reason to get rid of the material. And the police hadn’t found it in the car or in the area with the gun though there were matching fibers beneath the driver’s seat.

So Craig had hidden it somewhere between that country road and his arrival at the cabin.

There had to be a reason.

I recalled our talk at the jail.

Craig refused to answer when I asked why he’d gotten rid of the gun and what he’d wrapped it in.

And when I asked who might have reason to kill Patty Kay, I’d swear there’d been a flash of uncertainty—and fear —in his eyes before he cried out that it was “… crazy. Nobody’d want to kill her.”

But what if there were someone he feared might have done it—because of something he found in the playhouse
by his wife’s body? Something made of beige cotton, something he recognized.

That made sense. Craig would scoop up that article along with the gun and there would be a reason to run, the frantic, terrible necessity to get the damning cloth out of there, away from the police.

I left the playhouse. Back in the main hallway, I found the telephone directory. Again I dialed the police station.

I had to wait only a moment.

“Walsh here.”

“Captain Walsh, this is Mrs. Collins.”

“Yes, ma’am.” If they gave awards for lack of inflection, he’d be a cinch to win. “Glad you called. I talked to Mr. Matthews. According to him, the house was locked tighter than a drum when he left it Sunday.” Uninflected, yes, but puffed with smugness.

I love to deflate smugness. “A teenage neighbor, Dan Forrest, found that back door unlocked earlier this afternoon. I’m sure you’ll want to talk to him. The boy may have heard the intruder.”