J.A. Jance's Ali Reynolds Mysteries 3-Book Boxed Set, Volume 2: Trial by Fire, Fatal Error, Left for Dead (62 page)

While the coroner continued taping, Gil removed the wallet from the evidence bag and looked through it until he located a driver’s license in a clear plastic sleeve. From the photo it looked to Gil as through the victim was definitely Richard Lowensdale, although that comparison wouldn’t be enough to constitute a positive ID.

Gil closed the wallet, returned it to his evidence bag, and then added it to the growing collection of evidence being placed in a Bankers Box. He had just made a notation on the inventory sheet when he noticed that one of the CSI techs, Cindra Halliday, was about to remove the victim’s iPod.

To Gil’s way of thinking, Cindra looked far too young for the job, like she should have been enrolled in a high school biology class rather than being out in the field doing crime scene investigation.

“Is there any way to tell what he was listening to?” Gil asked.

The young woman shrugged. Instead of putting the device into its designated evidence bag, Cindra took it over to the table, examined a collection of power cords, chose one, and plugged in the device. A moment later, the tiny screen lit up. She shook her head. “It’s called ‘To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before’ by some guy named Willie Nelson. Never heard of him. What do you think that means?”

What Cindra’s question really meant was that Detective Gilbert Morris was old. Ancient, really, and out of touch. How could she
not
know Willie Nelson? How young was she?

“Beats me,” Gil said wearily. “You guys do your stuff. I’m going to go talk to some of the neighbors and see if any of them noticed something out of the ordinary.”

Once again grateful to leave the stink of the living room behind
him, Gil had walked only as far as the front porch when Officer Dodd came through the crooked gate and started up the walkway.

“I’ve got the info you needed,” he said, handing Gil a Post-it note. “The stuff about Ted Frost—his phone number and address.”

At that point most cops would have reached for a notebook. Not Gil Morris. He took the Post-it note and stuck it to one of the cards in a leather wallet that carried not only his supply of extra three-by-five cards but a fountain pen too. Gil had inherited the pen, a Cross, from his father. The wallet had been a Father’s Day present from Linda and the kids before it all went bad. Fortunately for Gil, the wallet and pen had both been in his shirt pocket the day Linda’s father had shown up—unannounced as far as Gil was concerned—to move them out.

Gil liked starting his day by sitting at the kitchen counter—both the kitchen table and his rolltop desk had gone north in Linda’s U-haul—and going through the ritual of filling his gold pen with that day’s worth of ink. He liked taking careful notes on the blank cards. He felt that set him apart from the beat cops. Unlike Allen Dodd, Gil wouldn’t have been caught dead passing out Post-it notes.

“Thanks, Allen,” Gil said. “I’ll give him a call.”

But not right away. Gil had studied the street while he’d been standing smoking the cigar. Now he did so again, going inch by inch over the street that bordered Richard Lowensdale’s fenced yard. Brittle dry grass took root at the edge of the pavement, so there was no dirt that held the possibility of finding either tire tracks from a vehicle parked in front of the house or of footprints going to or from it. There was no way to tell if the killer had parked there, coming and going in plain view of the neighbors, or if the perpetrator had parked some distance away and arrived at the victim’s doorstep on foot.

Gil had directed Cindra and the rest of the CSI team to dust the gate and the doorbell as well as the front door assembly for prints, but he wasn’t especially hopeful. This was a killer who had gone to a good deal of trouble to make sure there were no identifiable footprints left behind. Gil had a feeling that he would have exercised just as much care about leaving behind any latent fingerprints.

The killer had clearly spent a considerable period of time inside Richard Lowensdale’s home. Either he had known his presence there was unlikely to be challenged, or he had an entirely believable reason for being there.

Gil didn’t have much in common with Monk, the neurotic detective in the TV series. For one thing, as far as Gil knew, he didn’t suffer from any obsessive compulsive disorders, but when it came to crime scenes, he trusted his instincts. This one struck him as exceptionally cold-blooded.

It was one thing for the Herrera brothers to get all drunked up together, shoot the shit out of one another, and, as a consequence, break their poor mother’s heart. Had either of them lived long enough to be put on trial, it seemed to Gil that the charges against them would have tended more to voluntary homicide than to murder.

Richard Lowensdale’s murder was on another scale entirely. What Fred Millhouse had referred to as blunt force trauma probably had been delivered for one purpose only—to disable the victim long enough for the killer to use the tape to bind him to the chair. Then, after disabling the guy, the killer had set the iPod ear buds in the guy’s ears and had queued up Willie Nelson to sing the same song over and over until the device finally ran out of juice. “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before.”

You didn’t need to be a rocket scientist (which Gil Morris wasn’t) or an experienced homicide cop (which he actually was)
to figure out that the killer was broadcasting a message with the choice of that particular piece of music, but what message was it? Was it from a rival or maybe a disgruntled lover?

The most chilling aspect of the whole scene had been the presence of that single out-of-place dining room chair in Richard Lowensdale’s living room. Gil knew as sure as he was born that the killer had sat on that chair, waiting and watching, while Richard Lowensdale struggled for air inside the taped plastic bag. It seemed likely that he or she had stayed there until Richard gave up trying for a last gasping breath.

Murder as a spectator sport,
Gil thought once more. The idea of someone doing that seemed astonishingly heartless. The house had been thoroughly searched for something, but nothing had been taken—at least not as far as Gil could tell. The model airplanes had been smashed to pieces, but the wallet and car keys were there. The electronic equipment was there.

In Richard Lowensdale’s case, killing him was the main point, maybe even the only point. And the killer had gone to great lengths to make sure that the victim was helpless, that he couldn’t fight back.

For the first time Gilbert Morris was forced to confront the idea that the killer might be female. Unless Richard turned out to be gay or a switch-hitter, it was likely he had been taken out by a woman, one with a very serious grudge.

Richard Lowensdale’s house was the last one on the street. Just above the house was a small paved turnaround. Beyond that stood a piece of property covered with second-growth forest. Determined to learn something, Gil set off down the hill. The neighbors would have noticed the police activity around the house and he expected they would be eager to speak to him. That’s how things usually worked in small towns. Most of the time witnesses were glad to come forward and help out.

Unfortunately most of the residents of Jan Road had been at work or at school on Friday afternoon. The only exception was Lowensdale’s next-door neighbor, a gray-haired retiree named Harry Fulbright, who had spent part of the day out in his yard trimming an overgrown laurel hedge.

“Sure,” he said. “I remember seeing the UPS driver go past here right around two thirty. Not the regular UPS guy,” he added. “Ted must have been sick that day, ’cause it was earlier in the day than he usually shows up. But it was definitely UPS. Woman in a brown uniform and a brown leather jacket.”

“A woman,” Gil repeated. “Walking or riding?”

“Walking. The turnaround at the top of this here street is too damned small for them big trucks. Ted never drives up there, and he probably warned his substitute not to try it either.”

“Can you tell me anything at all about her?”

“Not really. She was about average. Not fat, not skinny. Fairly long hair.”

“What color?”

“Reddish maybe?”

“Did you see anyone else around that day?”

“Actually, now that you mention it, I think there was a second delivery later on. So maybe they made two drops at Richard’s house that day.”

As far as Gil was concerned, this information was all a step in the right direction.

Excusing himself to Harry, Gil went back out to the street and dialed Ted Frost’s number.

“Allen Dodd told me what happened to Richard and that you might be calling,” Ted said as soon as Gil introduced himself. “I’m sorry to hear it. Richard was a nice enough guy and he ordered lots of stuff. I stopped off at his house almost every day, and he’s one that always gave out little presents when Christmas
came around. Do you need me to come down to the station and give a statement?”

“I’ll probably need you to do that eventually,” Gil said. “Right now I’m just looking for a time line. What time was it when you dropped off that box from Zappos?”

“Right at the end of my shift. Around four thirty or so.”

“Is there another driver who might have dropped something off earlier?”

“Not with UPS. This is my territory. As for what time I delivered it? I have a computerized log. I have to enter where and when I drop off anything. I’m definitely sure of when I made Richard’s delivery.”

“Why did you leave the package on the porch? Was there anyone home?”

“There was somebody inside the house. I heard a vacuum cleaner running. It was noisy. She probably didn’t hear the bell.”

“She?” Gil asked eagerly. “A woman? Did you see her?”

“The blinds were closed. All I could see was the entryway. I just assumed that Richard had finally gotten around to hiring himself a cleaning lady. I guess it didn’t have to be a woman, though, huh? Anyway, I figured he’d got some kind of help. He sure needed it. He wasn’t the best housekeeper in the world.”

That,
Gil thought,
is an outrageous understatement!

“Thanks, Mr. Frost,” he said aloud. “You’ve been most helpful.”

Gil closed his phone, marched back into the house. He stopped by the entryway closet and opened the door. Inside was the old Kirby vacuum cleaner. He left the door open and walked into the living room. By then the body had been zipped into a body bag. Once the body was gone, Gil stopped to chat with the CSI techs who were busily collecting and cataloging computer equipment.

“Found several fingerprints for you,” Cindra said. “Including a real clear one on the tape on the victim’s mouth. Could be the victim’s, could be the killer’s. We’ll run them through AFIS as soon as we can.”

“Good,” Gil said. “The sooner the better. While you’re at it, be sure to pick up the vacuum cleaner in the entryway closet. Maybe we’ll get lucky and find something useful inside the bag, like a missing finger, for instance. Oh, and dust it for fingerprints as well.”

L
ola Cunningham had been a good cook, an excellent cook, actually, and she had been thrilled to pass those skills along to her adopted daughter. And in an effort to make Mina feel at home, Lola had tracked down a traditional Croatian recipe for
punjene paprike
, stuffed green peppers, and made it her own.

There was a lot about her adopted family and being in the Cunningham house that was repugnant for Mina, but she had loved being in the kitchen with Mama Lola, as her mother liked to be called. They would stand in the kitchen together, side by side, talking and laughing as they diced and sliced, chopped and cooked. Had Lola not died of an undiagnosed heart attack the year Mina turned sixteen, everything might have been different. Mina might have been different, but Lola’s unexpected death had changed everything.

Today though, once Mark finished burying the ashes from the Weber grill, he’d probably return to the couch. Morosely silent, he’d sit there, drinking and watching some inconsequential golf
tournament while Mina bustled around the kitchen. She prepared the stuffed peppers the same way Mama Lola had done—well, almost the same way—making two separate batches, one for Mark and one for Mina.

Working in the kitchen always made Mina happy. She hummed a little tune as she ground up the necessary ingredients—the beef and the pork and the onions—that would go into the green peppers she had brought home with her from San Diego for this very purpose. Finding decent green peppers or decent anything else in the godforsaken little grocery store in Salton City was pretty much impossible. She estimated that the extra doses of seasonings she added to the mix should be enough to conceal a few other things.

As she hacked the tops off peppers, Mina found herself thinking fondly of Richard. He had surprised her and proved to be far more of a man than she ever would have expected. She was sorry not to have the money back, but even so, Richard had won a measure of respect from his killer that he probably would have appreciated if he had lived long enough to know about it.

As for Mark? He was useless, spineless, and boring. His money had been a major part of his appeal. Now that the money was gone, so was the attraction. She enjoyed the prospect of torturing him with the idea that she expected him to take care of Brenda single-handedly and that she wanted him to do it tonight. It would be immensely entertaining to see him sitting there stone-faced while he struggled to come to terms with the very idea. She didn’t doubt that he’d need to fill himself with some kind of liquid courage—gin most likely, gin on the rocks with a twist of lime.

Just to keep him off balance, she would pretend that everything was fine and that she believed that he’d do what she wanted. Wasn’t that why she was hustling around in this grim little kitchen fixing him a sumptuous dinner?

Whenever Mina noticed that Mark’s drink needed refilling, she
would pick up his glass without being asked. And later, along with the brimming glasses, she would hand him one of his little blue pills. After all, Mark was an older man with a drinking problem and a much younger wife. In the shorthand of their marriage, the proffered drink was a peace offering. The little blue pill would be a bribe.