Stiff Penalty (A Mattie Winston Mystery) (5 page)

“I know.”

I glanced over at Bob and Junior, afraid they might be able to overhear. To give myself a little more privacy, I meandered my way out of the living room and into the hallway as Izzy said, “Why don’t you come over for dinner tomorrow night? Dom is making pesto fettuccine with Italian sausage.”

I winced, knowing the conversation wasn’t going to be an easy one, but it wasn’t like I had a choice. And my decision was made a little easier knowing what was on the menu and that Dom would be cooking. Not only is Italian my favorite food group, Izzy’s partner is a phenomenal cook, which is probably why Izzy is nearly as wide as he is tall. “Okay. What time?”

“Let’s shoot for six. If you get caught up in something in your investigation that runs longer than that, let me know.”

“I will.”

“Good. See you then.”

“Izzy, wait,” I said, hoping to catch him before he disconnected the call.

“What?”

“Does Dom know?”

He hesitated just long enough that he didn’t have to answer, but he did anyway.

“He does. In fact, he was the one who picked up on it first.”

It figured. If straight men could read women as well as gay men do, the divorce rates in our country would probably plummet.

“He’s very excited about the whole thing,” Izzy went on. “In fact, he’s hoping you’ll let him babysit.”

Babysitters
. It was one of the many complications that had been lurking in the back of my mind since I’d decided I was going to have the baby. I hadn’t dwelled on it much yet, figuring I had plenty of time and several options. Dom was definitely on the list, as was my sister. But bringing it up now made me realize just how fast time was slipping by.

“Of course I will,” I said. Then, eager to get off the subject, I said, “We can talk about it more tomorrow at dinner. Right now I’ve got Richmond waiting.”

“Call me if anything significant comes up.”

“I will,” I assured him.

I disconnected the call and headed back into the living room, where I filled Richmond and Junior in on the plans.

“Works for me,” Richmond said. “I’m glad to have you in on the interviews, Mattie. You’re good at reading people. The officers at Wendy Ames’s house know to call me when they’re ready to bring the family in. Let’s go take a look at the kitchen while we’re waiting.”

Junior led the way to the kitchen, which was in a state of disarray. There were broken dishes on the floor, a silverware drawer had been pulled out of its sliders, its contents spilled onto the floor, and a chair had been knocked over. It looked like Ames had put up one hell of a fight. The blood on the floor was smeared in some places, and there was a large, partially congealed puddle in one spot that suggested Derrick had lain there a while. On the counter I saw a butcher-block knife holder with one empty slot, and a large butcher knife that matched the description the ER doctor had provided was on the floor, smeared with blood.

Jonas Kreideman stood in the doorway of a mud and laundry room built off the back of the kitchen. He was dressed in a paper body suit, booties, and protective glasses, and he held a mask and gloves in his hands. Jonas had put on a lot of weight in the past two months, compliments of the steroids the docs had put him on to help him deal with his allergies. It left him pale and puffy-looking, and with the protective glasses and the white body suit, he looked like a nerdy version of the Pillsbury Dough Boy.

At his feet was a box filled with cotton-tipped swabs that were used to collect blood, DNA, and other fluid samples, and a bag filled with small, flattened cardboard containers that could be formed into an elongated box shape with a flap closing on either end. The swabs were placed in these boxes once they were used, and then the boxes were closed and both ends were sealed with evidence tape. Each sample also had to be numbered, labeled, and logged. It was a tedious, time-consuming process, and before any of it could begin, the scene needed to be photographed as it was found.

“Hey, guys,” Jonas said, nodding at us as we entered. Then he focused his gaze on me. “This one’s a doozy, Mattie. You can start shooting pictures whenever you’re ready. It looks like we’ll be here a while.”

“I’ll do the photography,” I told him, “but then I’m going with Richmond to talk to the family. Izzy is sending Arnie here to help you with the evidence collection.”

Jonas rolled his eyes. “Why can’t you stay here?” he whined. “I’d much rather work with you.”

“What’s wrong with Arnie? He’s quick, he’s thorough, and he knows his stuff.”

“I know, I know. It’s just that all he does the whole time he’s collecting evidence is talk about how the world is filled with all these secret societies and evil conspiracies.”

“Arnie does have some crazy ideas, but they’re harmless. Some of them are even entertaining.”

Jonas sighed and shook his head. “They may be harmless, but after a while the rhetoric gets old. The last time I worked with him he was spouting some garbage about how the wingdings font is actually a secret code that was invented by the Nazis for passing along top-secret messages, and later installed on computers by Middle Eastern fanatics to use in the same way. He said he can prove it because if you type the letters NYC using the original wingdings font, the resultant symbols predict the 9/11 debacle.”

While the rest of us laughed this off, Junior took out his smartphone and started tapping keys. “Holy cow,” he said a moment later. “Arnie might be on to something. If you type NYC using wingdings, you get a skull and crossbones, the Star of David, and a thumbs-up picture. Look.”

He showed us his phone screen. On it was a table showing what wingdings symbol would result for each letter typed.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Feller,” Richmond said, shaking his head.

“Hey,” Junior said with a little shrug, “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean someone isn’t out to get you.”

Though I couldn’t have known it at the time, this line would prove fortuitous and fateful for me.

Richmond started whistling the theme song from
The X-Files
, and I would have joined in, but my cell phone rang. I answered it without looking at the caller ID, assuming it was Izzy with some sort of update or change in plans. But it wasn’t, and that
X-Files
music turned out to be prophetic.

“H
ello?”

All I heard was static.

“Hello?” I said again. I realized everyone in the room was staring at me, and after listening to the crackling silence for a few more seconds, I disconnected the call. “Must have been a wrong number, or a dropped call,” I said with a shrug and a smile. My tone was light-hearted and dismissive, but the truth was the call spooked me. I chalked it up to the contagious paranoia triggered by the discussion about Arnie’s conspiracy theories and tried to put it out of my mind.

As I slipped my phone back into my pocket, a thought occurred to me. “Why did Derrick Ames go out into the street for help?” I said to no one in particular.

“What do you mean?” Bob said.

“Why didn’t he just call 911?”

Everyone in the room exchanged looks for a few seconds, and then Richmond said, “A phone. He must have had a phone.” We looked around the kitchen and then ventured into the living room, and from there through the rest of the first floor. On the second floor, which had three bedrooms—two with twin beds that were clearly set up for Derrick’s boys when they stayed with him, and a master bedroom—we found a phone charger on the bedside stand beside Derrick’s double bed. But there was no phone. “No landline, and no cell,” Richmond said.

“Maybe it was with his personal belongings at the hospital,” I suggested. “They gave Izzy a bag with his clothes and shoes in it. Maybe the phone was in there, too.”

Richmond took out his own cell and placed a call to Izzy, who said he would look and call him back.

In the meantime, we headed downstairs to join the others. When we were back in the kitchen, Jonas pointed toward the knives in the holder on the counter. “I’m guessing that’s where the murder weapon came from. And I’m betting the barbecue fork was in that silverware drawer that’s been spilled all over the floor.”

Richmond nodded, frowning. “That makes it harder for us since we can’t connect the weapons to someone from outside the house. Looks to me like whatever happened here was an unplanned, heat-of-the-moment thing, and the killer just grabbed whatever was handy.”

I started snapping photos of the room and its contents, including the blood spatter and several closeups of the knife before Jonas bagged and tagged it. A few minutes later, Richmond’s phone rang. He looked at the caller ID and said, “It’s Izzy.”

We all watched as he listened to what Izzy had to say, curious about the phone thing. When Richmond’s look of hope faded to one of curious disappointment, I knew what the answer would be.

“There was no phone with Derrick’s personal belongings,” he said once he disconnected the call. “Where the hell is it?”

“Maybe the killer took it?” I posed.

“Why?” Richmond said, shaking his head. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“Maybe not now,” I said, “but if the killer took it, I’m sure they had a reason. And if they still have it, maybe it will help us find whoever it was.”

That made Richmond brighten a little, and as the rest of us went back to our separate duties, he gave Junior a list of tasks that included digging up a cell phone account and number for Derrick, seeing if the phone could be tracked with GPS, and looking into the man’s bank accounts. “Look for any unusual transactions,” Richmond said. “Since the last thing Ames said was the word
payday
, maybe there’s money involved somehow.”

I was taking pictures of some blood smears on a low cabinet by the refrigerator when something in the crack between the cabinet and the fridge caught my eye. The space was about four inches wide, and something with a shiny circle on it was wedged a few inches in. I stuck my gloved hand in sideways, and after a bit of maneuvering, I was able to push the item out.

“Look at this,” I said, holding up a small, handheld camcorder. I pointed to the area between the cabinet and fridge. “It was wedged into this space here with the lens pointed out toward the kitchen.”

No one looked particularly excited by my news until I told them the next part. “And there’s blood on it.”

“I don’t suppose it’s turned on,” Richmond asked.

I shook my head, and after making sure there was no blood evidence on the power button, I pushed it. Nothing happened. “It won’t turn on. I wonder if the battery is dead,” I said. “Maybe Derrick was using it when his killer was here. How else would it have ended up stuck between the fridge and the counter?”

Richmond said, “Maybe it was sitting on the edge of the counter and got knocked off during the struggle. Maybe it’s not a dead battery, maybe it’s broken.”

Junior said, “I’m pretty sure it’s new. I saw a box for it in the trash out there in the laundry room.” He pointed to the room off the back of the kitchen.

“Did anyone see a charge cord for it?” I asked.

Everyone looked around the kitchen, scanning the outlets above the countertops, but there was nothing there. Jonas walked back into the laundry room and said, “I’ll bet this is it.”

I tiptoed my way through the spilled silverware and the blood smears over to the entrance to the laundry room. There, on a table against the wall, was a cord plugged into an outlet. I picked up the other end and examined the adapter, comparing it to the plug-in notch on the camera. “Looks like a fit,” I said.

“Stuff like that often comes with some charge on the battery, but they have to be plugged in for twenty-four hours before they’re fully charged,” Jonas said. He rummaged a little deeper in the trash bin and pulled out a piece of paper. “It looks like it might have arrived today. Here’s the box and the receipt. The camera was ordered two days ago from a company in Massachusetts.” He then looked at the box and smiled. “And it was delivered via UPS.”

“Good news for us,” Richmond said as Jonas slid the receipt into a plastic bag, sealed it, and handed it over to him. “We should be able to find out exactly when it was delivered.” Jonas then handed the box over to Richmond, who snapped a picture of the labels on it with his phone’s camera before handing it back to Jonas for packaging, labeling, and sealing. Then Richmond stepped out of the room, presumably to make a call to UPS.

I resumed my picture taking, and Jonas resumed his evidence collection with some help from a trio of uniformed officers. A few minutes later Richmond returned and said, “You were right, Jonas. UPS delivered that package at ten this morning.”

“Should we plug the camera in to charge it up?” I asked. “Maybe there’s something on it that’s relevant to the crime. Maybe Ames filmed whoever was here.”

Richmond considered this and then said, “It’s not a bad idea, but for the sake of securing our evidentiary chain, I’d rather just bag and tag everything as it is for now and let Arnie or the lab in Madison deal with it.”

Jonas did just that with the camera and the power cord, adding them to the box of growing evidentiary specimens he had on the floor of the laundry room.

I had finished taking pictures in the kitchen, so I moved on to snap the rest of the house. I carefully walked the length of the front hallway, taking shots of the blood trail. I took some general pictures of all the rooms off the hallway as I went, and while none of them appeared to offer any evidentiary value, I did find the color schemes and architecture interesting. Every room had high wooden baseboards, crown molding, and wide window trim with decorative rosettes at the corners. All the trim was painted in a bright, glossy white that beautifully framed the vividly colored plaster walls. The living room, entryway, and hallway were painted in a rich, dark, forest green, the dining room was done in colonial blue, and plum was the color of choice for a front room that had probably served as a parlor at one time but was now a TV/family room, complete with a game system. Judging from the controllers sitting on the coffee table, I surmised that the game system was used a lot, or at the very least had been used recently.

I headed upstairs to the bedrooms and snapped the two boys’ rooms first, poking around as I went. From there I moved into the master bedroom and took some more shots, including one of the phone charger. In the closet I found two items of women’s clothing hanging along with all the men’s stuff: one white blouse and a pair of gray dress slacks. I didn’t know how Derrick’s wife was built, so I couldn’t be sure these weren’t left over from her, but the tiny size of the clothing made me think they might be Mandy’s.

Richmond came up a few minutes later and found me peeking into Derrick’s dirty clothes hamper. With a gloved hand I reached in and snagged the black lacy thong that was lying on top and showed it to Richmond. “Either Derrick had a secret fetish, or Mandy was here recently.”

“I’m going to hope for the latter,” Richmond said. He peered closer at the undies and said, “How does someone wear those things?”

“It’s a thong.” I held them up by the waist and showed him the back part. “This part goes up your butt crack.”

Richmond made a face. “I know what it is. I just don’t get how anyone could wear it. It looks like it would be really uncomfortable.”

“I wouldn’t know,” I told him, tossing the thong back in the hamper. “I’ve never been much into butt floss, and to be honest, most of the panties in my size are boring old granny panties. Apparently the lingerie makers figure that if you aren’t a size zero or two, you wouldn’t want to strut around in sexy undies.”

Richmond was staring at his feet and shifting uncomfortably from one to the other.

“Sorry,” I said, giving him an apologetic look. “Was that too much information?”

“No, it’s not that. It’s just a topic I don’t know much about. I don’t have any sisters, I’ve never been married, and I never dated much. Most of the girls I knew weren’t too keen on going out with someone who looked like Jabba the Hutt.”

My heart ached for the guy. I realized then what a lonely existence he must have had prior to his weight loss. “You don’t look like Jabba the Hutt anymore,” I said. “In fact, you’re looking pretty darned good these days, Richmond.”

“Too bad I didn’t lose the weight when I was younger. Things might have been a whole lot different.”

“It’s never too late to start.”

“I’m going to be fifty in June, Mattie.”

“So?”

He sighed and shook his head. Then he switched topics on me. “Our dispatcher just called and said the officers are bringing Ames’s wife and kids down to the station at ten, which gives us about twenty minutes.”

“Is Arnie here yet?”

“He is. In fact, he’s in the kitchen as we speak trying to convince Jonas that Elvis Presley isn’t dead, but rather that he faked his death and had a wax body buried in his coffin so he could escape from the music business and go off somewhere private and live in peace.”

“Poor Jonas,” I said, shaking my head and smiling. “I just hope all those steroids he’s been taking don’t trigger any ’roid rage in him or we may end up with a double homicide to investigate.”

“Junior might have saved the day. He loaned Jonas his iPod and some earbuds so Jonas can tune Arnie out.”

“Ooh, I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” I said with a grimace. “Just the other day Arnie was telling me about the latest conspiracy theory circulating on the Internet regarding iPods.”

Richmond gave me a puzzled look, opened his mouth as if to say something, and then snapped it shut again, shaking his head. “I don’t want to know,” he grumbled under his breath.

“Wise choice. Is it okay if I meet you at the station? I want to stop by my office and download these pictures first.”

“No problem. I’ll see you there.”

I exited the house and headed for my hearse, which I had been forced to park a few houses away because of all the other official vehicles on-site. It was dark outside, but the weather was warm, the sky was clear, and there were so many lights on in the neighborhood that it looked like daylight. The neighbors were still out in force, talking among themselves about what had happened. They all stared at me with wistful expressions, no doubt hoping I would share a juicy tidbit or two with them. From the corner of my eye I saw one woman separate herself from a group and head my way at a fast clip. It was Alison Miller, Sorenson’s ace reporter and photographer. I ramped up my pace, hoping to outrun her, but she was too close and too fast for me.

“You know I can’t tell you anything, Alison,” I said as she caught up to me.

“Oh, come on, Mattie. Give me something. Anything. Any kind of quote will do.”

I kept going and said nothing, but if Alison is anything, she is persistent.

“Please, Mattie?” she said, a bit breathless as she kept pace at my side. “Just a little something for old time’s sake?”

I stopped then and whirled on her. “For old time’s sake? Seriously?” I said, looking askance. “You’ve done everything you can to embarrass me in that stupid rag you work for, publishing pictures of me half naked, and writing stories about how my divorce left me, and I quote, ‘unable to face the living so I decided to go work with the dead.’ And don’t even get me started on that whole business with Hurley a while back. How can you possibly think I’d want to help you after all that?” I turned away from her to continue my march to my car, but her next words stopped me short.

“My mother’s dying,” she said.

“What?” I turned back to her, unsure if I’d heard her right. The sad, overwrought expression on her face suggested I had.

“You almost got rid of me,” she said with a painful smile. “Do you remember that fiasco with the Heinrich family?”

I remembered it all right. A car accident had led to the death of multimillionaire Dietmar Heinrich and his second wife, Bitsy, who had been an exotic dancer prior to marrying Dietmar. Determining which of them had died first dictated who inherited the money—Bitsy’s kids or Dietmar’s—and the two families had engaged in some very public and ugly warfare. Because Dietmar Heinrich was a well-known public figure, news agencies from all over the country had descended on Sorenson to cover the case and the subsequent fallout. Alison found herself front and center, with a starring role in it all, and it had given her the kind of exposure most small-town reporters can only dream of.