At the Scene of the Crime (7 page)

“Are there unimportant ones? You’re as natural at this as anyone I’ve seen, and you’ve had good training, Krysti. Trust it.”

She took a deep breath and let it out. “Yes, sir.”

In the living room, Hawkins looked around. Knickknacks on the coffee table were untouched, magazines stacked neatly. On a side table next to the front door, a small basket held envelopes that proved to be the day’s mail and a set of keys, presumably Mrs. Hoff ’s. Everything seemed to be in order.

He went down the hall. On the left, he peeked into a small bedroom that had been turned into an office. Again, nothing seemed disturbed.

On the right side of the corridor, he entered a bathroom that felt like
stepping onto the flight deck of the starship
Enterprise.
Two glass sinks perched on twin black columns beneath two stainless steel plates with no visible faucets. Beyond those, a small cubicle housed the toilet. Against the opposite wall was a deep, two-person tub outfitted with water jets. Dominating the center of the far wall was a glass-enclosed shower with four brass heads aimed at various angles. The glass walls still showed beads of water. In front of the shower a huge, furry, lavender rug covered most of the Mexican tile floor. It felt damp, but not wet. Someone had taken a shower earlier in the evening. He looked at the towel rack on the wall next to the shower—empty. Maybe Mrs. Hoff had taken the towel, or towels, into the bedroom with her.

Getting his face down in the rug, Hawkins peered at the footprints pressed into the nap. They were already fading away, with no way to preserve them, but Hawkins was sure he could see the outlines of at least two different size feet in the damp rug.

Mrs. Hoff had been wearing a negligee, but Mr. Hoff had been fully dressed. Could they have had a short-term reconciliation that went bad later?

Maybe.

Hawkins pulled a short, unfolding ruler from his pants pocket. Normally he used it to give scale to evidence he was photographing, but tonight he measured the disappearing footprints in the rug. The first print was almost exactly eight inches long, the length of the ruler. The second print was at least two inches longer than the first and much wider.

Again, he wondered where the bath towels were. Looking at a second towel rack between the sinks, he noticed two lavender hand towels matching the rug. He rose and considered trying to photograph the footprints, but he knew by that time he could get the lighting right they would have long since disappeared.

He left the bathroom and returned to the corridor, where he checked two doors, both on the left side. The first door led into a small bedroom that had been turned into an immaculate office, apparently undisturbed. A
computer desk occupied one corner, the monitor on top in sleep mode with the power on.

The second door led to the master bedroom. He flipped the light on and found this room immaculate, too. A tall armoire stood immediately to the right of the doorway. A king-size bed took most of the right-hand wall along with two night stands. In the corner in front of him, a flat-screen television and DVD player occupied the top of a dresser. Nearer to him, on the left-hand wall, a double-door closet was closed. After opening it carefully, he pushed back both doors all the way without touching any areas that might contain fingerprints. A wicker laundry hamper stood against the right-hand wall. He used his Mini Maglite to see inside. There were no towels. Where the hell had they gone?

He knew that someone, probably two people, had showered earlier in the evening. Why weren’t the towels here?

Hawkins turned away from the closet and let his eyes wander the room as if the towels would suddenly appear before him. He was staring emptily at the bed when he realized a wrinkle stood out on the floral bedspread just where it disappeared beneath the pillows.

Hawkins was no OCD type who needed everything just so, but the obsessive-compulsive who lived here was. That meant that even this tiny wrinkle, something Yackowski probably would have overlooked if he had even bothered to come into the room, yapped at Hawkins like an angry little dog.

No way Mrs. Hoff would have been able to tolerate this affront to her neatness.

Raines appeared in the doorway. “Something’s not right.”

He looked at her. “What’s not right?”

“No shell casings.”

Hawkins considered that. “There have to be. The pistol’s an automatic. The ejected shells are somewhere.”

“Agreed,” Raines said. “Just not in this apartment.”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself.”

“Well, they’re not in the room where the crime happened, anyway.”

“Better,” he said. “You’ve moved the furniture?”

She nodded.

“The bodies?”

Another nod.

First the towels disappeared, now the shell casings. Some murder-suicide. He still had a hunch about the wrinkle in the bed. “What do you see here?” he said.

She took in the room for several long moments, before pointing at the closet. “I see the same thing in here that I saw in the rest of the apartment, somebody with serious obsessive-compulsive issues. The hangers all face the same direction. The clothes are divided by her good clothes, her work clothes, and her casual clothes, and within those sections, subdivided by style and color. Everything has a place and everything is in its place.”

Hawkins nodded. “Anything else?”

Raines looked around again, Hawkins watching her. Hawkins was about to tell her his theory when she suddenly said, “The bedspread is wrinkled.”

Smiling, he said, “It sure is.”

“But what does it mean?”

Hawkins shrugged. “Maybe something, maybe nothing, but the small out-of-place things can sometimes be the most important. Do you have a forceps with you?”

Nodding, she pulled the ten-inch stainless steel tool off a loop on her belt and handed it to Hawkins.

He took it, opened the serrated jaws, got the end of the bedspread between them and locked the jaws, then pulled back, revealing the pink blanket beneath.

It, too, was wrinkled. Releasing the jaws of the forceps, the bedspread fell away and he repeated the action with the forceps on the blanket and top sheet. Beneath that, on the pink satin bottom sheet, was a wet spot the size of a half-dollar near the middle of the bed.

“Looks like someone had sex recently,” Raines said.

“Swab that.”

But Raines was already moving in, buccal swab at the ready.

She pushed the swab up out of its protective plastic sleeve and gently wiped it over the spot on the bed. Next, she pulled the paper handle so the swab disappeared back into the sleeve. She snapped the small lid on it, then held it carefully as she handed Hawkins a roll of an adhesive tag from her pocket.

Using his Sharpie, Hawkins dated the tag, initialed it, then pulled off the backing and handed it to Raines, who placed it over the lid of the swab sleeve, sealing it.

“What have we got?” Hawkins asked.

Raines took a deep breath, then let it out. Holding up the swab, she said, “We have evidence that someone, probably Mrs. Hoff and a partner, had sex in this room.”

“Her ex?”

Raines considered that, then shook her head. “Doubtful. I used the electrostatic print lifter and got footprints off the wood floor. I think we have a third person present. Another man, this one wearing sneakers.”

Hawkins told her his theory about the towels and the wet rug in the bathroom.

“So,” she said, “there were three people here.”

“I think Carl Hoff definitely interrupted something. Tell me about the shootings.”

“Both were shot from a distance of about six feet. It looks like they were both shot with the same gun, about the same caliber anyway, judging from the entry wounds, and the shell casings have disappeared from Hoff ’s automatic.”

“Anything else?”

“The footprints indicate a struggle between the man wearing the tennis shoes and Hoff, who was trying to get away when the man shot him. The killer wiped the gun clean of fingerprints, then put it on the floor near Hoff.”

“Which one of them shot Mrs. Hoff?” Hawkins asked.

“Hoff tested positive for gunshot residue. It looks like he shot his wife, wrestled with her lover, lost the fight for the gun, then tried to get away but got shot in the head.”

“What’s the first rule about witnesses?” Hawkins asked.

Raines gave him a sharp look. “First on the scene, first suspect.”

“Good. Now, who called in the crime?”

“The neighbor, Roger Triplett.”

“Right. What kind of shoes was he wearing?”

“Tennis shoes.”

“Did you notice the burn on his arm?”

“Yeah. It wasn’t very big.”

“About the size of an ejected shell casing?” Hawkins asked.

“Oh hell.”

“Go get Yackowski and Stark.”

“Right away,” she said, and turned toward the door.

“Krysti.”

She stopped and looked back.

“If Triplett’s still in the hall, don’t let him know you know. If we’re going to convict him, we’re going to want the towels and casings. He didn’t have time to leave the building, so they’ve got to be here somewhere. We can only hope he was dumb enough to hide them in his own apartment.”

She gave him a quick nod and headed down the hall. Hawkins pulled out his cell phone and woke Judge Jonathon Maynard from a sound sleep. The judge was, naturally, livid, but once Hawkins explained the situation, Maynard agreed to sign a search warrant and fax it to the security office of Crossroads Towers.

Hawkins went out to the primary crime scene where Raines and the two detectives waited for him.

“You got something?” Yackowski asked.

Hawkins had Raines explain their findings to the detectives.

When she finished, Yackowski said, “I’m supposed to believe that shit?”

“If Triplett got the gun,” Stark said, “why shoot Hoff?”

Hawkins said, “For one thing, Hoff now had a witness to him killing his wife. Triplett would never be safe. At some point, Triplett’s going to claim self-defense.”

Stark shrugged. “Could it have been?”

“This is a far-fetched bunch of bullshit,” Yack said.

“If it was self-defense,” Hawkins said, answering Stark and ignoring the older detective, “what exactly was Triplett protecting himself from? Hoff was disarmed and running away. Self-defense is not shooting a man in the back of the head from six feet away.”

Raines asked, “And in the case of self-defense, why steal the evidence? What we have here is two separate homicides. Hoff shot his ex-wife, then Triplett shot Hoff. The crimes just happened to have been committed with the same weapon.”

Starting to buy in, Yackowski said, “And you’re sure the lab will find what you say they’ll find?”

“They’ll do all the tests,” Hawkins said, “but I’m betting we’ll get a DNA match to Triplett from the bed, match his shoes to the prints in the dining room, and we can probably get a positive GSR test with the warrant. If we find the towels and shell casings, we’ll have a slam dunk.”

Turning to Stark, Yackowski asked, “Where’s Triplett now?”

Shrugging, Stark said, “We released them. I think he and his wife went to bed. I know they went into their apartment. Hell, it couldn’t have been ten minutes ago.”

Without another word, the quartet moved through the apartment and into the corridor.

A security guard in a Crossroads Towers suit jacket and black slacks waited for them. He held out a small sheaf of papers. “Which one of you is Mr. Hawkins?”

Hawkins accepted the papers. They had their search warrant.

Yackowski knocked on the Tripletts’ door.

No answer.

Turning to the security guard, Hawkins asked, “How many elevators are running at this hour?”

The guard said, “Just the one. Security. We lock down the others.”

Yackowski pounded on the door again.

“Was anyone in the elevator when you got on?” Hawkins asked.

The guard shook his head.

The apartment door opened and a teary Angela Triplett opened the door.

“We need to speak to your husband,” Yackowski snapped.

She took an involuntary step backward. “He . . . he’s not here.”

“Where is he?”

The woman was crying again now. “The stress was getting to him. He went out for a pack of smokes. He knows I hate it when he smokes, so he won’t do it in here.”

Yackowski headed for the elevator.

Hawkins stepped forward. “Mrs. Triplett, how long ago did he leave?”

“Not even five minutes ago,” she managed through ragged breaths.

“Was he carrying anything?”

The woman looked puzzled, her handkerchief now twisting between her hands. “How did you know that?”

Ignoring her question, Hawkins asked his own: “What was it?”

“He said he was going to drop the garbage down the chute,” she said pointing at a small door recessed in the wall between the apartments.

Yackowski was already punching the elevator button, but Hawkins yelled, “He’s in the stairwell!”

Yack stood frozen for a second, but Stark hit the stairway door and started down. The burly detective came out of his trance and tossed a walkie-talkie to Hawkins. “Stay in touch,” he said as he went through the door behind his partner.

“Follow them,” Hawkins said to Raines. “Triplett might just be dumb enough to ditch the evidence in the building’s trash bin.”

With a curt nod, Raines disappeared after the two detectives and the suspect.

The elevator dinged and the door slid open. Hawkins stepped in.

“You want me to come with you?” the security guard asked.

“No,” Hawkins said, holding the door open. “You stay here. Are you armed?”

The guard nodded and held up a small can of pepper spray.

“You stay with Mrs. Triplett. Make sure she doesn’t warn her husband by cell or otherwise.”