First Murder (17 page)

“I called Dee.” She held her head up, trying to be strong. Her eyes filled with tears. “I knew she had something at the hospital that morning but it was so early I thought we could have coffee or get something.” The first small sobs began. “She didn’t answer.” Her quivering shoulders joined the sobs. She hugged herself to stop them.

Ray had a solemn look on his face. He gave her time to collect herself by flipping through his notebook. Tony noticed he was looking in the front of it.

“You didn’t leave a message.” Ray found what he was looking for. There were only two messages on the machine, one from the son and one from the husband.

“No. I guessed she was in the shower.”

“I see.”

“I was already dressed so I decided to just go over there.” Ray and Tony shared a concerned look.

“What time was this?”

“7:30? Maybe closer to 8:00.”

“Did you talk to her? Was she there?” Tony was glad Ray was doing the talking. He could keep the excitement out of his voice, temper the anxiety. Tony wasn’t sure he’d be able to. The woman had been there during the window of time they’d determined that Deanna had been murdered.

“No. She didn’t answer the door. I assumed I’d missed her.” She looked from Tony to Ray and back. Ray’s face was blank, impassionate. Tony’s expression must have been amazement or excitement. Karen’s expression changed from curiosity to fear, and finally to despair. “Oh my God,” she whispered.

“How did you know she was gone?”

“She was lying in there dead, wasn’t she?” Karen’ shoulders shook again.

Ray asked the question again. “How did you know she was gone?”

“I didn’t. I guessed. She was in there wasn’t she?” Karen’s voice was rising with each answer. Tony looked at the basement door with concern.

“Was her car gone?”

“I don’t…I don’t know. She kept it in the garage.”

“Did you look in there?”

“No. I just assumed she was gone already.”

“Where did you park?”

“What? Why?”

“Did you park in the driveway?”

“She was already dead, wasn’t she?”

“Please, Mrs. Hewes. Karen. Did you park in the driveway?”

“No. On the street.” Karen was leaving them, Tony noticed. She was focusing on something out of the window in the tiny backyard. Her voice and mannerisms changed. He wondered if she was going into shock.

“What did you do then?” Tears ran down her cheeks while Karen stared out the window. Tony guessed she didn’t even hear the question.

“What did you do then?”

“She was dead. Dee was dead.” Tony saw the moist stains on her sweater and on her jeans where tears flowed unchecked from the burst levee. She didn’t wipe them. She didn’t even know they were there.

“She was dead.”

“G
ary was kind of pissed you made his wife cry,” Tony joked from the passenger seat as they drove toward Minneapolis and the U campus. He’d had to do some arm twisting when Karen’s husband came up from the basement. Tony hoped Ray would find the humor in it.

“That interview could have gone better.”

As big as Gary Hewes was he hadn’t had a chance against de Luca’s training and years of experience on the streets. Tony had him down and ready for the cuffs in about three seconds.

Ray frowned at the windshield as they rolled down the interstate. “As interesting as it is that the woman says she was at the house the morning of the murder, we didn’t get very far with anything else, did we?”

“No,” Tony agreed. He thought he heard something else, some doubt in Ray’s tone. “Are you saying she wasn’t at the house?”

“I’m not saying that. Sure would be nice to have a witness, though.”

Tony couldn’t disagree, but he would have bet a large sum that the woman wasn’t acting. She’d been shaken. “We’re going to have to take another run at her aren’t we?”

“Oh yes,” Ray said.

“Mr. Hewes isn’t going to like that.”

Ray turned his head toward Tony, smiling now. “Let’s not let him know.”

“I like that idea. I’d really hate to have to put him on the ground again. Tell me something Ray. Do you really think Karen is a suspect? Or Lakisha Marland? Or Tia Bork?”

“Now we’re at a teaching moment, detective. Write this down: Everyone Deanna Fredrickson knew is a suspect. Everyone she knew or had contact with is a suspect until we clear them.”

“Okay.”

“And not just in this case. Every case is the same in this respect, Tony. Everyone is a suspect until they’re absolutely positively unimpeachably cleared.”

“I understand. I mean, it’s obvious, right?”

Ray chuckled. “So obvious that it’s easy to forget.”

They exited the freeway and entered the labyrinth that was the University of Minnesota campus. East Bank. West Bank. Dinkytown. Frat Row. No Left Turn. One way. Construction Zone. Of the thousands of students and teachers presently on campus they were looking for a Professor Galbraith who taught
History of the Cinema
on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

It took a while.

Professor Galbraith had no idea who Sean Stuckey was. He rarely attended the ‘History’ screenings, leaving the task to his TAs, graduate students who were working part time while they pursued their advanced degrees and were, Tony thought, as arrogant and unhelpful as the professor. Tony and Ray tracked them down one by one, by phone and in person.

They finally cornered their last prey hiding in a dark room full of editing equipment. His name was Gordon. He was editing a documentary of some kind. Flickering video images of people in lab coats talking earnestly were pointing at pictures of Earth on the TV monitor. A tinny dialogue ran underneath. It promised the end of the world as we know it every thirty seconds or so.

Gordon had been working the ‘
History
’ lecture Monday.

They’d screened
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
that morning. No one took attendance for the class, he explained. You either mastered the material or not. There were over two hundred students registered for the class. He estimated that they almost never had more than a hundred and fifty in the lecture hall.

It surprised them both when they learned that Gordon knew who Stuckey was. He knew he was a transfer student from UCLA and shared Stuckey’s opinion that the U had screwed him out of a bunch of credits. Stuckey had taken a similar, harder class out west but the credits didn’t transfer for some reason. They’d had coffee once or twice after class. Gordon didn’t remember seeing him Monday but hadn’t been looking for him. He could have been there, he told them.

Sean Stuckey doesn’t have much of an alibi, Tony thought.

Tony spent the drive time back to the station buried his notes, trying to get everything straight for the session later in the afternoon, the case review. When the car stopped he looked up, surprised. They were parked in front of a clothing store.

He followed Ray inside, watched him shake hands with the men and women there. They knew him. This was where Ray bought the nice suits and jackets he was famous for. The haberdashery had a smell. It smelled like wool and linen. It smelled of mild tasteful men’s scents. It smelled of talcum and shoe leather and the toasty smell of a hot iron on cotton.

Ray chatted while a small bald man groped Tony, quietly relaying numbers to another small bald man. They measured his arms and neck, his chest and his waist twice. He gave Ray a questioning look across the store. Ray had his half-smile working and turned to the small bald men. He pointed toward a rack of suits.

Tony was ushered into a large dressing room and stripped to his boxers. The room was very warm. He was surrounded by mirrors. He tried on a blue suit, a dark navy single breasted jacket and gently pleated trousers. He slipped into a grey chalk stripe double breasted. The fabric felt like a whisper on his legs. The small bald men made marks on the cuffs and scurried to another room further back.

Ray shook his head at a brown suit and it vanished. Shirts appeared. Ties were paraded one after another. Tony would nod yes. Ray would shake his head no. A dark charcoal gray-almost-black sports jacket appeared. It fit like Sue Ellen, naked in his arms. Got to have that one, Tony thought. The small bald men looked nervous when he tried it on over the shoulder holster rig. The jacket hung just fine.

Black slacks and a jacket reflected from the mirrors. Tony felt pampered. He felt sleek. He’d never had clothes like this, had never been fit. He imagined walking up to Sue Ellen’s door, decked out like this, ready to take her to the Dakota to hear Rafe Bankston sing with Joel Shapiras’s quartet.

Trousers were brought out from the back. A plump woman with pins tucked like toothpicks in the corner of her mouth watched him slip on one pair after the other and made him turn around. Twice she grabbed at the fabric at his rump and clucked.

Plastic wrapped hangars appeared. Shirt boxes were stacked on the counter. Ties were gently folded in tissue paper and bagged. Tony surrendered his Visa Card. Fifteen hundred and eighty bucks later he and Ray were back in the car and headed for St. Paul. Tony was wearing the charcoal gray sport coat. The blue jacket with the hangar pleats was in the trash bin back at the store.

He thanked Ray several times.

Ray told him he was welcome.

Carol noticed the sport coat right away. De Luca looked good striding into the squad room behind Ray. She went over to him and rubbed the fabric. Tony thought he heard her purr. Vang and Ted showed up minutes later. The team was assembled.

Just as Ray was getting their attention and Carol was passing out her notes Jonny Kumpula banged into the room. He had stack of thick folders under one arm and was carrying a half-full jug of electric blue Gatorade.

“Hey everybody!” Kumpula grinned. Ray knew that grin meant he had something interesting.

“I would like to thank those of you who turned in your fingerprint cards promptly. They helped a lot.” Kumpula rifled through the folders, found the one he wanted, and looked up. “What? You guys just go ahead. I’ll raise my hand.”

“Why don’t you go first, Kump.” Whatever science Kumpula had in his files and notes would help later. Ray was afraid they didn’t have much to discuss otherwise.

“Okay. Lots of prints. No fibers we could find. No juices. It’s all detailed in the file.” He patted it, smiling. “I got some other stuff, though. You want the highlight reel?”

“Please.”

“Okay. The mister’s in the system. Scott Fredrickson spent a year and a day in the Ramsey County workhouse in…let me see…1977.” Tony sat straighter in his chair. “I called up the case. He pled guilty to assault third, knocked down from attempted murder.” They all knew that assault in the third degree meant it involved a weapon of some sort. “He beat the crap out of his wife. There were pictures.”

“Deanna?” The question slipped out of Tony’s mouth, but everyone else had it ready.

“Apparently the first wife…a Marjorie.” Ray’s eyes were locked on Kumpula.

“The weapon?”

“A lamp. He hit her with a lamp after he hit her several times with his fists.” Tony wanted to start writing down notes right then, record first impressions of the information, get some immediate questions on paper so he wouldn’t lose them. No one else was writing anything down, he noticed, so he set his pen back on the desk.

“Anything since then?”

Kumpula flipped a page. “Nope, not even a traffic citation.”

“Okay. What else?”

“You’re gonna love this one. Okay, de Luca doesn’t get me a comp card for the roommate, Stuckey. Not right away. So I’d put all the mystery prints out there, right? I got a hit on Stuckey this morning. If I’d had the comp card I might not have put it out on AFIS, least not right away.”

“Let me guess, LA?”

The LA trip was well documented. Sean Stuckey had transferred from UCLA, the University of California/Los Angeles. Tony hadn’t had a chance to share that with anyone but Ray as yet, and that only in passing. He thought this was damn interesting.

“Yup. LA. But it’s a weird deal. Very weird.”

“Define weird.” Ray said. He knew that ‘
Kumpula
’ weird could be another person’s truly bizarre.

“What I could pull up—he was arrested, okay, and booked. Then the case was dropped. Well, not dropped, exactly. It’s murky. I’m confused.”

“What was the charge?”

“See, that’s part of it. The charge was sexual misconduct. We don’t have anything like that here.”

Now it was Carol’s turn to sit up straighter. Her previous assignment had been in the Sex Crimes Unit. Minnesota didn’t have a ‘sexual misconduct’ charge. She wasn’t sure what that meant in California.

“So we don’t know if he was tricking, or pimping, or if he was picked up for lewd behavior, or diddling little girls, or what.” Kumpula took a swig of his blue drink. “I’ve only had it for a couple of hours, sorry.”

“No, this is good, Jonny.” Ray turned to Carol. “You got anyone you know out there that could help us?”

“I’ll have to check my files. I’ll find someone.”

“It could be important.”

Kumpula sorted through his pile and pulled another, thinner folder out. “We found a thumbprint and two fingers from Stuckey on the doorjamb of the master bedroom upstairs. At some point in time he was upstairs in the house.”

Tony remembered the graphite smudge on the doorframe from his last visit to the house, remembered wondering whose it could be. The vibe in the room turned even more serious. Quieter. Everyone was processing this information. All of them; Ray, Carol, and the others were trying to figure out what Stuckey might have been doing upstairs in the Fredrickson house. Ray finally broke the silence.

“I know you would have brought it up immediately but I have to ask. Did you get anything off of the knife?”

“The handle was smudged. Now that’s interesting because it means it was wiped with a synthetic, most likely a nylon or rayon cloth. It could have been silk or a real lightweight wool blend, too. That would tend to leave a smear. Cotton or terrycloth, like a dish towel, would have wiped it clean.”

“That is interesting.”

“And then there’s the mug.” Tony remembered the mug in the sink with dried coffee stains. “It had been wiped too, on the outside. It was wiped completely clean, though. We’re thinking with the hand towel that was on the counter.”