Murder in the Dog Days (Maggie Ryan) (3 page)

“No danger he won’t know we’re back,” observed Olivia as they sauntered back to the van. The excited squeals continued, punctuated by Nick’s and Jerry’s hilarious versions of doom-laden Nazgul squawks.

Maggie pulled another towel from the van and shook sand from it into a puddle. “Is anyone else hungry?” she asked.

“We just had a huge basket of sandwiches,” Olivia objected. She grabbed a towel and hurled it at Jerry as he ran flapping by. He caught it and came over to help.

“Yeah, I’m hungry,” he said, fishing a pink plastic swim ring from the van. “Pizza, right, Maggot?”

“With anchovies and extra cheese!” she agreed enthusiastically.

Tina galloped past her mother and there was a crash.

“Oh, dear!” Donna, her hand at her mouth, looked down at the picnic basket she’d just dropped onto the wet driveway.

Nick was already kneeling to pick up the scattered contents. “Nothing broken except the jar of pickles,” he said, handing her a packet of paper plates. “But the napkins got wet.”

They cleaned up, repacked the basket, and tucked all the toys and towels inside the kitchen door. Then Nick and Jerry took Tina with them to the shopping center to get pizza. The others wiped their shoes and went inside. It seemed stuffy after the rain-washed air outdoors.

“Dale!” Donna called. There was no response. She put a kettle on the range and pulled out a pitcher and some tea bags, her face troubled.

Olivia frowned. Damn it, Dale was acting like a total asshole today. No story could keep him that busy. “I’ll go get him,” she said.

The office door was closed. She banged on it. “Hey, Dale!”

No answer. She listened, but if he was on the phone the other person was doing a hundred percent of the talking. A paper napkin drifted across the polished floor of the hall in the soft air-conditioned breeze. Olivia stuck it in her pocket and hammered on the door again.

Still nothing.

The knob turned but she couldn’t budge the door itself.

She went back to the kitchen. “No answer,” she said. “I heard him say he was going to take a nap.”

“Not many people could sleep through this homecoming,” Maggie observed with a doubtful glance toward the bedroom hall. She was squatting on the vinyl floor, belly bulging, to help Sarah get into her little blue shirt and shorts again. “You tried the door?”

“I couldn’t get it open. Will you come try, Donna?”

“Sometimes he bolts it.” But Donna looked increasingly uneasy.

Maggie straightened. “Sarah and I will go have a peek in the window while you try the door.”

Donna followed Olivia to the den door and pounded on it. “Dale? Open the door!”

They knocked and shouted. Josie, her hazel eyes curious, sidled along the wall behind them to watch.

After a moment Maggie came flying down the hall. “Move over!” she shouted. “Let’s get that damn door open!”

She was carrying a crowbar. Olivia pulled Donna aside and watched, astonished, while Maggie rammed the bar between door and jamb. She braced a foot against the door frame and then levered the bar violently back and forth until the door sprang open with a piercing, agonized creak.

Donna gasped.

Dale Colby lay prone, splayed on the plaid carpet, his half-turned face resting in a dark stain.

Olivia’s mind refused to consider what that stain might be.

2

Holly Schreiner strode up the puddled cement walk, walking point in plainclothes, mechanically registering what details she could see in the dusk. The Sandford subdivision: smallish fifties ranch houses, decent middle-class homes decked with petunias and tricycles, the summer-toasted lawns soggy but unrevived by the brief rain, the azalea bushes droopy too. Stormwater still dripped from their branches and she pulled her twill skirt aside to avoid them. This house faced north, had kids’ bikes in the garage next to a Pinto. A Ford passenger van, this year’s model, sat in the driveway. Beyond the garage, a patrolman watched them approach. In the yard next door a woman and a teenaged boy observed them all. Holly stepped up onto the cement platform that was trying to pass for a porch. Gabe Mercer stepped up beside her. Gabe wasn’t a bad partner to work with. He’d come on to her once, of course, but that was practically a job requirement. Take good notes, always carry your gun, and proposition female partners. Luckily she was senior enough to put that down quick. She wouldn’t date cops anyway. To them there were only three varieties of woman cop: nympho, dyke or frigid. They called Holly Ice Maiden. She was content.

Gabe was younger than Holly, already too pudgy. Not that she should point fingers, she was no Twiggy herself. He punched the button.

She heard the bell chime inside, heard the plop-plop of water from a drainpipe at the corner of the garage, heard the squeals of children down the block. Heard the chopper. The throbbing rotor crescendoed suddenly overhead, pounding the humid air, hammering the spike of memory into her gut. A wave of nausea. Her stomach began the crawl toward her throat, lifting ahead of it a spreading fan of image and odor: steamy air weighty with the stench of charred red flesh, red mud oozing through the cracks in the wall, reds everywhere in a fantastic palette from maroon and brick red through scarlet to petal pink….

Steady, Schreiner. The door was opening. The chopper had passed. She swallowed acid and planted her crepe-soled sandals a little further apart, bracing herself, her ID held out before her. A uniformed town cop peered out at them, graying, big-bellied, suspicious. She drew herself up to her full five five, fixed him with the stolid, unblinking cop stare she practiced in front of the mirror at home, and said crisply, “Holly Schreiner and Gabe Mercer. County Homicide.”

Reassured by the shield and by a glance at Gabe’s round face, the cop nodded. “I’m Higgins.”

“What have we got?”

“DOA in the back room.”

They followed him into the house. From somewhere in the rear came a child’s shrill chatter. Comfortably machinelike again, Holly checked off the details. An arch from the entry hall into a living room with gold wall-to-wall carpeting, flowered sofa, wing chairs. Sibilant sound of central air-conditioning. Newspapers stacked neatly on a shelf, big-screen Sony TV in the corner, expensive stereo components on the bookshelves. Barbie and Ken dolls dressed for a rock concert and then abandoned by the brick fireplace. The bookshelves were filled, except for a gap near the stereo. Across the room, another arch led into the dining room. From a door in its wall, kitchen probably, two people craned their necks to catch a glimpse of the newcomers. One was a tall, dark-haired woman, the other a girl, twelve maybe, who chewed solemnly on the knuckle of her forefinger. “Family?” asked Gabe.

“Yeah,” Higgins confirmed. “And friends. Found the body. I told them to wait in the kitchen. It’s out of the way, other end of the house.”

“Fine.” Holly and Gabe followed him around the corner and down a short hall. First door on the left was a bath. Two bedrooms were on the right, one sporting white-painted bunk beds, probably advertised as French provincial. A yellow plastic tape recorder sat on the pink rug, a John Denver poster looked out from the wall. Barbie and Ken’s resplendent two-story colonial house stood atop a white dresser. Holly had missed Barbie, had already been in high school when the curvy dolls had first swept the nation. Born too soon. She asked Higgins’ sweat-rumpled back, “Ambulance been here?”

Higgins nodded, scrabbling in his pocket for a card where he’d jotted down names and numbers. “Couple of seconds after we got here. Pronounced him DOA and left him for us.”

He waved vaguely at the last door on the left. A den. Gray metal file cabinets, battered Naugahyde recliner with the footrest up, big oak desk, gray metal typing table bearing an IBM electric typewriter. Big windows to the south and west gave a twilight view of the backyard and side fence. From the vent, air brushed softly past her face. As she stepped into the room, Holly saw that the doorjamb was splintered.

The body sprawled on its back between the typing table and the recliner. The neck and shoulders were twisted, scalp and face gashed, dark blood soaking the plaid carpet. A few feet away lay a metal lamp base, shade mashed, bulb shattered. Holly squinted at it. Blood on the base. She said, “Fill me in, Higgins.”

He pulled another card from his shirt pocket. “Guy’s Dale Colby. Reporter for the Sun-Dispatch. Wife and two daughters, in the kitchen now. Friends too. They were away swimming, got back about nine, yelled for him. Didn’t answer so they tried the door.” He frowned doubtfully at Holly. “What they say is, it was bolted from the inside. They broke it down.”

“Wonderful.” Frowning too, Holly turned to examine the door. It held a standard brass barrel bolt installed about a foot above the doorknob. The bolt was in its locked position, barrel jutting past the end of the door, the strike that should be on the doorjamb now dangling from the end of the bolt. The screws of the strike had taken a chunk of wood with them. It would fit the
splintered scar in the jamb. “Okay. Crime Scene will check it out.”
She looked at the windows, three of them, gauze-curtained, all clamped closed. One looked cracked. “Higgins, you secured the yard outside these windows, right?”

“Yeah, my partner’s there.”

“Good. You better get back to the family. I’ll talk to them one at a time.”

Cautiously, she squatted by Colby’s body, grateful for the few moments before the forensic technicians arrived with their bustle and black jokes. Colby was wearing a crisp short-sleeved blue shirt, blue jeans, heavy leather belt, sandals. He’d soiled himself in death, that was common enough, but otherwise his clothes were uncommonly neat. He lay on his back, his head and neck twisted oddly aside. The gash in his skull and forehead over his right eye did not seem deep but had bled profusely. The blood was drying now, thick, caked black in the sparse brown hair. Something was odd about it, about the angle of the face. She decided it was the way the blood had spread toward his temple and right ear; most of it should have run down across his forehead the other way, toward the left. Didn’t quite match up with the stain on the carpet either. And there were purplish hints of lividity on the up side of his neck. “Wonderful,” muttered Holly in disgust. “Paramedics or somebody rolled this body around.”

“Yeah?” Gabe glanced over his shoulder.

“Well, could be God temporarily repealed the law of gravity.” She touched the taut neck gently; it was rigid. But when she lifted his forearm a couple of inches, the hand dangled limply. Rigor just starting. Well, she already knew it hadn’t happened in the last half hour. Wait for the ME to give her the official guess.

Gabe was peering at the oak desk. “Looks like some violence here.” He pointed at the edge of the table, where a gash showed in the wood. “Hard to date it, though.”

“Yeah. Still—” Holly’s eyes traveled to the recliner. “Damage on the arm of the chair there too. Stuffing looks clean. Let’s keep it in mind.”

Gabe leaned across the desk, his paunch dented by the edge, and peered at a plate with interest. “Looks like he ate lunch here. Tuna sandwich, potato chips, I’d guess.”

“You can’t think of anything but food, Gabe. Only one person?”

“Only one coffee mug. Mm, lemon drops.”

“Don’t eat the evidence, Boy Wonder.”

“I won’t. Yet,” he promised. “Guy’s got a tape recorder here. Some messages by the phone. Priscilla Lewis. Mitch Mitchell. Mrs. Resler. Leon Moffatt.”

“Good.” Holly was checking Colby’s pockets and making notes. Not much there; some loose change, house keys, penknife neatly folded. No handkerchief, no billfold, no cards. Maybe in the back pockets; she’d leave it for the technicians.

Gabe, peering into the top desk drawer, whistled. Holly straightened and joined him.

“Looks like he expected trouble,” said Gabe.

A pair of Colt .38s gleamed in the drawer, extra cartridges next to them. Holly shook her head. “Kids in the house, and the drawer doesn’t lock.” She looked back at the door, wondering if the weapons were the reason for that bolt.

“S’pose this is important?” asked Gabe.

He indicated a newspaper. Today’s Sun-Dispatch. His stubby finger pointed at a byline: Dale Colby. Holly skimmed the story, an update about that plane crash back in January. Congressman Knox. The story made it sound as though most of the families were better off now. Names: Moffatt, Resler, Lewis, some others. “Yeah. Let’s start with these names,” said Holly.

She pulled a pad of graph paper from her shoulder bag and sketched the room quickly, the position of the windows, the furniture, the body. Someone else would do a measured map, there would be countless photographs, and if she was lucky she’d never have to try to explain her crude sketch in a courtroom. But she needed it to help organize her own mind. God help her, it needed organizing. Okay, lamp there, outlets there and there, air-conditioning vent there, bulletin board there. She gave a last look around the room but saw nothing that she should add. “Gabe, launch the Crime Scene boys when they come moseying in. I’m going to go tackle the witnesses.”

From the den end of the hall, she walked along the polished floor to the dining room, gold-carpeted like the living room. A pair of big windows gave a dusky view of the only tree in the backyard. Pineapple-patterned wallpaper, a top-of-the-line thermostat near the door to the kitchen, Audubon bird prints lined up on the walls. She paused at the kitchen door.