The Prettiest One: A Thriller (8 page)

The man stared at Josh for a moment before answering. “I’m her fiancé,” he said, then he looked at Caitlin again. “Katie, I almost called the cops. You lose your phone? Where were you all night?”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CAITLIN HAD HEARD THE MAN’S words, heard him say that he was her fiancé, but he might as well have been speaking an ancient, dead language. The words made no sense to her.

“You’re her fiancé?” Josh said. “Bullshit.”

“Heading down to the courthouse to say our vows on Friday,” the man said. He turned to Caitlin. “Now would you tell me where the hell you went after closing last night? You had me out of my head. And then maybe you can tell me who this clown is and why he thinks he’s looking for you.”

Caitlin had no idea what was going on. Why would this man claim to be her fiancé?

“Look,” Josh said, “maybe this kind of thing is funny to you, jerking around people who knock on your door, but we just want to speak with Katherine Southard. If she’s here, we’d like to see her. If not, we can come back later.”

The man laughed. “You want to see Katherine Southard, turn around, brother. For some reason I can’t begin to imagine, you just told me you’re married to her.”

After a moment’s hesitation, Josh turned toward Caitlin, his eyes confused. The man in the doorway was watching her, a slight smile playing at his lips. Caitlin said nothing. She just stood there. And the longer she stood there, the more confused Josh looked. Slowly, the smile faded from the other man’s face. He frowned. “Katie?” he said.

“Caitlin?” Josh said.

“I think I need to sit down,” Caitlin said.

Unfortunately, the approximately one hundred million people whose fingerprints were in the FBI’s integrated automated fingerprint system did not include the victim from the warehouse. That meant he most likely had never been arrested, served in the military, been employed with the state or federal government, or received a gun permit in states requiring fingerprinting of applicants. There were still other scenarios in which a subject’s fingerprints could find their way into the Feds’ database, but none apparently applied to Hunnsaker’s victim. John Doe remained a John Doe for the time being.

Hunnsaker hated John Does. A murder victim can be an invaluable investigative tool—not just his corpse but his life prior to his becoming a corpse. Did he take or deal drugs? Was he married? Cheating on a spouse? Who were his friends? His enemies? More often than not, a victim’s activities in life hinted at or even pointed directly to the reason for his death, and just as often, a list of his acquaintances included the name of his killer.

That was why Hunnsaker hated John Does. In fact, she refused to refer to the victims in her cases as such.

In this case, Vic Warehouse—as Hunnsaker had come to know him—was not going to be identified by his fingerprints. And his description didn’t match that of any recently missing persons, at least not that she could find. Nor did he conveniently carry ID in his pocket, which would have made Hunnsaker’s job a lot easier. She wished they could just put his face on TV with a caption reading, “Do you know this man?” but in the only photos they had of him, he was very dead with a bullet hole in his cheek, and the department’s public relations people didn’t want the police to come across as ghoulish. So Vic was still a mystery man.

Damn John Does.

Hunnsaker turned from her computer screen and decided she needed coffee. She loved the coffee in the squad’s break room. Most detectives complained about it as though there were some departmental regulation requiring them to do so. But it tasted good to Hunnsaker. She had never liked coffeehouse java, and not just because it cost four times what it should. She just didn’t care for the taste. But give her a cup from the eight-year-old Mr. Coffee in the break room and she was happy. She’d even bought the same model on eBay, though had never quite been able to replicate the flavor at home.

She was adding sugar to her mug when her cell phone rang. Caller ID told her it was Padilla calling.

“Hey, Javy.”

“I might have a line on our potential witness,” Padilla said.

Though Vic Warehouse’s fingerprints hadn’t been in the system, the prints of at least one person who had spent time in the closet at the back of the warehouse had been, and his prints were all over the place—on the beer bottles, the glossy-paged girlie magazine, the wall, the floor. Twenty-four minutes after those fingerprints had been entered into the national database, Dominick Bruno’s brief stint in the military caused his name to pop out. They ran the name through their own systems and learned a little about Mr. Bruno. Currently thirty-four years old. Divorced. No discernible source of income. Two misdemeanor arrests for possession. So far in his life, Bruno had been able to avoid jail time. According to Padilla, he no longer resided at 481 Fieldstone Drive, Apartment C, which was his last known address. Padilla had interviewed the elderly man now living there, who claimed that he’d never heard of Dominick Bruno. The building super reportedly remembered Bruno, though, telling Padilla that “that scumbag” hadn’t lived in the building for more than a year, having just disappeared one day, along with the formerly built-in microwave that belonged above the stove.

“So where is he?” Hunnsaker asked, stirring the sugar into her coffee.

“Not sure yet,” Padilla said, “but the guy in the apartment next to Bruno’s old one remembered him and said he used to hang out with someone Bruno called Stick Man. The neighbor says they seemed real tight. The guy used to crash at Bruno’s place all the time.”

“Stick Man? What, was he just a giant pencil sketch?”

“No,” Padilla said, “but he was apparently very skinny.”

“That was going to be my second guess,” Hunnsaker said. “I assume you ran Stick Man through our system.”

“Yup. Real name is . . . man, I can’t even pronounce it. First name Kenneth.”

“That’s not so bad.”

“Last name is . . .” He paused, then spoke slowly, evidently sounding out the name as he read it. “Kahana . . . hanu . . . kahale . . . nahuli . . . or something like that. Probably Hawaiian.”

“No wonder he goes by Stick Man,” Hunnsaker said as she added a small splash of creamer to her coffee. “You talk to him yet?”

“Heading to see him now.”

“Want me to come along?”

“No, I got it, Charlotte.”

“Okay. Let’s hope he’s still at his last known address.”

“He’ll be there,” Padilla said.

“Why so sure?”

“Because he’s got another two years left on his sentence. Mugged a little old lady.”

“Ah. Where is he?”

“Hampshire House,” Padilla said, which was his and Hunnsaker’s shorthand for the Hampshire County Jail and House of Correction. “I’ll be there in twenty,” Padilla added.

Hunnsaker loved it when someone they needed to interview happened to be a guest of a nearby correctional facility. “Let me know what you find out,” she said.

She pocketed her phone, stirred her coffee, then took a sip. It had cooled a little but was otherwise just the way she liked it. Why the hell couldn’t she get her Mr. Coffee at home to brew something like this? Same coffeemaker, same coffee brand, same sugar, same everything. Why couldn’t she figure it out? Some detective she was.

She headed back to her desk with slightly more bounce in her step. She may have struck out so far trying to ID Vic Warehouse, but at least she had a mug of good coffee in her hand and a partner who might be on his way to finding them a real live witness to a murder—that is, unless they got really lucky and the guy had pulled the trigger himself.

Hunnsaker sat back down at her desk. She pushed the toxicology report to one side—the guy’s blood was clean—and pulled the crime scene photos toward her. The top photograph was a close-up of the victim’s face.

“Who did you piss off enough to kill you, Vic?”

Caitlin was sitting on the sofa of the man who claimed to be her fiancé, a glass of water in her hand. She wasn’t yet ready to look at her husband or . . . well, the other guy, so she looked around the apartment. It was small and a bit cluttered, but it was clean and smelled surprisingly fresh. It had a darkly colored, masculine feel to it, though there were tasteful touches here and there that suggested a gentle, feminine hand. She knew she was being slightly sexist, but the overall impression she got from the apartment was that it belonged to a man but a woman had exerted some influence here. She looked over at Josh, who sat in an armchair facing the couch. The other man had brought a wooden chair into the living room from the kitchen and straddled it backward, his arms resting on top of the chair’s back. They were both watching her drink her water.

Finally, the man said, “Katie, what’s going on here? Who is this guy?”

“Her name is Caitlin,” Josh said. “No one calls her Katie.”

“Well, I do, pal,” the man said, “and I’m not the only one. And her name is Katie, short for Katherine, not Caitlin.”

“No,
pal
, her name is Caitlin.”

They turned their heads as one toward Caitlin. She blew out a nervous breath. She didn’t want to admit it, even to herself, but she knew what must have been the truth.

“Josh,” she said, “you see what’s going on here, right?”

“Yeah?” the man said. “Well, someone needs to explain it to me, and pretty damn quick.”

“Josh?” Caitlin said.

The muscles of his jaw bunched. Finally, he nodded. He obviously didn’t like it any more than she did, but at least he seemed to understand what was happening.

“Katie,” the other man said, softly this time, “who is this guy really?”

She turned to him and took a deep breath. “My name is Caitlin. And this is my husband, Josh.”

The man said nothing for a moment. He scratched at the stubble on his chin. Then he nodded, almost to himself, as though this had confirmed something in his mind. “Is he the one you were running from?”

“The one I was . . . what?” Caitlin said.

“Look, I’m no fool. I meet a pretty girl in a bar, she comes home with me, dyes her hair the next day, doesn’t want to answer personal questions, chooses not to leave . . . it was obvious you were trying to get away from someone. I figured that part out. And I didn’t care who you were running from. I was just glad you ran to me,” he added sincerely.

“She wasn’t running from me,” Josh said. He was still grinding away at his teeth, the knots of muscle at the top of his jaw bubbling under his skin. Caitlin knew this had to be terribly difficult for him to hear. Heck, it wasn’t easy for her to hear. If this man was to be believed, she’d lived with him for months. That meant they had no doubt been intimate. The thought made Caitlin’s cheeks feel warm. She hoped the men didn’t notice her blushing.

“I guess it was his rings you sold?” the guy said.

“I what?” she asked. “I sold them?”

“Of course you did,” he said. “Don’t tell me you don’t remember?”

“It’s hard to explain, but no, I don’t.”

If he thought that was odd, he didn’t say so. Instead, he said, “I figured you had an ex-husband somewhere. It honestly didn’t occur to me that he wasn’t exactly an ex. It probably should have.”

“That’s what happened to your rings?” Josh asked. “You sold them?”

The man answered for her. “Sorry to break the news. She got almost a thousand bucks for them, though. Tell him, Katie.”

“A thousand? Seriously?” Josh said. “They cost ten times that.”

“I’m sorry,” Caitlin said. “I don’t remember doing it.” She felt terrible. She loved those rings.

Josh sighed. “I know. Sorry. It’s just . . . Don’t worry about it. When we can afford it, we’ll get you new ones.”

Caitlin nodded, absentmindedly rubbing her empty ring finger, which felt utterly naked. She let her eyes wander around the apartment again.

“I lived here?” she asked.

“You
live
here,” he said. “And why are you asking me? You know as well as I do. And how can you not remember selling those rings? It was just a few months ago. And why the hell is this guy saying that he’ll get you new rings? What’s going on here?”

“For how long?” she asked.

“What?” the man said.

“How long did I live here?”