An Intimate Murder (The Catherine O'Brien Series) (2 page)

The train, which he’d been playing with at the time of his death, had crashed into his ribcage, but to my amazement, hadn’t derailed. The cheap train set my brother and I had played with as kids would derail if you looked at it wrong.

This model was higher quality than the plastic trains kids played with, the wheels held to the track like a real train. The engine car chugged and whistled against the resistance of Luther’s body. The wheels slid in place, and the whole line of cars shuddered with the force.

The wounds that gaped in the center of Luther’s chest looked as though they’d come from two shotgun blasts.

“Jesus,” I said.

Louise reached down and pulled the plug on the Northern Pacific. The black engine and green boxcars whined to a stop.

“The techs finished in here first,” Louise said. “I wanted you to see him before they moved anything.”

Jonathan Luther had been standing in the center of the tracks. Encircled and trapped by his collection.

I ducked under the track, not a minor accomplishment these days, and surveyed Jonathan Luther up close. I turned my back to him and mimicked his stance, hovering over, but not touching, the body.

“The killer was all the way inside the room.”

I stood upright and held my arm straight out in front of me. “The bullets would have come from that direction.”

Louise moved around the table and aligned herself with my arm. She was three-quarters of the way down the wall, and directly in front of a café table set, whose chairs had an old steam engine carved into the backrests.

“So what?” Louise asked. “He allowed a killer to walk in with a shotgun, sit down, and chat? What sense does that make?”

“None at all.” I turned and scrutinized Luther’s face. “He looks surprised. There’s no fear on his face at all, just shock.”

“He knew his killer,” she said.

“What I don’t understand is why the killer changed weapons. Why stab the wife and then shoot the husband?”

I ran through plausible answers in my mind but couldn’t make any stick. In my years as a detective, I’d seen dozens of multiple homicide scenes, and I didn’t remember one where the killer had changed weapons.

“Maybe the killer wanted to kill the wife quietly so he wouldn’t alert the husband,” Louise said. “So he stabs the wife then shoots the husband.”

“Mr. Luther was killed first.”

Louise grinned. “Okay, I give. How do you know he was killed first?”

“You saw the cast off on the wall down stairs. If Mr. Luther weren’t the first to die, then the killer would have been drenched in blood. We should have found blood all the way up the stairs but they were clean. Plus, Mr. Luther, unless he was an extremely dense individual, would never have stood still while a killer, covered in his wife’s blood, carrying a shotgun, waltzed into his train room, and blasted him.”

“Touché.” Louise nodded. “Nice catch.”

“Thanks. Maybe my senses have been heightened by my sexual frustration.”

“Yeah, I’m sure that must be the reason.”

Louise smirked at me, which was the best I could expect for my sense of humor. Rarely, if ever, would she laugh, and when she did throngs of men fell at her feet, like bugs drawn to a bug light. Poor Louise had trained herself long ago that to be taken seriously she needed to restrain her sultry laugh.
Growing up must have been difficult for her, being beautiful and smart, and I don’t mean that in a snarky way. In this world, the prejudice that you can either be smart or pretty remained, and God forbid you be both.

Louise defined every man’s fantasy woman and every woman’s worst nightmare. Tall, slim, and elegant; her mahogany skin and braided hair were flawless.

In contrast, I was short, pale, and too round in certain places to be considered slim. I’m more bumpy than curvy, and more dorky than graceful. I am the anti-Louise.

And maybe I was seeing something at the crime scene that for some reason, Louise didn’t.

“So why change weapons?” I asked. “Why wouldn’t Mrs. Luther run to a neighbor? She must have heard the shotgun blasts.”

Louise stomped on the floor. Instead of a hollow clonk, clonk sound there was a solid whomp, whomp.

“Sounds well insulated to me, and she was two floors down.”

“I can hear Gavin routing around in our attic when I’m on the first floor.”

“No offense, Catherine but your house is old. This is new construction. High dollar new construction at that.”

“You might have a point.” I ducked under a set of three railman’s signal lamps hanging from the ceiling that were rewired for electricity. “But my house isn’t old. It’s a classic Victorian with better architecture, and more style, than this high dollar, cookie-cutter new construction.”

“Even so,” Louise said. “This place was built to be quiet. My guess is after a long hard day at work, Dad liked to play trains while Mom slept.”

“Are we done here?” I asked, not fully convinced by her argument. Especially since I could hear the technicians down the hallway, chattering about last night’s
Minnesota Wild hockey game. If I could hear them, then a shotgun blast could be heard in the living room.

“I think we’re done,” Louise said.

“Then I’m going home to my old house and my old husband.”

“Fraid not,” Louise said. “First twenty-four hours and all.”

“But I clocked out over an hour ago.”

“You’re here now.”

Arguing the point with her would be like pushing against a wall of stone, equally immovable and just as gritty when she wanted to be. Plus, she was right. Despite my desire to go home and ravish my husband, I had a responsibility and a job to do.

“Where to then?”

“Let’s talk to the neighbors and see if they heard anything. I find it hard to believe that the sound of two shotgun blasts could go completely unnoticed.”

Two EMTs bumped a gurney into the room.

“Is it okay to remove the body, Detective?”

Louise swiveled around to face me. “Catherine?”

“Sure.” I waved them in. “I think we’ve seen everything we need to see.”

The world as a whole is a strange place, and the people who inhabit this world are even stranger. The Luther’s neighbors proved to be the strangest I’d encountered in ten years of law enforcement. Considering the whackos and ice-blooded murders I’d run into, these neighbors could be proud of their over achieving ways.

The street looked benign, an affluent tree lined parkway with a BMW or Mercedes in every other driveway. The neighbor across the street had a pickup truck in their drive, but it turned out to be the yard man’s, who happened to be cleaning up the left behinds from the oak and maple fall deposits. Pretty to look at until they rotted into brown slime piles on your grass.

We questioned every neighbor on the block but no one heard the gunshots. They lived behind triple pane glass where the temperature was never too hot or too cold. Only one had dared to steal a glance out their insulated glass when an older car, rusted in too many places and not carrying the pedigree of a classic automobile, sped down the street.

“I knew right away they were up to no good.” Bernice Leigh, who claimed a relation to Janet Leigh, rocked on the edge of her tufted, chintz ottoman.

“Well maybe not right away.” She rolled her hand dramatically in the air. “At first I thought the car could belong to one of the boy’s friends who visit the Luther’s from time to time.”

“Did you know the Luther’s very well?” Louise nibbled the edge of a Ginger Thin Mrs. Leigh had fanned out on a china plate, and placed on the coffee table in front of us.

Bernice Leigh shook her head with such force that her hair, which had been so obviously a wig, dislodged itself and canted to one side. Bernice righted the wig without as much as a second thought.

“I don’t know them at all really. Or didn’t.” She waved a dismissive hand from side to side. “Yes, I saw them around at different functions and I’d wave too them if I saw them in the yard, but no one could claim we were anything more than passing acquaintances.”

“What kind of car did you see driving away, Mrs. Leigh?” I brushed the cookie crumbs from my hands onto a small plate Bernice had given each of us to hold our Ginger Thins.

“I don’t have any idea. It was old and not very well maintained. That’s all I can really tell you.” She smiled and touched her fingers to her chest. “I don’t even drive. Since my husband died, I’ve had to rely on friends or dirty old cabs to take me where I need to go.”

My Grandmother had been the same way when my Grandpa died. After about a month, “
the kindness of strangers”, routine grew old and she enrolled in driving lessons. The first thing she did with Grandpa’s life insurance money (which had been more than she really needed since Grandpa had been a minor financial wizard) was to pick out a brand new, black, Chevy Suburban and drive it home.

When we’d asked her why she bought a vehicle larger than she really needed, her response was, “Because if I’m going to get cracked up in one of those winter pile-ups that I read about in the paper, I want to make sure there’s a few feet of American steel between me and those piled up around me.”

To date, she still hasn’t been in one of those winter pile-ups, though she drives like a maniac on the loose.

“What color was the car you saw?” Louise asked.

“Dirty.” Bernice pursed her lips in a grimace of disgust. “Very dirty.”

“A very dirty blue?” I prompted trying to jog her memory. “A very dirty green? Or black?”

“I think the paint was a dark green, dirty,” she said. She tapped her temple in deep thought and then nodded her assurance. “Yes, a dirty, dark green.”

“Would you be able to identify the car if we showed you a picture?”

The look of complete pissed-off-attude that crossed Mrs. Leigh’s face told me without hesitation that I had over stepped the boundaries she’d set for stupidity. She crossed her left leg over her right, wrapped her arms around her knee, and pulled her back straight.

“I might be old but I’m certainly not feeble.”

With any luck, I could recover before Louise laid one of her warning looks on me. The kind of look that told me my lessons in tact had failed. Perhaps I could slop enough sugar on the woman to make her believe my sincerity.

“I apologize, Mrs. Leigh, my question didn’t come out at all right.”

I smiled. From the softening of the sharp lines around her frown, my smile, stilted as it was, had worked.

“What I meant to say was did you get a clear view of the car? Enough to recognize a photo or did the driver speed off too quick?”

Louise who had been my Sensei of tact for the past few years cast a glance in my direction that looked vaguely like pride. A
perhaps-you-are-learning-after-all
glance. I don’t think Mrs. Leigh caught the look or if she did, she didn’t register anything out of the ordinary about Louise’s Cheshire smile.

“Oh, no,” Bernice cooed. “I got a full side and front view when the driver tore out of here. I happened to be watering the plants in my front window at the time.”

Happened to be snooping out the front window at the time is more like the truth. The binoculars on the front windowsill hadn’t escaped my attention when we came in, though I’m sure, if pressed, Bernice Leigh would claim to be an avid bird or squirrel watcher.

“It wasn’t one of those little sporty models like the Luther’s boy drives. I know that for sure, and it wasn’t a pickup truck or those other ones.” Bernice pressed the fingertips of her right hand to her upper lip. “Oh what are those boxy things called? STDs?”

A burbling laugh rolled out of me before I could cage the sound behind my teeth. Bernice’s brows drew together in the Grand Canyon’s of furrows; only on her, the change wasn’t so drastic.

I let out a slow breath.

“I am so sorry, Mrs. Leigh. I think you meant to say SUV. A sport utility vehicle.”

She shook her sausage of a finger at me. The last knuckle bulged out at the sides adding to the effect that someone had tied off a sausage. On the tip of her finger was a perfectly manicured red nail and the errant thought that this would be Louise in thirty-years, ran through my head.

“Are those the ones that are square? The ones that tip over all the time?”

“Yes,” Louise said. “You’re thinking of SUV.”

“Well whatever they’re called it wasn’t one of those numbers. It was more of a normal sized car.”

She crunched into a Ginger Thin and gave a smug satisfied smile around the crumbs as if she’d helped us crack the meaning of life.

I riffled through my purse and found my notebook. “Let me write this down.”

I made a show of flipping through the pages until I found a clean sheet of paper. When I finally did, I clicked open my ballpoint and poised the tip over the page.

“Let me make sure I have everything. We have a normal sized, dirty. . ..”

I paused.

“Green,” Bernice provided, when she realized I was waiting for her to fill in the details again. “Definitely a dirty green.”