Blood Silence (13 page)

“Snaps.”

“Yeah,” Dick replied. “She came out here to confront them, but then she sees them in the act, at the height of passion. She stands there, and maybe she watches a little as the anger rises inside her. Even the calmest and most levelheaded of people would be hard-pressed to not get … pissed. The bastard doesn’t even have the decency to go to a hotel—no, he brings her here. The son of a bitch brought her out here to their house—
their house
.”

“She’s angry.”

“Who wouldn’t be? Who wouldn’t be absolutely beside themselves in rage? And what is there, thirty feet away? A loaded Smith-9 back in the master bedroom. The rage she has, well, that turns the brain off—it’s all emotion and anger driving the bus now. She goes and gets that gun and says, ‘I’m going to smoke the no-good, cheating son of a bitch.’ Meredith comes in here and just unloads, letting out all of the anger, the frustration, and bitterness. She empties the damn gun and then runs.”

Mac nodded. It was exactly what the scene looked like. “I hear you.”

“But you don’t buy it.”

Mac shook his head while staring at the photos. “Hmmm.”

Lich saw the change in his partner’s expression. “I know that look. What is it?”

Mac stood up and pursed his lips. “I’m not sure. I see something in this picture of Sterling and Gentry on the bed … but I can’t quite figure out what it is.”

“Which picture are you looking at?”

Mac held up the photo. “Sterling is lying on top of her, and their bodies are kind of laced together.”

“Yeah, so?” Lich answered, not following. “Coroner thought they were having sex. Like you said, they found fresh semen. Sterling at least went out with a smile.”

“Sure, they get here, they get all fired up and do the deed, but does that take two hours? I like foreplay as much as the next guy, but when it starts how this starts, which is all hot and heavy, ripping each other’s clothes off as they make their way to this bedroom, to then downshift into a long session of foreplay before actually … you know … having sex. That doesn’t make sense. This has all the earmarks of a rush to the bed to get it on.”

Lich shook his head, not bothered. “Yeah, and then maybe they lie in bed for a while, talk, and then there’s … I don’t know, a round two.”

“Don’t take this wrong, but Sterling is nearly fifty years old, and Gentry is in her forties,” Mac replied skeptically. “I mean, are you and Dot getting your swerve on twice a night?”

“It’s not unheard of, Mac. Us men in our midfifties have not lost the desire for sex, especially with the little blue pill being so easy to get.”

“You need help to stand at attention?” Mac snickered.

Lich’s expression said it all.

“It’s okay, buddy, that’s what it’s for.”

“Fuck you. Wait until you’re my age, Superstar. The pharmacy will be your friend too.”

Mac laughed hard.

“Just you wait, you cocky little prick,” Dick retorted but with a knowing smile. “Just you wait. You’ll be sneaking Viagra to keep that fiery redhead of yours happy.”

After a minute of joint laughter, Mac turned back to business. “I’m still skeptical of round two, but we can ask Meredith when she gets here.”

“Oh yeah, I’m sure she’ll want to comment on J. Fred’s sexual stamina.”

“She liked round two back in the day,” Mac retorted. “Responding to questions regarding her husband’s sexual stamina and proclivities goes with her current predicament.”

“I get the sense that she and her husband had stopped getting it on for some time.”

“Probably true,” Mac answered. “But still, Dicky Boy, I swear to you, I’m seeing something here.”

“If they’re
not
having sex, then what are they doing?”

“Well, that’s the question, now isn’t it?” Mac replied, still boring in on the photos of Sterling and Gentry lying dead in bed.

Just then, the front door opened, and Mac heard Lyman, Plantagenate, and Meredith enter the house. Mac and Lich went to the front.

“How’s it going?” Lyman asked, taking off his leather gloves.

“Working the scene, trying to get a feel for it,” Lich said as he handed out rubber gloves to everyone.

Mac looked to Meredith, who was nervously looking around like a stranger in what was now her lake home, assuming she didn’t spend the rest of her life in prison. “Are you sure you can handle this?” he asked her quietly. “It’s”—he hesitated—“gruesome in there. I’m just telling you, it’s not going to be easy for you to look at.”

She nodded. “I’ll be fine … I think.”

“She almost wasn’t, an hour ago,” Lyman stated with a smile. “Media sneak-attacked her at her parents’ place when we came out the door. I had to throw myself in front of her.”

Mac froze, “Lyman, what did just you say?”

Lyman turned to Mac and could see the expression on his face. “I … had … to throw myself in front of her.”

“That’s it! I knew I was seeing something in that damn picture,” Mac exclaimed and rushed back to the bedroom while everyone followed, confused. He stood at the left side of the bed and leaned his head over the bed where a pillow would normally be and looked back toward the hallway. Then he looked down at the photos again. Then he walked around to the right side of the bed and did the same thing, lingering over one photo of Sterling lying on top of Gentry, his back riddled with bullet holes, and then the kill shot to Gentry’s forehead. “Excuse me.” He pushed through everyone to get back to the front of the house, where he opened his backpack and took out a large sheet of plastic, about the size of a painting drop cloth. He quickly raced back to the bedroom. “Dick, take the photos off the bed.”

“Okay, but what do you see?” Lich asked urgently, knowing his partner was on to something.

“An alternate explanation,” Mac answered. Once Dick swept the pictures off the bed, Mac threw the plastic sheet over the mattress, covering the large blood spot on the right side of the bed. “Summer, lie on the right side of the bed, on your back, like you’re sleeping.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” she answered, taking off her long winter coat and handing it to Meredith. She did as instructed and lay down on the right side of the bed.

Mac walked back around to the left side and lay down as though he was sleeping, except he had the picture of Sterling lying on top of Gentry, all shot up.

“Mac?” Lyman asked, confused. “What is it?”

Lich was taking another look at the photos as well. He looked up and met Mac’s eyes.

“You see it?” Mac asked.

“Yeah, I think I do.”

“What? See what?” Lyman asked impatiently.

“Meredith, are you up for some play acting?” Mac asked.

“Uh … sure.”

“Okay,” Mac started, “let’s say you come down that hallway, you have a gun in your hand, and you see your husband in bed with another woman. What do you do?”

“I want … to … shoot him—kill him?”

“Perhaps,” Mac answered, “but let me ask you—would you say anything first?”

“Oh, yeah,” she replied, nodding, animated. “I’d been working through my mind what I was going to say to him when I confronted him with the pictures of him and that … woman. I’d have had plenty to say.”

“
Exactly,
” Mac exclaimed, pointing at her. “And if I’m your husband in that case, and I see that gun in your hand, what do I do?”

“You …” Lyman saw it now. “You jump out of bed. You … try to—”

“Talk me down. He says, ‘Oh, baby, I’m sorry. This isn’t what it seems. Don’t overreact, I can explain, blah, blah, blah,”’ Meredith finished, and then there was a gleam in her eye. “But you don’t think that’s what happened?”

“No, I don’t,” Mac answered, shaking his head. “I’ve been looking at these photos again and again, both last night and this morning, and something gnawed at me, and now I know in part what it was. It’s the way the bodies are positioned. They’re not tangled up like your husband and Gentry were embracing or having sex. They’d had sex, but that was some time before. The way his body is lying on top of her at an angle—I think he jumped on top of her to try and protect her. The killer didn’t come down the hallway and confront your husband and his mistress.”

“No,” Lich stated. “He came down the hallway and started firing.”

“And Meredith,” Mac continued, “your husband probably heard something and woke up, saw the killer in the doorway, probably saw the gun raised, and just … reacted and …” Mac dove on top of Summer at a forty-five degree angle.

“And shielded me from the shots,” Summer finished.

“Or at least some of them,” Lich noted. “She was hit six times anyway.”

Mac pushed himself up from Summer and kept going. “All of which explains the way his body is positioned on top of her,” he proffered, once again lying on his back, looking toward the hallway. “He sees the killer, the gun, and he rolls on top of her. It explains his body position. He was shielding her—that’s why he’s lying on her at an angle and not, for example, in missionary between her legs. They weren’t having sex, at least not then.”

“No,” Lyman said. “They were sleeping. He wakes up, sees the shooter, and he dives over on top of her. He takes most of the shots in his back, and then the killer comes up and puts one in the back of his head and one in the front of hers.”

“Given all of this—looking at it like this, Lyman, with the finishing shots to the head—does that sound like the act of an angry, emotional, scorned wife?” Mac asked, his face bright with the discovery.

“No,” Lyman answered, a creased smile on his face. “That looks like the act of a professional. The eleven shots are window dressing. The kill shots to the heads say professional.”

Mac lay on the bed for a minute. “This is possible, but how to prove it? I mean, the prosecution will simply say Sterling saw Meredith and dove to save Gentry. In fact, they will counter that he could have easily gotten out of bed and tried to talk you down.”

“But I wouldn’t listen and started firing anyway,” Meredith replied, following along.

“And Sterling jumped on top of Gentry in a futile effort to save her, which is how she was hit six times to begin with.”

Meredith sighed, plopping down into the soft chair in the corner. “I got hopeful there for a second.”

“Don’t give up so easily,” Mac teased, smiling, now more intense and enthused with this discovery. “I said that’s the counter to what we’ve seen. It doesn’t mean we’re wrong or that some people on a jury might not agree with our view of it. Acquittals are made of alternate interpretations. They create doubt – reasonable doubt,” he continued as he pushed himself off the bed, now a bounce in his step with this discovery. “Okay, so let’s say we are right—there’s another thing that bothers me. Say this is a pro—how does he or she get into the house? We have no evidence of forced entry.”

“Would a pro leave any evidence of their entry behind?” Lyman asked.

“Yes!” Mac and Lich answered in unison.

“You just have to figure out how he got in,” Lich finished.

“I don’t believe in perfect crimes,” Mac added. “There is always something to be found if you look hard enough for it and spend enough time visualizing what happened.”

The group reconvened in the living room of the house, wanting to get away from the blood. Mac and Lich were digging their noses back into the investigative report.

Lich shook his head. “There was just no evidence of forced entry, at least not that the forensics team found.”

“Because the police suspect Meredith came in the front door, because the deadbolt was open when the police arrived. But a hitter wouldn’t come in the front door,” Mac said as he walked to the back of the house. There was a sliding glass door out the four-season porch, the security bar still in the track. “So the killer didn’t come up through the porch.”

Next, Mac and Lich went down the steps to the basement to find another sliding glass door on the back of the house. As with the four-season porch, the security bar was still in the track. A check of the crime scene photos showed that the security bars were secured in both sliding-glass doors when the police arrived.

“So how would you get in?” Lich asked.

“Not through the sliding-glass doors. Besides, they’re both wired into the … security system.” Mac’s eyes lit up as he rushed back up the steps to the main level. “Meredith, the door into the house from the garage is on the security system, but what about the door out the back corner of the garage?”

“That door is not part of the system, as far as I know.”

Lich waved for Mac to follow him to the garage and the back door. Mac glanced right. “Is that an old-school wood speedboat?”

Sitting on a trailer, hidden under a canvas cover, looked to be a vintage speedboat. Mac saw that the cover on the left side of the stern was loose. He looked underneath and could immediately see the shine of the wood and the chrome edging. “I bet she’s a real beauty. Just the condition of the wood tells me he took great care of it.”

Lich reached the rear door, where he found it locked and dead bolted.

They both hunted around the door, and there was no sensor for it. Dick opened it, and Mac crouched down to look at the lock and dead bolt.

“See anything?”

Mac shrugged. “If he picked it, he probably knew how, so could you really tell? The lock is probably twenty, thirty years old. Heck, it could be as old as that boat.”

“Lyman could hire a private forensics expert to give it a look.”

“Yup,” Mac answered as he looked to his right out the door at the small, four-foot by four-foot cement slab that sat between the edge of the garage and the tall arborvitaes that marked the edge of the property line. Stepping out onto the slab, he looked right, back toward the front of the house and, could see the edge of the driveway. To the left was the backyard, which sloped gradually down to the lake. To the north of the backyard was a large, wooded lot, through which Mac could see the street leading to a small cul-de-sac. He thought it odd that someone had not developed the wooded lot as it led down to the lake.

“Find anything?” Lyman asked, Meredith in tow behind him.

Mac shook his head as he walked back into the garage and checked out the boat again. “Meredith, does this boat ever end up in the water?”