Death on the Diagonal (13 page)

“I’m on my way up there now, Mr. Collins,” Rosco said. He made no attempt to soften the edginess that had found its way into his voice. “Al Lever’s a friend of mine.
Clown
isn’t a word I’d use to describe him.”

In his distressed state Collins missed the sharpness of Rosco’s reply. In fact, his sorrow only served to heighten his inflexibility and resolve. “Good. Consider yourself hired. I want to know what’s going on in that room up there. I want the creep who killed Ryan strung up by his fingernails. I don’t care what it costs. Friend or no friend, cops don’t move fast enough for me. I want answers, and I want them now.”

“That’s all well and good, Mr. Collins, and I’m more than happy to help uncover your answers, but I’m afraid I can’t accept any money from you or be considered under your employment. It would be a conflict of interest.”

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’ve been hired by the Dartmouth Group to investigate the stable fire. I can’t ethically accept employment from any of the principles in that case—”

“What?” Collins nearly shouted. “You think I burned down my own stable?”

Rosco held up his hands. “I’m not saying that, Mr. Collins.”

“Well, you better damn well not be implying anything like it!” A sob wracked his chest and broke up the words.

“I understand how upset you are, sir. And I recognize the fact that you want answers—”

“And pronto!” Todd barked out. “That’s my wife who’s lying dead up there!”

“Yes, sir. I understand that,” Rosco continued. “I can only repeat that this is a sticky situation. However, whether or not I can accept employment from you doesn’t mean I won’t do everything in my power to help apprehend the person who attacked your wife.”

The statement seemed to calm Todd a bit. After a long moment of silence, he gave a decisive nod. “Okay, I see what you’re getting at. I appreciate any help you can give me.”

“Good . . . I was wondering if Belle might be able to wait in the living room with your family while I take a look around upstairs? I shouldn’t be more than ten or fifteen minutes.”

A weak smile found its way to his lips. “Oh, of course. I’m sorry. In all of this ugliness I didn’t think; here I am standing next to my favorite crossword puzzle person.” He offered his hand to Belle. “This was my whole reason in having you out to King Wenstarin Farms—to meet the infallible Annabella Graham.”

“I don’t know if I’d go that far,” Belle said, and followed it with a sympathetic, “This is just horrible, sir. My deepest sympathies.”

Todd led Belle into the living room, and Rosco crossed back over to the police officer.

“Pretty gruesome up there?” he asked.

“Oh, yeah, it’s a good one.”

13

“Left at the top of the stairs,” the uniformed officer told Rosco as he passed. “Then down the hallway. Just follow your nose.”

Rosco climbed the long staircase, but when he reached the landing he realized the cop’s directions had been immaterial. Outside the entry to one of the bedrooms, the hall was buzzing with activity. A police photographer was in the process of packing up her equipment, a member of Abe Jones’s forensics team was lifting fingerprints from the door jamb, and another was moving on his hands and knees toward the far end of the hallway, stopping now and then to retrieve some object from the carpet and then seal it in a containment bag, which was duly labeled.

“Is this clear down here?” Rosco called to the man bent over the carpet.

He cocked his head back toward Rosco and said, “Yeah, we’re all done with that end. Knock yourself out.”

Rosco walked to the doorway and slid past the fingerprint expert. It was a large bedroom, furnished with what he assumed were valuable French antiques. The dresser, night-stands, armoire, and bed were ornate and gilded. Sky blue, apple leaf green, and powder pink seemed to be the color scheme, and the walls boasted paintings that matched: pastel-colored gardens, soft-faced and amorous couples, fountains, and flowers in full blossom. Rosco guessed they were pricey objects. Against this bowerlike decor, the businesslike humans with their dark and austere clothing were a stark contrast.

He spotted Lever, Jones, and the medical examiner, Herb Carlyle. All had removed their latex gloves, which indicated that forensics had finished with the room; and judging from the bulging ashtray, Lever was already on his eighth or ninth cigarette—meaning things weren’t going as smoothly as he wished. But then, with Carlyle on hand, homicide scenes were never easy.

True to form, the ME had plunked himself unceremoniously on the deceased’s bed and was scribbling notes on paper attached to a stainless-steel clipboard, while his equally spooky assistant, Estelle, hovered at his side holding a large black plastic zippered bag. Ryan Collins’s body was stretched out sideways across the bed only a few inches to Carlyle’s left. She was obviously still in the spot where she’d died.

Her corpse was lying face up. She was dressed in dark red satin men’s pajamas, and from the neck down it almost appeared as though she were sleeping. From the neck up, however, the story was different. Her head rested in a large pool of blood that had begun to dry; the color now resembled that of her pajamas. Her skin was no longer pink or even a deathly blue; it had become a chalky gray white, and her features were flattened against her facial bones. From Rosco’s vantage point he wasn’t able to observe the extent of the wounds, but he noted they were centered above her ear on the left side of her head.

Lever and Jones had their backs to Rosco and hadn’t yet seen him enter, but Carlyle looked up from his clipboard and uttered a carping, “Polycrates, wonderful, just what we need. The squeaky-clean hero in action.” If his words had failed to indicate the disdain he felt for Rosco, his tone made up for them. The edgy relationship dated back to when Rosco had been NPD and had spared no criticism of the ME’s sloppy methods. “This guy’s like a bad penny,” Carlyle continued in his jeering manner. “Is this some unfortunate coincidence, Al, or did you invite him here just to make my life miserable?”

“Alright,” Lever grumbled, “I’m not here to play referee between you two children. If you’re finished, Herb, let’s bag her up and move on out of here.” He turned to Rosco. His eyes looked tired. Homicide was Lever’s beat, but unlike Carlyle, he didn’t enjoy it. “The only reason I let you in here, Poly-crates, is because you’ve got a relationship with these people.”

“Not much, Al.”

“Anything’s better than nothing.”

Estelle placed the plastic body bag on the bed beside Ryan and slid the zipper open. Then she and Carlyle hefted the corpse into the bag and sealed it.

“What happened?” Rosco asked Lever.

But the medical examiner replied with an answer Rosco had heard from him one too many times: “Pretty cut and dried, really.”

He waited for Carlyle to say more, and he wasn’t disappointed. When it came to lugubrious details, the ME was in his glory. “Somebody slammed a hoof pick into her temple. And, yeah, we got the weapon. Once probably would have been enough to do the job, but our perp really went at it. Six or seven whacks from what I can tell. I’ll get a clearer picture once I get her back to the morgue and do some digging around.” Estelle smiled at this thought; clearly she was also anxious to get to work.

Rosco, along with Lever and Jones, watched as the pair placed the body on a gurney. As they left the room Lever said, “Let me know if anything unusual turns up, will you, Herb?”

“Sure, Al, but like I said, it’s pretty cut and dried. Pun intended. In case you didn’t catch it the first time.”

When Carlyle was out of earshot Jones said, “For once in his life, he may be right. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to determine cause of death on this one.”

“Did he pinpoint a time?” Rosco asked.

“He’s thinking she’s been dead around six or so hours and places it somewhere between two and five A.M.,” Al told him. “Before you start dumping on Newcastle’s crack medical examiner, a.k.a.,
brother to our illustrious mayor
, Abe agrees with that assessment.”

“Hey, did I say anything?” Rosco studied the bed linens. “From the looks of these sheets, I’d say she’d gone to bed, then got up for some reason, was attacked, and fell back down, where she died.”

“That’s how we’ve put it together,” Al said.

“Any sign of a struggle?”

“No,” Abe said. “And I don’t think she was attacked from behind either. If that had been the case, she would have fallen onto the mattress face-first.”

“Someone could have hit her once, then rolled her over and finished the job,” Rosco suggested.

“I considered that,” Abe continued, “but I don’t like it. It’s too methodical. My assumption is that the perp was hop-pin’ mad and just laid into her. If the first blow had come from behind, the others would have, too. I say he, or she, nailed her once and then just went to town. Ryan Collins never knew what hit her.”

If Rosco had heard this assessment from Carlyle, he wouldn’t have believed a word of it, but since it came from Abe Jones, he was inclined to take it as gospel. He looked around the room once again. “This is a spare bedroom, right? What gives with that?”

“According to Mr. Collins he’s been snoring a lot lately. So she packed up and moved over to this room shortly before midnight,” Lever answered.

“And he didn’t see or hear anything unusual, I take it?”

“Nope. No sign of forced entry. He told me he came in to wake her at seven and found her dead. That’s when he called us.”

“He was cool enough to recognize the scene for what it was,” Abe added. “He didn’t touch a thing and sealed off the upstairs until we arrived. As Carlyle said, we have the murder weapon right here.” He indicated a clear plastic bag containing the bloody hoof pick. It sat beside his evidence case.

“Any prints?”

“I’ll check that when we get downtown. The handle’s plastic, so if they’re there, they’ll be clean.”

“Was the door locked?”

“Collins says no,” Lever offered. “Even if it had been locked, it’s clear to me she must have known her attacker and opened the door. Nothing’s been stolen, according to her husband. This has all the makings of a crime of passion. Strangers don’t nail each other like this.”

“Unless it’s
intended
to look like a crime of passion,” Rosco observed.

“My money’s on choice number one, Poly-crates.”

“What about the front door, Al?”

“Collins maintains all security issues are handled at the main gate, so it’s seldom that
any
of the buildings on the farm are locked. And all employees are logged in and out by the guard.” Lever coughed twice, lit a cigarette, and dropped the match into the ashtray. “Okay, Poly-crates, my turn to ask you; tell me what you know about Collins and the rest of the clan.”

Rosco spent the next ten minutes bringing Al up to speed on everything he’d learned about Todd Collins and his children, even Bartholomew Kerr’s gossip, and then finished with, “So as far as I’m concerned, any one of them could have done it—including the old man. When you think about it, he was the only one who admits to being in the house at the time.”

“There’s also Jack Curry, the barn manager; Orlando Polk and his wife, Kelly; the daughters; Heather’s husband, Michael Palamountain; Chip and his girlfriend, Angel; they all live within the compound,” Abe tossed in.

“Ah, ah, ah, not so fast, Good Doctor,” was Rosco’s wry response. “Polk’s still in the hospital, remember?”

“Hallelujah,” Al intoned through his cigarette smoke, “someone with an alibi. My favorite kind of person.”

14

Nest of vipers
was the term that popped into Belle’s brain the moment Todd escorted her into the living room, the two having left Rosco to ascend to the second floor and whatever unpleasantness awaited there. The oddity of the linguistic association, as well as its seemingly self-contradictory words—
nest
and
viper
—made her pause in mid-stride.

Nest,
she thought,
a tree home in which birds raise their young, a haven, a retreat . . . as well as clutch of poisonous snakes.
Belle studied the room; it seemed to corroborate the allusion: a peaceable place decorated in pale and tranquil shades and emitting a discernible aura of wealth—as opposed to the glittering and watchful eyes that now regarded her. If she hadn’t recognized them as belonging to human faces, she would have imagined viperous tongues flicking out to test the air as she approached. The decibel level also raised; it was the quick bump in sound that occurs when people are caught discussing a secret or a forbidden topic.

“Belle, I’d like you to meet my daughter Fiona. . . . Fee, this is the famous crossword queen, Belle Graham.”

The hand that shook Belle’s was limp with disinterest, although the eyes narrowed into suspicious slits.
Ryan’s gone,
they seemed to protest,
and now Pop’s introducing another blondie into our midst. Great! We’ll have no end of girlie brides.

“My husband—” Belle began, sensing it was time to set the record straight, but Heather’s booming voice interrupted her.

“He’s the PI who’s charged with determining whether the barn fire was accidental or a case of arson,” she announced to the room as if she were in charge of disseminating all information. Belle decided Rosco’s description of Heather fit the woman perfectly. The word
horsy
seemed coined for the Heather Collinses of this world.

Fiona, with her perfect hair and flawless makeup, turned away to begin murmuring to a man Belle could only assume was Jack Curry—at least he looked like the rough and ready trainer Rosco had encountered.

Todd covered his eldest daughter’s rudeness by formally introducing Heather and her husband, Michael Palamountain, but any polite exchange was cut short by the roar of Chip’s voice as it rose from the other side of the room. “Pop, this isn’t some damn social visit . . . or another one of your cherished family reunions! None of us wants to be here, so let’s just cut the cute palaver.”