Murder One (18 page)

“That’s Richard,” Mary Beth said as a short, balding man wearing designer sunglasses popped from the car fixing his windblown hair, and jogged in the direction of the front door. Mary Beth met her husband in the entry with a look that clearly conveyed, “They’re here.”

Richard walked past her without so much as an acknowledgment, dropped his keys on a table abutting the staircase, and fixed his silver sunglasses atop his head. He stepped down into the living room, hand extended, all business, dressed like his wife in designer jeans, a gray cashmere sweater pulled up his forearms, and loafers. After introductions, they remained standing, again seemingly uncertain of the next step. Rowe couldn’t take it anymore and blazed a trail to the sofa. Crosswhite joined him, and Richard and Mary Beth sat to Rowe’s right in the two matching chairs. When neither initiated conversation, Rowe said, “My detective sergeant indicated you might have some information that relates to the shooting.”

The Blume home was half a mile south of Vasiliev’s home—Rowe and Crosswhite had clocked it—and across from the public easement.

Richard sat forward, forearms on his knees. Despite strands of gray in what hair remained atop his head, his goatee was solid black. He looked too young to be living in a house so grand, driving a car so expensive. Rowe deduced him to be either a trust-fund baby or one of the lucky ones who hit the Internet start-up craze at the right time and got out before the crash.

“I need to know whether we have any liability here . . . before we talk, whether I should call my attorney.”

What was it with rich people and attorneys? Rowe wondered. They talked of attorneys as if they kept them on leashes like other people kept dogs.

“I don’t understand,” Rowe said. “I was told you may have some information. Do you think there could be some liability?”

Blume looked at his wife. The woman sat chewing her thumbnail, grimacing. “No. It’s not that.” Richard paused, lips pursed. “We just don’t want his name in the paper—the publicity.”

“Whose name?” Rowe asked.

Blume again looked to his wife, but this time his expression was more of a question. “I’m sorry. I thought my wife told you all of this.”

“We were waiting for you,” Rowe explained.

“It’s our son, Joshua. He was out the other night; he shouldn’t have been, but he was. He snuck out.” The picture began to sharpen for Rowe, and with clarity, the butterflies of anticipation again began to flutter. “That’s why we didn’t come forward earlier. We didn’t know. Joshua was afraid of the consequences because we’d told him we’d ground him if we caught him sneaking out again.”

“Your son was out the morning Mr. Vasiliev was shot,” Rowe said, trying to move the story along.

Mary Beth pointed in the direction of the bay window. “He was coming up the street. His bedroom is off the porch in the back. He was . . .” She stopped speaking when her husband raised a hand. Rowe could only imagine what Crosswhite was thinking. She would have pistol-whipped Rowe if he ever similarly disrespected her.

“He was out with friends,” Richard said. “They dropped him off down the road so we wouldn’t hear the car engine. He has a room in the back with a slider. Anyway, he saw something. It scared him, actually.”

“What did he see?” Crosswhite asked.

“There’s no liability here, is there, for not coming forward earlier? I mean, if this even amounts to anything . . . there’s no repercussions?”

“There’s no repercussions I can think of,” Rowe said. “Except maybe between you and your son.” He smiled. Richard Blume did not. “Why don’t you just tell us what your son thinks he saw?”

“I think maybe it would be better if Joshua told you,” Richard said, standing.

T
HREE
T
REE
P
OINT
B
URIEN
, W
ASHINGTON

Sloane chased her down the stairs, hand sliding on the railing. When he hit the landing, the entire house shook. When he rounded the corner for the kitchen, Barclay dodged him, but he got a hand on her waist and pulled her to him, wrestling with her from behind until she suddenly stopped, looking past him. He turned to see Charles Jenkins at the kitchen door, about to knock. Instead Jenkins pulled back his hand and quickly retreated down the steps.

“Shit,” Sloane said.

She covered a grin. “A neighbor?”

“My investigator . . . and friend.”

She laughed. “Sorry. I’ll go upstairs.”

Sloane pulled open the door, standing behind it. “Hey. Hey!”

Jenkins turned at the gate. “I’ll call you later.”

“Hold on. Let me get some clothes on. Just . . . wait.” He went back upstairs and slipped on a pair of sweatpants and a cutoff sweatshirt.

Barclay stood in the bathroom wearing his robe, still smiling. “Did he see the show?”

“Enough of it.”

“I’ll take a shower. I’m not sure I can look him in the eye at the moment.”

Sloane found Jenkins in the easement, standing beside the Buick.

“In my defense, I was about to knock.”

Sloane shook his head, the situation now amusing. Seagulls cawed overhead. “Sorry about that.”

“You and me both. The last thing I needed was a glimpse of your hairy ass.”

“So what’s up?”

“Nothing. I tracked down some more employees for Pendergrass and stopped to give him a report.” Pendergrass lived nearby, in the city of Des Moines. “Thought I’d check in and find out how it went at the Justice Center.”

“I’m sorry, I should have called. I left work early and took the kayak out. Barclay surprised me.”

Jenkins waved it off, but Sloane knew it bothered him.

“I should have called. I’m sorry.”

“So how
did
it go?”

“Well, I’m not in handcuffs . . . but Rowe had the file on Tina’s murder. I forgot I gave a statement about the gun, not being able to get to it. He called me on it.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That it had been Tina’s gun before we got married and that I got rid of it after her death.”

“Rid of it how?”

“Dumped it off the boat into the Sound. Said it was a nine-millimeter.”

“Do you think he bought it?”

“No.”

Jenkins looked back up at the house to the second-story window.

“Something else?” Sloane asked.

“Just kind of strange . . . seeing her here.”

Sloane understood. “I know.”

“You love this woman?”

Two dogs, a golden retriever and a mutt, ran up the easement from the beach, nails clicking on the pavement, tongues out, panting. Not far behind, two women made their way up the slope in a power walk. Sloane greeted them as they passed, then turned back to Jenkins. “I think I might,” he said.

“She makes you happy?”

“Well, it’s been pretty trying lately . . . She took a lie-detector test. She took it for me.”

“For you?”

“She didn’t want there to be any doubt. She wanted me to be certain.”

“So she passed?”

“Apparently.”

“And is there?”

“Is there what?”

“Any doubt?”

L
AURELHURST
S
EATTLE
, W
ASHINGTON

Joshua Blume had his father’s dark hair and olive complexion, but judging from his meek demeanor as he shuffled into the room, gaze fixed on the floor, shoulders slumped, hands thrust into the pockets of faded and torn blue jeans that hung below his waist, he was more his mother than his father. A mop of black hair extended over his forehead and all but covered his eyes. Rowe’s initial thought was the kid had his head down to see where he was walking. Then another, more troubling thought came to him—how the hell could he have seen anyone or anything through all that hair, in the dark of night?

When introduced, Joshua responded with a limp handshake and the briefest of eye contact. Rowe didn’t take it personally. He’d met enough of his son’s teenage friends to know that some kids had either been taught how to look an adult in the eye or had the self-confidence to do so on their own. Others did not and never would.

His father directed Joshua to the chair where he had been sitting and motioned for his wife to move, banishing Mary Beth to one of two brown leather stationary chairs in a corner of the room near a bookcase and reading lamp. Rowe doubted anyone ever sat in the chair and read, but it was part of the facade, along with the baby grand nobody played and the convertible car that anyone who lived in the Northwest knew to be completely impractical.

“Sit up,” Richard Blume said to his son.

Joshua dutifully sat up, though it was a matter of degrees and had little impact on his overall posture. He wore a black T-shirt with the words god’s nails and the silhouette of a guitar. Teenage acne pocked his chin and cheeks and likely his forehead, though the hair prevented Rowe from knowing.

Rowe decided to get to it. “Joshua, we understand you may have some information about something you saw the other night.”

The kid nodded. “Yeah.”

“Yes,” Richard corrected.

Rowe thought he saw the kid roll his eyes beneath the bangs.

“Yes.”

“Why don’t you tell us what you saw?” Rowe asked.

The boy pointed in the direction of the bay window. “I saw someone down near the road.”

“Okay, Joshua, I’m going to need you to be more specific. Should we go outside so you can show us exactly where you saw this person?”

“Do we need to do that?” Mary Beth blurted.

“What time was it when you saw this person?” Crosswhite asked in a gentle voice only a former schoolteacher could muster to calm everyone and let Rowe know he was going about it the wrong way.

Joshua frowned in thought. “About three-thirty, maybe three-forty-five. Around there.”

“Are you sure about the time?” Crosswhite asked.

He glanced in the direction of his father before nodding. They’d obviously had a conversation, and Richard likely had demanded to know, to the exact minute, the time his son had returned home.

“Yes,” Richard said.

“Yes,” the son said, sounding annoyed.

“How can you be certain?” Crosswhite prodded.

“Because we left the club around three, and I told my friends I had to get home or my dad was going to kill me.”

“Oh, Joshua.” Mary Beth tried to put a dismissive lilt in her voice, but she sounded more nervous than amused. “You know your father would never hurt you.” She leaned forward to enter the inner circle. “We don’t believe in physical punishment. Joshua has never even been spanked.”

“Mary Beth. Please,” Richard said.

Rowe thought it was Richard who could have used a few good spankings as a child.

“Your friends drove you home?” Crosswhite asked. “And where did they drop you off ?”

The boy gave another vague gesture in the direction of the window. “Down the street. It’s a couple of houses.”

“There’s an easement, a path at the back of our house. He uses it to sneak out and in,” Richard said, making it sound like the boy had
tunneled out of prison. “It leads past our backyard. It’s not really an easement, but the kids have made it one. It cuts between the two houses and comes up through our side yard. He hops the fence.”

“Is that right, Joshua?” Crosswhite asked, never looking at Richard.

He nodded. “Yeah . . . Yes.”

“And your friends dropped you off there so your parents wouldn’t hear the car engine?”

Joshua nodded.

“And they left?”

“They left.”

“Then what happened?”

“I heard a noise, like something moving in the bushes.”

“We have raccoons,” Richard said.

Crosswhite ignored him. “What did you do when you heard the sound?”

“I ducked behind some bushes. And that’s when I saw this person getting a bike out from a hedge. Then they got on it and rode down the street.”

“Can you describe this person?” Crosswhite asked, careful not to suggest a gender. A good defense attorney would imply the police had suggested a suspect to a witness.

“Black . . . I don’t know what you call them, like tights or something. One-piece.”

“A wet suit?”

He shook his head. “It seemed thinner than a wet suit, but . . . I don’t know.”

“What color hair did the person have?”

“I couldn’t really tell because of the bike helmet. But I think it was dark, like . . .” He searched the people in the room, his mother, then Crosswhite, and finally, Rowe. “More like his, maybe, without the gel.”

“And you got a look at this person’s face.”

He nodded.

“A good look?”

“Like, a couple seconds.”

“Do you think you could pick out the face if we came back with a group of pictures for you to look at?”

“I don’t know. I think so.” Joshua paused and, for the first time, brushed aside the tips of his bangs, revealing blue eyes.

Rowe asked, “How old are you, Joshua?”

“Sixteen.”

“What club were you at?” He knew that underground clubs didn’t get too hung up on things like the legal drinking age and fake IDs. Rowe and Crosswhite would have to confirm the boy’s story and find out what he’d been doing. But that could be done later.

Joshua’s voice became tentative again. “We were just listening to music. Another band we know.”

“That’s fine, but I need to know the name of the club,” Rowe said. “I’m going to have to confirm some things.”

“Are you going to talk to my friends?”

“Right now I don’t think that will be necessary,” Crosswhite said. “We can get their names later if we need them.”

Rowe backed off.

Crosswhite sat forward. “Joshua, I need you to be honest with me. Did you drink any alcohol or use any drugs that night?”

Richard Blume moved farther to the edge of his seat but resisted the urge to stand. “I don’t think I want Joshua to answer that question. I think I’d rather have my attorney here.”

Rowe tried to stay even-keel. He wanted to say, “Listen, idiot, if you think that was a tough question to answer, wait until an experienced criminal defense attorney gets your son on the stand.”

Crosswhite maintained the demeanor and tone of the schoolteacher trying to get to the bottom of a situation. “Mr. Blume, as we explained earlier, any time you desire, you can have your attorney present, that’s not a problem. If you would like to make a call, please do. We’re just trying to make sure Joshua is certain of what he saw. As I said, any
family
rules Joshua may have broken are between you, your wife, and your son. But why don’t we leave that question for another conversation.”