Red Light (5 page)

They stepped inside.
The front door swung almost shut again. Bright afternoon light shot through the
sliding glass door and the windows. The day was clear and cool and the sun was
already low out over the ocean. Merci felt the heat coming through the glass.
She noted the bullet hole in the upper left corner of the slider, the one she
hadn't noticed the night before.

Nobody's perfect, she
thought, but she expected herself to be. What was it Hess had said? Forgive
yourself, Merci. You've got another fifty years to spend with you.

Duly
noted.

The CSIs had outlined
the body in dark chalk before removing it. Merci looked from the case file to
her partner.

"I don't get
this. Coiner and O'Brien say she was dragged three feet into the dining room.
That, from the blood smear on the carpet."

"So he could
shut the door behind him," said Zamorra. "Her feet were in the
way."

"But why, Paul?
What did he do in here? He didn't use her sexually, at least not that we know
of. He didn't take anything we know of. He left cash, credit cards, some good
prescription drugs in the medicine chest. He took a big risk coming in. He
wasted time. Why?"

"Maybe
he took her picture, got himself off, then hit the road.'

Merci recalled the
recent unsolved murders of prostitutes: two in motels at different ends of the
county, one dumped on Harbor Boulevard, down by the car dealerships. All three
were streetwalkers strangled, one bludgeoned, one shot in the head.

"No
semen."

"Maybe
he used a rubber. She had plenty."

Merci
thought about this but couldn't make it fit. The whole thing seemed so
efficient, so cold, so sexless. There was no evidence he'd even touched her,
other than to drag her out of the way of the door.

They
stood at opposite ends of the dining-room table. Merci noted the place mats,
the matching cloth napkins beside them, the short crystal vase in which Lynda
Coiner had found the casing. There was a nearly empty glass of water at one
place, and a nearly full cup of coffee at the other. She could see the oblong
smudge of lipstick near the rim of the water glass. Both were laden with black
fingerprint dust. Merci could see where the tape had been lifted off the
tumbler. She got down to a good angle for light and saw fingerprint dust on the
glass table, too. Prints galore.

She
went into the kitchen, saw the still-crusted baking pan on the counter, and the
flatware, salad bowls and plates in the sink. There was a wing and a thigh in
the pan. No booze glasses, no booze bottles. Standing in front of the sink you
could see the ocean out a window to the right.

"Okay,
Paul. So she makes dinner for someone. Her calendar said D.C. Let's say it's
the eight-thirty arrival that Coates heard—a big man, light on his feet,
familiar with his surroundings. He knocks and she answers. No loud words. No
loud music. No sounds of struggle or gunshot or anything else. They eat their
salad and chicken. No alcohol. At ten-ten he leaves. All's quiet for five
minutes. We know this because Alexander Coates is in his bathtub with his
trusty stopwatch."

Zamorra
had moved into the living room. He stood in the sunlight looking down at Aubrey
Whittaker's high heeled shoes. His voice sounded flat, abstracted. "Then
Man Friend Number Two climbs the stairs and comes down the walkway. He's a
smaller guy, wearing soft shoes. He doesn't knock but she opens the door
anyway."

Merci
leafed through the CSI reports to see if the doorbell had been dusted. Evan had
worked it and found nothing. She said so.

"Maybe
he wiped it," said Zamorra. "Maybe he knocked quietly. Maybe Coates
belched, splashed, yawned—just didn't hear."

Merci
considered. "She hears the knock or the ring, goes to the door and opens
it. But not before she turns on the porch light and looks through the peephole.
This is important. She must have recognized him.

If she didn't, why
did she open up? She's a call girl. She's seen a lot of things. It isn't her
nature to trust. But she opens the door."

"She
knew him," said Zamorra. "She thought she did. If we cancel out
Coates's assumptions based on sound, we're looking at the same guy. The simplest
explanation. The dinner guest, D.C. That's why Coates didn't hear the knock. It
was soft, because he'd just left. He knew she'd assume it was him again. A soft
knock, she comes door and says who is it, and he says it's just me, Man Friend
Number One. I forgot my jacket. My cell phone. My glasses."

Merci
came into the dining room and looked at the chalk outline. "So he came to
dinner knowing he was going to kill her."

"Absolutely.
That's why he left and came back."

"To
get the gun. Because he couldn't carry the gun in without her seeing it."

"That's
what I get, Merci. And not just a gun, but a gun with a suppressor. We got four
neighbors who were home last night, and nobody heard a shot. Nothing like a
shot. You know what a racket a forty-five would make here. A covered porch and
entryway, the door half open. It had to be silenced."

Merci
thought he was right: The shooter came here to shoot, she tried to take it the
other way: Man Friend comes to dinner and leaves mad, by the time he gets to
his car he's furious, gets the gun and goes back up. Working girls get killed
by furious johns all the time. But she couldn't get any logic out of that one.
She didn't think Aubrey Whitaker was working that night. Call girls don't make
dinner for their clients. The bed was made up. And nobody carried a silenced
.45 auto unless they planned to use it. Soon.

"All
right," she said. She hadn't worked with Zamorra long enough to know how
he reasoned, so she wanted to take things slow, get them right from the start.
"Take our path back to the first fork, though, if there were two
guys?"

"Then it's
connected or unconnected."

"Connected is a
lot of coming and going, a lot of personnel on the job.”

"Lots
of secrets to keep," said Zamorra. "I like one guy, period, no matter
what Alexander Coates heard."

Merci was leaning
that way, too. "That could explain why he came in after he shot her."

"Exactly.
To clean his prints off of everything he touched at dinner."

"And
something else, now that I think of it."

Zamorra
looked at her.

"He wanted the
brass. A semiauto ejects to the shooter's right. He would follow her in as she
fell, look to his right for the shell. He couldn't have heard the case hit the
door because the gun just went off. Even a silenced auto is going to make a
noise. He wouldn't have noticed the nick in the paint. That was our luck. He
didn't find his casing immediately, so he pulled the girl out of the way, shut
the door and looked again. But he still struck out, because he was looking in
the wrong part of the apartment. Even if he'd thought of a ricochet, what are
the chances of him looking into the flower vase? It was all the way to his
left."

Zamorra was nodding.
"The trouble with that is, it works for Man Friend Number Two, also. If
he's connected with Man Friend Number One, then he cleans the place and looks
for his brass. If he's not connected, he likes all the fingerprints Man Friend
Number One must have left, but he still wants his casing."

"How
does he know what his partner touched?"

"He
goes with the obvious."

Merci followed this
one as far as she could. One path, many forks, one fork at a time. "Nobody
plans a murder but leaves his fingerprints on the silverware. If we find a load
of good prints, that means two guys, not working together. Two sets of footsteps.
Two guys. Just like Coates said."

Zamorra looked down
at the body outline like he'd never seen it before. He cocked his head like one
of Mike's bloodhounds. Uncocked it, kept staring.

"What."

"I'm
pulling out walls, putting in windows."

She said nothing. She
figured it was like Hess seeing things that weren't there.

"You
know," he said, "just trying to get past my own bad ideas."

"I
know about that."

"Two guys. Just
like Coates said," he repeated her words verbatim. Something in the tone
told her he was lending credence to their earwitness for the first time.

Stoned
or not.

"But
why?" he asked. "Why kill her?"

"I've been
thinking about that ever since I saw the money wallet. In fact, I wondered if
that might be part of the answer."

"You
lost me."

"He's
aware of us. He left the money to make us wonder."

"That's
far-fetched." Zamorra looked at her uncomfortably, then

She felt the rage
blast through her, clear and clean as the winter sun coming through the slider.

She didn't say it,
but what she was thinking was: I got my partner killed because I thought a
psychopath was too stupid to come after me. Far-fetched. Bastard used my gun on
Hess. Almost got myself killed, too, and sometimes I still want to trade places
with him.

With his back still
toward her Zamorra shook his head, then said something she didn't hear.

She tried to keep the
anger from her voice, something she was never much good at. "Say it again,
Paul. I'm a big girl. We can't work together if we can't talk."

"I said you were
right," he said gently. "Nothing seems far-fetched from a guy who
just shot a girl in the heart."

She could see him in
profile against the window, looking at her from the side of his bloodshot eye.

"Sorry,"
said Merci.

"Accepted.
I am, too."

"I'm
sorrier."

"No,
I'm much, much sorrier."

She was relieved he
actually got her joke. She smiled to herself and sighed. "Sometimes I
think I got problems, until I look at the cases I work."

"Me,
too. Then I look at Janine."

Janine
was his wife.

They stood between the
kitchen and the dining room, Merci reading her notes on the Coates interview.
"This bothers me," she said. "Some kind of struggle here,
according to Coates. First a thump, then another, but a sustained one. He said
it was a minute or two later. I figure the first thump was Aubrey hitting the
floor. If a struggle ensued, who the hell was it between?"

"Coates
said it was like furniture being moved."

The cabinet under the
sink was open, the door handle screws were half torn out of the wood. The
second drawer was all the way out, the runners were bent so bad it wouldn't
close.

Merci knelt, looked
at the damage. "Lots of strength, to pull screws and bend metal. But
Aubrey's peacefully laid to rest twelve feet away, two minutes earlier, if we
believe Coates. No visible bruises or abrasions, nothing under her
fingernails, nothing on the body that points to a fight. So who's our killer
fighting with in here, his conscience?"

"There's
our two Man Friends again."

"The
Man Friends weren't here at the same time, if Coates is right."

Zamorra looked at her
long, then shrugged. "What he says doesn't fit the evidence. The thing is,
you get loaded and your time-space judgment goes straight to hell. You think
twenty minutes is going by while you have meaningful thoughts. Really, five
seconds went by while you tripped out."

Merci considered the
distance from body to kitchen. "Even if Coates was off, even if the
struggle happened right after the first thump, it wasn't Aubrey in a struggle.
Shot in the heart and fighting for her life, she doesn't lose one drop of blood
on the kitchen floor?"

"Where's that
leave us? Someone else up here when Man Friend Number One left?"

"It's
possible."

"A third guy.
Wasn't invited to dinner. Nobody heard him come or go. Hid in the bedroom?
Jumped out to rescue her when she got shot?"

Merci was listening
but didn't answer. She was flipping through to the CSI report, looking for
reference to a good shoe print that Lynda Coiner found on the kitchen floor.
There were three prints left by the same shoe, with a back-slanting series of
treads that looked to be like big commas. The tails tapered toward the heel.
The heel had a central circle with spokes leading outward to the edge.

O'Brien
had photographed it in reflected light, then lifted a big print using
fingerprint dust and a sheet of white paper. They could match an impression if
the detectives could come up with a suspect shoe. It looked to be a size
twelve, probably not a dress shoe due to he pronounced tread pattern. And very
likely a soft sole and not a hard one because of the
clarity of the print left on the hardwood floor.

Zamorra
was on the same page. "This shoe print," he said. “It doesn't fit
with what Coates said either. The big guy, the size twelve, was supposed to be
a hard-soled shoe or boot. Mr. Snappy-Dressed Businessman coming home to his
family. I think our earwitness little too stoned to keep things straight."