Ricochet (6 page)

“Who else has been in there?” DeeDee asked.

“The judge. First cops on the scene. Swore they didn’t touch anything. I waited on your crime scene boys, didn’t go in till they gave me the go-ahead. They’re still in there, gathering trace evidence and trying to get a name off the guy.”

“
Guy
?” Duncan stopped in his tracks. “The shooter is in custody?”

Dothan Brooks turned and looked at the two of them with perplexity. “Hasn’t anybody told y’all what happened here?”

“Obviously not,” DeeDee replied.

“The dead man in the study was an intruder,” he said. “Mrs. Laird shot him. She’s your shooter.”

Movement at the top of the staircase drew their gazes upward. Elise Laird was making her way down the stairs followed by a policewoman in uniform. Sally Beale was as black as ebony and hard as steel. Her twin brother was a defensive lineman for the Green Bay Packers. Sally’s size alone made her physically imposing. It was coupled with a stern demeanor.

But Duncan’s gaze was fixed on Elise Laird. Her face looked freshly scrubbed. Her pallor couldn’t be attributed to the glare of the gaudy chandelier, because even her lips appeared bloodless. Her features were composed, however, and her eyes were dry.

She had killed a man, but she hadn’t cried over it.

Her hair was secured with a rubber band at the back of her head. The ponytail looked mercilessly tight. She wore pink suede moccasins on her feet and was dressed in a pair of soft, worn blue jeans and a white sweater that looked like cashmere. With the outdoor temperature hovering around ninety degrees, the sweater seemed out of season. Duncan wondered if she felt chilled, and why.

When she saw Duncan, she halted so suddenly that Officer Beale nearly ran into her. The pause was short-lived, but lasted long enough to be noticed by DeeDee, who gave him a sharp glance.

When Elise reached the bottom step, her gaze locked with Duncan’s for several beats before it slid to DeeDee, who stepped forward and introduced herself. “Mrs. Laird, I’m Detective DeeDee Bowen. This is my partner, Detective Sergeant Duncan Hatcher. I think you two have met.”

“Darling, did the shower make you feel better?” The judge came from the living room and quickly moved to his wife, placing his arm around her shoulders, touching her colorless cheek with the back of his finger. Only then did he acknowledge the rest of them. Without so much as a hello, he said, addressing the question to Duncan, “Why did they send you?”

“You’ve got a dead man in your house.”

“But you investigate homicides. This wasn’t a homicide, Detective Hatcher. My wife shot an intruder, whom she caught in the act of burglarizing my study, where I keep valuable collectibles. When she challenged him, he fired a pistol at her. She had no choice but to protect her own life.”

Standard operating procedure was to keep the witnesses of a crime separate until each had been questioned, so that one couldn’t influence the other’s account in any way. A criminal court judge should know that.

With consternation, Duncan said, “Thanks for the summary, Judge, but we would prefer to hear what happened directly from Mrs. Laird.”

“She’s already given an account to these officers.” He nodded toward Beale and Crofton.

“I talked to her first,” Crofton said. “It’s pretty much like he said.”

“That’s her story,” Beale confirmed, slapping her notebook against her palm. “His, too.”

The judge took umbrage. “It’s not a
story
. It’s a true account of what took place. Is it necessary for Elise to repeat it tonight? She’s already been traumatized.”

“We haven’t even seen the victim or the scene yet,” DeeDee said.

“Once we’ve taken a look and talked to forensics, we’re certain to have questions for Mrs. Laird.” Duncan glanced at her. She’d yet to utter a sound. Her eyes were fixed on a spot in near space, as though she had detached herself from what was going on around her.

Coming back to the judge, he said, “We’ll try and keep it as brief as possible. We certainly wouldn’t want to contribute to the trauma Mrs. Laird has suffered tonight.” He turned and addressed Sally Beale. “Why don’t you take her into the kitchen? Maybe get her something to drink. Crofton, you can continue with the judge.”

Judge Laird didn’t look happy about Duncan’s directives, which purposefully kept him separated from his missus, but he consented with a terse nod. Stroking his wife’s arm, he said, “I’ll be in the living room if you need me.”

Sally Beale laid her wide hand on Elise’s shoulders, firmly but not unkindly. “I could use a Coke or something. How ’bout you?”

Still saying nothing, Elise went along with the policewoman. DeeDee gave Duncan a questioning look. He raised his shoulders in a shrug and proceeded down the hallway to rejoin the ME. “What about it, Dothan? Does it look like self-defense to you?”

“See for yourself.”

Duncan and DeeDee paused on the threshold of the study. From that vantage point, they could see only the victim’s shoes. They asked the crime scene techs if it was all right to come in.

“Hey, Dunk. DeeDee.” Overseeing the collection of evidence was a small, bookish guy named Baker, who looked more like an antiques dealer than a cop who performed the nasty job of scavenging through the rubble of violent death. “We’ve vacuumed the whole room, but I don’t think he got any farther than where you see him now. He jimmied a window lock to break in.” He motioned toward the window.

“We found a tire iron outside under the bushes. We’ve got casts of the footprints outside the window. Matching prints here inside don’t extend past the desk. They were muddy prints, so now they’re sorta smeared.”

“Why’s that?”

“The Lairds smeared them when they checked to see was he dead.”

“Lairds plural?” DeeDee asked.

Baker nodded. “Her, soon as she shot the guy. The judge when he came into the room and saw what had happened. He assessed the situation and immediately called 911. That’s what they told Crofton and Beale anyway.”

“Huh. How’d the intruder get here? To the house, I mean.”

“Beats me,” Baker replied. “We’ve lifted prints off the desk drawers, but they could belong to the judge, his wife, the housekeeper. We’ll see. Took a Ruger nine-millimeter out of his right hand.” He held up an evidence bag. “His finger was around the trigger. We’re pretty sure he fired. Smelled like it.”

“I bagged his hands,” Dothan Brooks said.

“We pulled a slug out of the wall over there.” Duncan and DeeDee turned to look at where Baker was pointing and saw a bullet hole in the wall about nine feet above the floor.

“If he was trying to shoot Mrs. Laird, his aim was lousy,” DeeDee remarked, echoing what Duncan was thinking.

“Maybe she startled him, caught him in the act, and he fired too quickly to take aim,” Duncan said.

“That’s what we figured,” Baker said. He motioned toward the photographer, who was replacing his gear in its hard-shell case. “We got pictures from every angle. I made sketches of the room, and took measurements. It’ll all be ready when you need it, if you need it. We’re done.”

With that, he and his crew trailed out.

Duncan advanced into the room. The victim was lying on the floor, faceup, between a desk that was larger than Duncan’s car and a bookcase filled with leather-bound books and knickknacks that looked rare, old, and expensive. The rug beneath him was still wet with blood.

The man was Caucasian, appeared to be around thirty-five, and looked almost embarrassed to be in his present situation. Duncan had been taught by his parents to respect the nobility of life, even in its most ignoble forms. Often his father had reminded him that all men were God’s creation, and he’d grown up believing it.

He had acquired enough toughness and objectivity to do the work he did. But he never looked at a dead body without feeling a twinge of sadness. The day he no longer felt it, he would quit. If the time ever came when he felt no remorse over a life taken, he would know his soul was in jeopardy. He would have become one of the lost. He would have become Savich.

He felt he should apologize to this unnamed person for the indignity he had undergone already and would continue to be subjected to until they got from him all the answers he could provide. No longer a person, he was a corpse, evidence, exhibit A.

Duncan knelt down and studied his face, asking softly, “What’s your name?”

“Neither the judge nor Mrs. Laird claim to recognize him,” Dothan said.

The ME’s statement jerked Duncan out of his introspection and back into the job at hand. “ ‘Claim’?”

“Don’t read anything into that. I’m just repeating what the judge told me when I got here.”

Duncan and DeeDee exchanged a significant look, then he searched the dead man’s pockets, hoping to find something that perhaps Baker had overlooked. All the pockets were empty.

“No car keys. No money. No ID.” He studied the man’s face again, searching his memory, trying to place him among crooks he’d come across during the investigations of other homicides. “I don’t recognize him.”

“Me, neither,” DeeDee said.

Standing, Duncan said, “Dothan, I’d like to know the distance from which the fatal shot was fired. How close was Mrs. Laird when she shot him?”

“I’ll give you my best guess.”

“Which is usually pretty damn good.”

“Baker’s reliable, but I’ll take my own measurement of the distance between the door and the desk,” DeeDee said, pulling a tape measure from her pocket.

“Well, unless y’all need me, I’m off,” the ME said, tucking his damp handkerchief into his pants pocket. “Ready to get him out of here?”

“DeeDee?” Duncan asked.

“Sixteen feet.” She wrote the measurement in her notebook, then took a look around the room. “I think I’ll do my own sketch of the room, too, but you don’t have to hang around,” she said to the ME.

“Then I’ll send in the EMTs.” He glanced around, his expression turning sour. “Money sure gets you nice stuff, doesn’t it?”

“Especially old money. Laird Shipping was started by the judge’s grandfather, and he’s the last of the line,” DeeDee informed them. “No other heirs,” she said, raising her eyebrows.

“This place probably isn’t even mortgaged,” Dothan grumbled as he turned to leave. “Think I’ll find a Taco Bell open this time of night?” He was panting hard as he lumbered off.

As DeeDee sketched in her notebook, she said, “He’s going to keel over one of these days.”

“But he’ll die happy.”

Duncan’s mind wasn’t on the ME’s health. He was noting that the victim’s clothing and shoes appeared new, but cheap. The kind a con would wear when he was released from prison. “First thing tomorrow, we need to check men recently released from prison, especially those who’d been serving time for breaking and entering. I bet we won’t have to dig too deep before we find this guy.”

EMTs wheeled in a gurney. Duncan stood by as the unidentified dead man’s body was zipped into the black bag, placed on the gurney, and rolled out. He accompanied it as far as the front door. From there he could see that a larger crowd of gawkers had gathered on the far side of the median. More news vans were parked along the street.

The flowers in the vase on the foyer table shimmied, alerting him to Sally Beale’s approach. “I had her go through it all again,” she said to Duncan, speaking in an undertone. “Didn’t falter. Didn’t change a word. She’s ready to sign a statement.”

He surveyed the divided street, trying to imagine it prior to becoming a crime scene. Without the flashing emergency lights and the onlookers, it would be serene.

“Sally, you were first on the scene, right?”

“Me and Crofton were only a couple blocks away when we got the call from dispatch.”

“Did you see any moving vehicles in the area?”

“Nary a one.”

“Abandoned car?”

“Not even a moped, and other patrol units have been canvassing the whole neighborhood looking for the perp’s means of transportation. Nothing’s turned up.”

Puzzling. Something out of whack that demanded an explanation. “Are the neighbors being canvassed?”

“Two teams are going door-to-door. So far, everybody was fast asleep, saw no one, heard nothing.”

“Not even the shots?” He turned to face the policewoman, who was shrugging.

“Big houses, big yards.”

“Mrs. Laird showered?”

“Said she felt violated,” Beale said. “Asked would it be okay.”

It was a typical reaction for people to want to wash after their home was invaded, but Duncan didn’t like it when a bloody corpse was just downstairs. “Did she have blood on her?”

“No, and I was with her the whole time upstairs. All she had on was her robe. I got it from her, gave it to Baker. No blood on it that I saw. But the judge, the hem of his robe had blood on it from when he checked the body. He asked permission to dress. Baker’s got his robe, too.”

“Okay, thanks, Sally. Keep them separate till we’re ready to question them.”

“You got it.”

He returned to the study, where DeeDee was examining the judge’s desk. “All these drawers are still locked.”

“Mrs. Laird must have caught the burglar early.”

She raised her head and gave him an arch look. “You believe the burglar scenario?”

“I believe it’s time we asked just how this went down.”

“W
HO FIRST, HER OR THE JUDGE?”

Duncan thought about it. “Let’s talk to them together.”

DeeDee registered surprise as well as a trace of disapproval. “How come?”

“Because they’ve already been questioned separately by Crofton and Beale. Sally Beale told me Mrs. Laird’s second telling didn’t vary from the first and that she’s prepared to sign a statement.

“If it really is a matter of her shooting a home intruder, and we continue badgering them, it’s going to look like we doubt them, and
that
will seem like reprisal for my contempt charge. The only thing it will accomplish is to piss off the judge. Gerard will have my ass if I have another run-in with him.”

“Okay,” DeeDee said. “But what if it isn’t a case of her protecting herself from a home intruder?”

“We have no reason to disbelieve them, do we?”