Ricochet (9 page)

Duncan raised his arm and let the newspaper slide onto his desk. He draped his jacket over the back of his chair, set down the coffee, which had grown hot in his hand despite the cardboard sleeve around the cup, and took a bite from the doughnut before removing it from his mouth.

“No ‘good morning’?” he asked grumpily.

“Dothan got to work early, too,” she told him as he plopped into his desk chair. “He fingerprinted the Lairds’ corpse. Gary Ray Trotter was a repeat offender, so I had the ID in a matter of minutes. Lots of stuff on this guy.” She indicated the folder lying still untouched on his desk.

“Originally from Baltimore, over the last dozen years he’s gradually worked his way down the East Coast, spending time in various jails for petty stuff until a couple of years ago he got brave and expanded into armed robbery in Myrtle Beach. He was released on parole three months ago. His parole officer hadn’t heard from him in two.”

“My, you’ve been busy,” Duncan said.

“I thought one of us should get a running start, and I knew you wouldn’t.”

“See, that’s why we work so well together. I recognize your strengths.”

“Or rather, I recognize your weaknesses.”

Smiling over the barb, he flipped open the file folder and scanned the top sheet. “I thought his clothes looked new. Like a con recently out.”

By the time he’d finished reading Gary Ray Trotter’s rap sheet he had eaten the doughnut. He licked the glaze off his fingers. “He didn’t have a very distinguished criminal career,” he remarked as he removed the plastic top from the coffee cup.

“Right. So I don’t get it.”

“ ‘It’?”

DeeDee pulled a chair closer to Duncan’s desk and sat down. “Burglarizing the Lairds’ house seems a trifle ambitious for Gary Ray.”

Duncan shrugged. “Maybe he wanted to go out with a bang.”

“Ha-ha.”

“I couldn’t resist.”

“He’d never been charged with burglary before,” DeeDee said.

“Doesn’t mean he didn’t commit one.”

“No, but from reading his record, he doesn’t come across as the sharpest knife in the drawer. In fact, his first offense at age sixteen was theft of a bulldozer.”

“I thought that was a typo. It really was a bulldozer?”

“He drove it from the road construction site where he was employed as a flagman. You know, orange vest? Waves cars around roadwork?”

“Got it.”

“Okay, so Gary Ray steals a bulldozer and drives it to his folks’ farmhouse, leaves it parked outside. Next morning, the road crew shows up for work, discovers the bulldozer missing, calls the police, who—”

“Followed the tracks straight to it.”

“Duh!” DeeDee exclaimed. “How dumb can you be?”

Duncan laughed. “Where was he going to fence a bulldozer?”

“See what I mean? Our Gary Ray wasn’t too astute. It’s quite a leap from bulldozer theft to breaking into a house with a sophisticated alarm system. It wasn’t set, but Gary Ray didn’t know that when he went at that window with a tire iron.”

Playing devil’s advocate, Duncan said, “He’d had years to perfect his craft.”

“Wouldn’t that include coming prepared? Bringing along the tools of his trade? Let’s say Gary Ray had become a crackerjack burglar. Doubtful, but let’s say. One who knew how to disarm sophisticated alarm systems, cut glass so he could reach in and unlock windows, stuff like that.”

“Your basic Hollywood-heist type with his fancy techno toys.”

“I guess,” she said. “So, anyway, where was Gary Ray’s gear? All he brought with him was that tire iron.”

“And a Ruger nine-millimeter.”

“Well, that. But nothing to pick locks or crack safes. Nothing he could use to break into a desk drawer.”

“Those locks would be simple, the kind you open with a tiny key. Give me a few seconds and I could pick them with a safety pin,” Duncan said.

“Gary Ray didn’t have even that. And another thing, even if you were the dumbest burglar in history, wouldn’t you at least wear gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints?”

None of the points she’d raised were revelations to Duncan. When he’d returned home in the wee hours, he’d made an earnest effort to sleep. But his mind was busy with jumbled thoughts about Elise Laird’s account of the events that had left a man dead, and about the judge’s urgency for them to accept her account without question.

Every discrepancy that DeeDee had cited, he’d already considered. Even before he knew that Gary Ray was an inept criminal, the break-in seemed ill planned and poorly executed. Failure was practically guaranteed.

Nevertheless, he continued to argue the points. “You’re assuming that Gary Ray planned this burglary.” He tapped the folder. “According to this, he was a drug user. He started life stupid and then cooked his few good brain cells with controlled substances.

“Supposing he’s in bad need of a fix, has no money, sees a house that’s bound to have good stuff in it, stuff he can grab quick and fence within a half hour. He could get at least one good toot out of a crystal paperweight or silver candlestick.”

DeeDee thought it over for several moments, then shook her head. “Maybe I’d buy that scenario if he’d been in a commercial area. He pulls a crash-and-snatch on an electronics store or something. Even if the alarm is blaring, he could be in and out in a matter of seconds with a goodie in his pocket.

“But not out there in the burbs,” she went on. “Especially on foot. No one’s found a car attached to him. I checked as soon as I got here this morning. What was he doing in that neighborhood without a getaway car?”

“I wondered about that last night,” Duncan admitted. “It’s been nagging me ever since. How’d he get there and how did he plan to get out?”

“If he didn’t have a car, where’d the tire iron come from?” she asked. “Which, when you think about it, is a pretty clumsy apparatus for a burglar.”

The high humidity had upped the frizz factor of her hair. It swept the air like a stiff broom when she shook her head again. “No, Duncan, something’s out of joint.”

“So what do you think?”

She propped her forearms on the edge of his desk and leaned forward. “I don’t think we’re getting the straight story from the angel-faced Mrs. Laird.”

Dammit, that’s what he thought, too.

He didn’t want to think it. He’d spent the early morning hours trying to convince himself that Elise Laird was as true blue as a nun, had never told a lie in her life, had never even fudged the truth.

But his detective’s gut instinct was telling him otherwise. His master’s degree was telling him otherwise. Fifteen years of police work was telling him that something didn’t gibe, that the judge’s hot tub buddy had intentionally left something out or, worse, made it all up.

Obviously his partner questioned Elise’s veracity, and DeeDee didn’t even know about the private exchange that he’d had with Elise.

He told himself not to read anything into that, that it was irrelevant, and to forget it. However, in addition to sorting through the elements of the shooting incident that didn’t add up, his mind frequently wandered back to that moment when a simple, two-word question had become foreplay.

“Wasn’t it?”

Each time he thought about it — the husky pitch of her voice, the expression in her eyes — he had a profound physical reaction. Like now.

For a cop, it was a bad and dangerous reaction to have to a woman who’d fatally shot a man. For a cop who’d criticized fellow officers for having similar lapses in judgment and morality, it was hypocritical.

It was also damned inconvenient, when DeeDee was sitting across the desk, watching him, waiting for his assessment of Elise Laird’s story.

“What do you know about her?” he asked in a reasonably normal voice. “Her history, I mean.”

“How would I know her history? She and I hardly run in the same circles.”

“You recognized her the night of the awards dinner.”

“From her pictures in the newspaper. If you read something besides the sports page and the crossword puzzle, you would have recognized her, too.”

“She’s featured frequently?”

“Always looking sensational, wearing haute couture, attached at the hip to the judge. She’s definitely a trophy for His Honor.”

“Do some digging. See what you can find on her. I’ll go over to the morgue, goose Dothan into giving priority to Gary Ray Trotter’s autopsy. We’ll compare notes when I get back.” He drained his coffee cup. Then, trying not to appear self-conscious, he stood up and reached for his sport jacket.

“Duncan?”

“Yeah?”

“I just realized something.”

He was afraid DeeDee would say something like,
I just realized that you’re sporting a boner for the judge’s wife
.

But what she said was, “I just realized that we’re not treating this shooting like it was self-defense. We’re investigating it as something else, aren’t we?”

He almost wished she’d said the other thing.

He called the ME from his car and prevailed upon him to put Gary Ray Trotter at the head of the line. Dr. Dothan Brooks had already opened up the cadaver by the time Duncan arrived.

“So far, all his organs are normal size and weight,” Dothan said over his shoulder as he placed a hunk of tissue on the scale.

Duncan took up a position against the wall, listening and watching as the ME methodically went about his work. He glanced at the cadaver only occasionally. He wasn’t particularly squeamish. In fact, he was fascinated by the information a cadaver could impart.

But his fascination made him feel guilty. He felt like he was no better than people who rushed to the scene of a tragedy in the perverse hope of glimpsing strewn body parts and blood.

The ME finished and turned the human shell over to his assistant to close. After he had washed up, Dothan joined Duncan, who was waiting for him in his office.

“Cause of death was obvious,” he said as he huffed in. “His heart was pulp. Exit wound bigger than a salad plate.”

“Before I got here, did you see any other wounds, bruises, scratches?”

“Was he in a fight, you mean? Struggle of some sort?” He shook his head. “Nothing under his fingernails except your common dirt, and there was gunpowder residue on his right hand. He had a broken toe on his left foot, long time ago. No surgical scars. He hadn’t been circumcised.”

“From how far away would you say he was shot?” Duncan asked.

“Fifteen feet, give or take.”

“About the distance between the door of the study and the desk.” He remembered that DeeDee had measured it at sixteen feet. “So Mrs. Laird was telling the truth.”

“About that.” Dothan unwrapped the corned beef sandwich that had been waiting for him on his desk. “Early lunch. Want half?”

“No, thanks. Do you think Mrs. Laird was lying about something else?”

Brooks took a huge bite, but blotted mustard from the corners of his lips with surprising daintiness. He chewed, swallowed, belched, then said, “Possibly. Maybe not. There’s the question of who fired first.”

“You said Trotter died instantly. Meaning he would have had to shoot first.”

“Then you’ve got to believe he was blind — he wasn’t — or the worst marksman in the history of crime.”

“Maybe he deliberately aimed high. He was only trying to frighten her with a warning shot.”

“Could be,” Dothan said, nodding in time to his chewing. “Or maybe she startled him when she appeared in the doorway. Trotter had a knee-jerk reaction, fired a wild shot.”

“She didn’t startle him. She said she told him to leave. He just stood there, looking at her, then jerked his arm up — that’s the word she used — and fired.”

“Hmm.” The ME talked around a big bite of sandwich. “Then I suppose he was extremely nervous, which would account for his aim being nowhere near her. Another possibility” — he paused to slurp Dr Pepper from a paper cup the size of a small wastebasket — “is that he was in the act of firing when her bullet struck him. His finger reflexively contracted and completed the action that pulled the trigger as he was falling backward.” He swallowed. “Now that I think on it, the angle would be right for where the bullet struck the wall.”

He acted it out, pretending to fall backward, his index finger serving as the barrel of a pretend pistol. As he went back, his aim moved to a spot high on the wall, far above Duncan’s head.

“Could that happen?” Duncan asked. “A reflex like that at the moment your heart is blown to hell?”

Brooks crammed the remainder of his sandwich into his mouth. “I’ve seen fatal bullet wounds with even more bizarre explanations. You wouldn’t believe how far-fetched.”

“So what are you telling me?”

“I’m telling you that anything can happen, Detective. But lucky for me, it’s your job to find out what actually did.”

“I’ve put them in the sunroom, Mrs. Laird.”

“That’s fine.”

Mrs. Berry had come upstairs to inform her that the same detectives who’d been at the house the night before were downstairs and had asked to see her. “Could you please bring in some refreshments? Diet Coke and iced tea.”

The formidable housekeeper nodded. “Shall I tell them you’ll be right down?”

“Please.”

Elise shut the bedroom door, then stood there, wondering what questions the detectives would be asking today.

Hadn’t they believed her last night?

If they had, they wouldn’t be back today, would they?

Loose ends, Detective Hatcher had said. The term could cover any number of inconsequential nagging details. Or it could be an understatement for discrepancies of major importance.

She feared the latter.

That’s what had prompted her to go see Savich this morning. It had been risky, but she’d wanted to contact him as soon as possible, and using the telephone could have been even chancier than driving to his place of business. She didn’t trust that the home telephone would not be tapped, and cell phone calls could be traced.

Cato had got up at his normal time and quietly dressed for work. She’d pretended to be asleep until he left the bedroom. Then, as soon as his car had cleared the driveway, she had dressed quickly and left the house, hoping to complete the errand and return home before Mrs. Berry arrived for the day.