Time of Death (11 page)

Schultz pulled on gloves for the search. “Here,” he said, offering a pair to PJ. “Put these on. Keep your hands to yourself anyway.”

Gloves appeared in her hand. “I carry my own now, thank you.” She headed down the hall and he scurried after her, frowning.

Woman’s getting uppity.

The officer followed them only as far as the bedroom door, so that she wouldn’t have to let Mr. Huber out of her sight. “The ME isn’t here yet, but the victim’s been dead less than an hour, if my opinion’s worth anything,” she said as they approached the bathroom.

Schultz maneuvered himself in front of PJ. It wasn’t to protect her from viewing the unpleasant scene, but he didn’t want her accidentally messing with evidence. Just because she carried her own gloves didn’t mean she was one hundred percent reliable at a scene.

The body drew his eyes the way the corpses always did. A naked woman was slumped to the floor of a shower stall. A wood-handled kitchen knife was buried to the hilt below her sternum. The ring finger on her left hand was missing, the whole length of it. Long wet hair was plastered to her skin, covering most of her face. The victim hadn’t gone to her death easily. There were bloody smears on the opaque shower door and on the fiberglass walls, where the water from the showerhead didn’t make contact. She’d tried to escape, but she was cornered.

An attacker coming at her and nowhere to go.

He closed his eyes for a moment, testing his intuition, letting the thread that would eventually connect him to the killer grope around blindly in the dark. There was a little tug on the line, but nothing he could grasp.

“Ran, did anybody turn the water off in here?” Schultz said.

“No, sir. It was off.”

“Bathroom and shower doors open or closed? How about that bedroom window over there?”

“All open when we arrived. Be sure to look at the back of the bathroom door, sir.”

Schultz swung the door closed. On the back, in blood, there was a crude diagram of a heart with a knife stuck into it.

“That’s obviously why we got the call on this murder,” PJ said. “It’s a direct reference to Arlan Merrett’s death. The knife in the heart, that’s the holdback.”

“I’d say that’s jumping to conclusions. It could just as easily be a broken heart because of a jilted lover that has nothing to do with Arlan. This leads me to Mr. Huber, the fiancé out there.”

PJ shrugged, as if to say he was entitled to his opinion, even though it was wrong.

“Mr. Huber,” he said sharply. The man sat up, wide-eyed, a deer in the headlights of Schultz’s voice.

“Y … yes?”

“Did you see anyone leaving the house, or near the house? On foot or in a car?”

“No. No one, not in the whole time I waited.”

“You waited? You didn’t find the door kicked in?”

“No, I did that myself. I don’t have a key. I rang the doorbell over and over. I figured she was in the bathroom and couldn’t hear it. After about five minutes I called her from my cellphone. When she didn’t answer, I got frantic. She had to be home, because her car’s parked outside and I just left her a little while ago. It was the open window, wasn’t it? The way the killer got in? I begged her not to sleep with that window open, but she wouldn’t listen.”

Huber had had enough. He covered his face with his hands and his shoulders shook. “I begged her,” he said from behind his hands.

“You may have scared the killer off.”
That is, if you’re not the killer.

“Ran!”

“Sir.” She was already at his elbow, somehow. “The killer might still be in the neighborhood. It’s a long shot, but it’s a shot. I want patrol cars saturating this area. Can you coordinate that?”

“I’ll call it in.”

Schultz was marveling at the woman’s efficiency, in action and speech, when he heard a call from inside the house.

“Leo, you’ve got to see this.”

When he got to the bathroom, she was squatting next to the shower. She’d raised the victim’s head with a hand under the chin, and was gently clearing the wet hair away from the face.

“Damn it, Doc, I told you not to touch anything!”

“You didn’t tell me not to touch
anyone.
Look, Leo.” She tilted the victim’s face up to him.

A smiling couple, sharing a drink from a coconut.

“It’s June Merrett,” he said.

“Or someone who looks enough like her to be her twin.” PJ took out her cellphone and dialed June’s home. The phone rang for a long time with no response, and without switching to voice mail. Her suspicion grew that the woman lying dead at their feet was the same person she’d interviewed, a woman whose wackiness may have just been leakage of concealed, powerful grief. A woman whose grief she’d allowed herself to taste.

Schultz gestured to get her attention.

“She might be out, doing funeral arrangements or something,” Schultz said.

PJ covered the phone, even though no one could hear her on the other end. “At this time of night? The body hasn’t been released yet, anyway.”

Schultz observed the corpse in the shower, his eyes lingering on the dead woman’s breasts. PJ was about to give him an indignant nudge when he spoke.

“June’s tits were bigger,” he said.

“What?”

“This woman has smaller tits than June. Don’t you remember her foreplay pics? In the album?”

“Well, yes,” PJ thought back to the image of June Merrett pulling her robe around her when she sat down in her floral chair.
The lollipop.
“You might be right.”

“Might be, hell. I know I’m right.” He tapped his forehead. “The power of the trained observer.”

PJ frowned, wondering just how much time he spent observing women’s breasts, and how much of it was in the line of duty. She gave up on the call and folded her phone. “Better get someone over to check on June, in spite of your observational skills.”

“Yeah, never hurts to have confirmation.” He made a quick call asking to have a patrol officer check the Merrett house.

Schultz said, “So we probably have a look-alike here. Coincidence?”

“It would have to be a double coincidence, don’t you think, with that drawing of the heart and knife on the back of the bathroom door?”

Schultz pushed the door closed and studied the drawing again. “I still say it’s not conclusive. Mr. Huber out there could still be good for it. ‘You’ve wounded my heart,’ something like that.”

Voices near the front of the house announced the ME and the ETU arriving and coming in through the scene perimeter.

“Didn’t you say Anita was talking to May now?” PJ said.

Schultz nodded.

“That’s covered, then. I’d like to get back to the office and get some time on the computer. Meet me back there when you’re done here.”

“Go ahead; leave us out here doing the work while you go play games.”

She put her gloved hand up to touch Schultz’s cheek, and there in the bloody bathroom, he tenderly air-kissed it.

PJ’s cellphone vibrated in the pocket of her jeans. She answered the call.

“June Merrett and her bountiful tits are alive and well,” Schultz said. “The officers had to pound on the door of her house. She’d taken a sleeping pill. Probably took several pills. Can’t say that I blame her. The woman’s had a tough time.”

“So we’re back to coincidence that Shower Woman looks like June. With the drawing on the door, too.”

“Yeah.”

“Coincidence my ass. Find the connection, Leo.”

“Way out front of you, babe. But I have to check some things first.”

“Don’t call me …” she said, and heard him disconnect, “… babe.”

While she had her phone handy, PJ called June Merrett. There was something she had to ask.

A sleepy-sounding woman answered. Too late, PJ remembered that Schultz said June had taken a sleeping pill. PJ introduced herself.

Yawning, the woman said, “You were here before, weren’t you? The police were pounding on the door a while ago. I can’t seem to get any time to myself. Anyway, what can I do for you?”

“I’m sorry to intrude on your rest. Um, June, do you happen to have a twin sister?”

“Twin sister? No, it’s just May and me. Although I did hear rumors.”

“Rumors about what?”

“Oh, it’s nothing.”

“Tell me anyway, please,” PJ said.

“Well, I did overhear my parents say something about an older child in the family. The way they were talking about it, it must have been some kind of scandal, maybe an abortion. I don’t even know for sure they were talking about us—it was probably gossip about somebody else. My mother, Virginia Crane, came from a very wealthy background. When she married my father, Henry Winter, it was something of a shock to her family because he was middle class, and barely clinging on to that. I’m sure the Crane family had its little secrets. All those wealthy families do.”

“What kind of secrets?”

“Well, Mother had a little brother named Ellis. He died when he was a year old. It was hushed up, but rumors started that he was a mixed race baby, and maybe his death wasn’t accidental.
That
kind of secret. What’s this all about, anyway?”

PJ weighed how much to say. How much had the officers already revealed when June came to the door after minutes of pounding? Probably not much, just checked to see that she was breathing.

“There’s been another murder, June. The victim looks a little like you. I was just checking that you were okay.”

“Looks like me? What does that mean? Was someone trying to kill me? Is that what the officers were doing here, seeing if I was still alive? Oh, no, first Arlan and now me. She’s trying to wipe us out!”

“Calm down, calm down. Who do you mean by ‘she’?”

“May, of course. May! She’s jealous of us, I told you. You’d better ask her where she was.”

“That will be checked out thoroughly, I can assure you of that.”

There was a deep sigh on the other end of the phone. PJ pictured June standing there tugging her robe, bewildered that a murder victim looked enough like her that the police felt obligated to check on her well-being. There were times during PJ’s divorce when all she’d wanted to do was stay in her nightgown, slink around the house, and crawl under the covers—and times when she actually did just that. It made her sympathetic to what June was going through.

And the police keep bothering her, on top of everything else.

PJ was embarrassed that she’d made the call. Her question could have waited until morning. “Why don’t you get some more rest, June? I’m sorry about the intrusion.”

“I’ll try, but it’ll be hard to get back to sleep now. I’ll go check that all the doors are locked. Don’t forget about May.”

DEAR DIARY,

These are things that happened to me, cross my heart and hope to die.

When I’m six, I bring home my report card from first grade. I’m smart, and I know it because me teacher tells me. At home, my parents don’t think I’m very smart because my sister tells them that I do stupid things. She’s making it up, but they don’t listen to me. “She knows what she’s talking about,” Mom says. “You shouldn’t question her, you’re too little. You should be happy you have a sister who pays so much attention to you.”

She pays attention, all right. That’s because she’s always watching for times she can do something to me, like smack me around. I don’t give her any reason to. I stay away as much as I can. I’d like to go to a friend’s house and spend some time with somebody who likes me. The problem is, nobody does. She tells them bad things about me, so I don’t have any friends. Sometimes Mom and Dad have parties for me so I can meet friends. My sister helps out at the parties, of course, and the guests go home crying. I think they’ve about given up on the party idea.

“Lazy bones, never does anything,” she says, and grabs my report card. It’s not like I was waving it in her face. I had it hidden in my book bag, but she got it anyway. Every time she gets my bag away from me, she tears it a little, so it will look like I don’t really care how I treat things that belong to me. I’ve gotten that lecture so many times I could mouth the words right along with Dad, but I don’t dare.

“Oh, look how careless she is,” she says, as she rips the carrying strap loose from my book bag. “Such a thoughtless child. Crazy bones, lazy bones,” she chants as she holds my report card up over my head so I can’t reach it. Then she steps on my toes, hard.

“Oops.”

She opens the report card and stares at it. I got high passes in everything, and an “exceptional” in reading.

“Give me back my report card!” I grab for it but she dances away.

“The teacher must have gotten you mixed up with someone else,” she says. “These can’t be your grades.”

“Oh, yes they are! Give me that!”

“I’ll just have to straighten things out. Where’s that eraser?”

“I’ll tell Mom.”

“You do and you’re dead meat, you little twerp.” She said it like each word was a deadly threat, which it was. I didn’t want to find out what it was like to be dead meat. I shut up about the report card but I made a face at her.

She found an eraser and undid all of Mrs. Sandauer’s nice cursive writing. Then she wrote in different grades, like “Math: Can’t count to three,” and “Art: Not talented.” In the comments at the bottom, she put “Very disruptive in class.” Those things were so wrong. I tried to grab the card from her. I was going to rip it up. Better to have Mom and Dad think I lost it than to have them see it like that.

She grabbed my arm and twisted it behind my back. I tried to hurt her by kicking backward with my feet. The heel of my tennis shoe connected with her shin.

“Ow, damn it. Cut that out.” She twisted my arm higher, so that I had tears on my face.

We heard Mom come into the kitchen and both of us froze. I didn’t want to get punished for saying bad things about my sister, and I guess she didn’t want to hurt me for real with Mom in the next room. She let go, and skipped away before I could get the card from her.

“Mom, look, a report card!” She dashed into the other room. I was right on her heels, but Mom already had the card in her hands. She was shaking her head.