Dead Lies (5 page)

Kreeger said, “Okay, let’s go back to the beginning. Tell me what you saw first.”

“Actually, the first thing I noticed was the smell of gunpowder,” she corrected. “It was very faint, but it made me think the killer might still be in the house. The vic was on the floor like this,” she explained, demonstrating the position of the body using her own arms to show how the woman’s had been splayed. “And the broken chair was right here.” She indicated the spot with a wave of a hand. Kreeger listened quietly, moving slowly around the room and examining surfaces and angles as she spoke. Gene, too, seemed to be hanging on every word.

“All right,” Kreeger said. “So, Serena Vance was standing in front of the island when the perp—or perps—entered the house and shot her.” He pointed to the way the blood droplets on the counter seemed to be moving away from them, like upside-down tears. “But if the guy came into the room from that door with a gun, when and why did he hit her with the chair?”

Anna had wondered that, too.

Kreeger looked around. “Gene, can I touch the body?”

“Yup, the M.E.’s been through here already,” Gene answered, his eyes never leaving Anna.

Kreeger walked over to the body and lifted the sheet. He studied each wound one by one, oblivious to the woman’s knockout shape.

“Anna, can you help me out here?” he said. “I want to turn her on her side.”

Anna hesitated because even though she’d attended murders before, she’d never handled a dead body. Hiding her discomfort, she gently picked up the woman’s arm and pulled the body toward her, surprised by how pliant it was. The woman had not been dead long enough for rigor mortis to set in.

Kreeger put his hand on the woman’s waist to help prop the body up and checked her back as thoroughly as he had her front. Anna knelt down and peeked over the body so she could see what the detective was looking at. There was no exit wound from the bullet in the woman’s chest, which meant it was still lodged somewhere inside her. But the wound to her neck had both an entry and exit wound, and thus was unlikely to have been the fatal shot.

“Okay, let’s bring her back,” said Kreeger. Together they gently lowered the body to the floor and covered her with the sheet.

“Okay, let’s try this again,” Kreeger said, walking back to the kitchen door. Extending his thumb and forefinger like he was holding a gun, he said, “So Serena’s standing over by the counter with the pie when the door is busted in, and she turns to look.” He paused. “I’m thinking the first bullet was the one to her neck. It probably knocked her down, but the perp didn’t realize it didn’t kill her.” Looking back at Gene, he said, “Did you find the round?”

“Yup, over here,” beckoned Gene. Kreeger joined him on the other side of the island, and Gene pointed to a spot midway up the window frame. Anna stayed where she was. “It was a .22 hollowpoint,” Gene said.

“Did you get any prints off it?” Kreeger said.

“Nope.”

So the shooter had been careful when he’d loaded, thought Anna, feeling more sure that her initial impressions of the killer had been correct. He’d worn gloves
and
he’d taken the casings from the scene, two things a professional might do. She imagined the killer firing his first shot, and the image raised a question she hadn’t considered: Why hadn’t a neighbor heard the shots and reported it to the police? Even a low-caliber bullet like a .22 would have made an identifiable sound.

“Jerry, did anyone report hearing gunshots?” she asked.

He spun around, and she had the fleeting thought she should have addressed him as “Detective.” Back home, uniformed officers called detectives by their first names—titles were reserved for the brass only—but she didn’t know how things worked here.

“I don’t know,” he said, giving no indication she’d slipped up. “Shouldn’t I be asking you?”

“Yeah, the dispatcher would have radioed me about it,” she admitted, adding, “It’s strange no one heard anything.”

“It’s possible the next door neighbors weren’t home or that someone heard something but didn’t report it,” he said. “We’ll find out from the canvass.”

“Or maybe the perp used a suppressor?” she offered, referring to the device commonly referred to as a silencer. But that was a TV term.

“Maybe,” said Kreeger.

If the perp
had
used a suppressor, it gave even more credence to her theory that this was no ordinary burglary. Suppressors weren’t so easy to acquire on the street. They were specialized pieces of hardware used mostly by the military.

“That’s an interesting thought,” Kreeger reiterated, jotting something down in his notebook. “But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We need to get back to the sequence of events. So he fires at Serena and thinks he’s killed her with that first shot to the neck. Then what?” He paused, considering his own question.

“One theory would be that he headed upstairs to look for the loot,” offered Anna.

Kreeger shot her a look. “But I take it you don’t like that theory?”

“Another thought is that the husband comes into the kitchen unexpectedly, sees what’s happening and starts to run away…” She paused, realizing how that the made the poor dead husband come off as a bit of a coward. But she’d never actually been face-to-face with the muzzle of a gun before, so she wasn’t really in a position to judge.

Kreeger finished her thought. “…And the perp chases him upstairs and puts a bullet in the back of his head.
Then
he grabs the jewelry from the closet.” He shook his head. “Logically that makes sense, because the burglary motive isn’t working for me. I don’t know many burglars who kill. They break into homes when they know the owners are away.”

She nodded vigorously. “I was thinking the same thing. Plus, the timing’s weird for a burglary. He broke in smack in the middle of dinnertime.”

“Boring old four to midnights,” said Kreeger lightly. “I remember.”

Anna smiled at his reference to the shift known as a “four to midnight,” when the police take most of their burglary calls from people who came home from work to find they’d been robbed. It wasn’t as bad as the overnight shift, but it was an unpopular one all the same, involving plenty of paperwork and frustrated homeowners.

“The four to midnights I did in Brooklyn weren’t so boring,” she blurted, immediately wishing she could take it back. She felt like she’d just issued a playground challenge, something her four-year-old son might do.

But Kreeger didn’t seem to notice, just looked at her in surprise. “You were N.Y.P.D.?”

“Yeah,” she nodded, feeling the familiar old pride bubble up. Her eyes darted to Gene, who’d fortunately resumed his work and was no longer looking in her direction.

“Where?” said Kreeger

“I started out at the seven-three then moved to the Upper East Side. The 19
th
.”

Kreeger smiled. “I worked the two-four, but that was a long time ago.” He looked at her. “You were probably just a kid at the time.”

It was Anna’s turn to be surprised. Kreeger was N.Y.P.D.? He was so unassuming. But his old Harlem beat was certainly no cake walk. Clearly there was much more to him than he let on.

“How long have you been on the job?” he asked.

“Three years. How ‘bout you?”

“Twenty-five. I’ve been out here eighteen years now.” He added, “I came for the schools. You?”

Anna hesitated, reluctant to share her personal reasons for moving to New Jersey. “I moved here four months ago,” she shrugged. “Change.”

He nodded. “How do you like it?”

“So far, so good.”

The detective smiled, looking a little sheepish. “All right, I have to ask. Do you know Ryan Finlay? He worked the five-two.”

“I do!” she exclaimed, surprised again. “How do you know him?”

“His father was my partner way back when. I’ve known Ryan since he was little.”

“Oh, yeah?” she smiled at the coincidence. “We were partners for a few months.”

Kreeger’s eyes lit up with recognition. “Anna, yeah!” He shook his head. “I know this is hard to believe, but I remember Ryan talking about you. He liked you.” Shaking his head again and looking at her with newfound respect, he added, “Said you were a good cop.”

Anna blushed, not at the compliment, but at something Kreeger would know nothing about. One night after her divorce a little over a year ago, she and Ryan—who had a wife and three kids under the age of ten—had gone out for beers after work and seen the bottom of one too many pint glasses. She ended up taking him back to her place and spending the night with him. To some extent, the tryst had been inevitable. Sexual tension had been steadily building between them for months, like it was so often between partners. But she’d still felt awful about it. Ryan had wanted to continue their affair, but Anna was so ashamed she requested a transfer. She was relieved when it came through a few months later.

Still, Ryan… That night… The sex had been amazing.

She reluctantly shook off the memory. “You know, Ryan used to take pictures at homicide scenes,” she said to Kreeger. “In fact, he bought me my first disposable camera.”

Kreeger laughed. “Touché, Anna. But just to let you know, I decided to let you off the hook back on the driveway.”

Aware that Gene and the two other detectives were now following their conversation with interest, Anna coughed and turned away. Kreeger must have become self-conscious, too, because he got serious again.

“So the perp leaves the kitchen to take out the husband upstairs,” he said, quickly turning back to work. “While he’s upstairs he grabs the jewelry. Then what, he comes back down here?”

“Yeah. He comes into the kitchen and sees the woman isn’t dead like he thought.”

“In fact, he finds out she’s made a phone call.”

“She called her brother, not 9-1-1. Why would she do that?” Anna paused. “Maybe speed dial was all she could manage?”

Kreeger was nodding. “Possibly. But there might be something more there. The brother told me Serena tried to tell him something. He thinks she said, ‘Bet violent.’ ”

“That’s strange,” Anna said, frowning. This message thing was news to her. “What does it mean?”

“The brother doesn’t know.”

“Could it be a name? Maybe she knew her killer?”

“I wondered that too. But when I asked the brother he said it doesn’t sound like any name he knows.”

“Or maybe she was saying, ‘Be violent when you find the guy who did this to me.’? ”

The detective shrugged. “Maybe.”

“Did the brother hear anything else?” she pressed.

“Yeah,” Kreeger said, flipping through his notebook. “And I think it supports the scenario we just worked out. After his sister said, ‘Bet violent’ or whatever, Web said he heard a minute of silence and then, and I quote, ‘a howl and a crashing noise.’ ” Kreeger flipped the pages back. “I take that to mean Web heard the perp come back into the kitchen after killing the husband and cry out in rage when he saw Serena with the phone in her hand. Then the guy picked up the chair and hit Serena with it, which was the crashing noise Web heard. The brother said the phone disconnected at that point.”

What happened next wasn’t difficult to imagine. “So after that, the perp emptied a few rounds into the woman to finish her off?”

“Point blank to the chest,” said Kreeger.

The two cops stood together in silence for a few seconds.

“All right, let’s go upstairs,” Kreeger said finally.

Rounding the second-floor landing, they squeezed past a gurney and entered the master bedroom. Earlier the room had seemed large, but now it looked small, thanks to the number of people working there. Several people with badges hanging around their necks were dusting for fingerprints, and a smallish-looking, balding man wearing a paper gown was crouching next to the body on the left side of the bed. He was on his knees, peering intently at the corpse, which, Anna noted, was now naked. Anna assumed the balding man was the medical examiner.

On the other side of the room an older man with a bushy brown mustache stood near the window behind a photographer, who was popping off shots of the closet’s interior. The Mustache was only a few inches taller than Kreeger but a lot bulkier, and he was wearing a rumpled brown suit that matched the color of his facial hair. He wore no tie, and the top two buttons of his dress shirt were unbuttoned at the neck, revealing a white undershirt underneath. A tangle of chest hair curled out over the collar like a mass of electrical wire in an overstuffed fuse box, forcing Anna to picture the furry horror that very likely also covered the man’s back too. The gold shield that dangled from his neck glinted each time the camera’s flash went off.

When the Mustache turned to face them fully, Anna could see he wore the hardened expression of a veteran cop who’s seen too much and tries to cover it up with casual indifference.

“Excuse me for a minute, will ya?” Kreeger said then headed toward the man Anna figured was Detective De Luca. She found a spot by the door where she’d be out of the way but could still hear what the men were saying.

“Get anything?” De Luca asked as Kreeger approached.

Kreeger stopped and shook his head. “Not much. I’m going to talk to them again tomorrow,” he said, referring to the distraught brother and sister. He took a breath. “So, where are we, Leon?”

De Luca was holding a notebook, which he tapped absently with a red and black pen. “Ray’s still out with some of the local cops doing the canvass,” he said. His voice sounded like car tires on a gravel-driveway. No doubt he was a smoker. A glance at his nicotine-stained fingers confirmed it. “And I’ve got Jonas looking for parolees with a history of armed burglary,” De Luca continued. He led Kreeger to the window. “We found something outside,” he said, pointing toward the backyard with his right index finger, using the same hand that held the pen. “The guy went in and out of the property through those trees.” He moved the sausage-sized finger slightly to the left, and Anna could hear the sound of the pen scraping lightly across one of the wooden grills. “See that thin spot, there? We got a couple of good footprints from the snow. Size twelve boot.” He moved his finger closer to the window, tapping it on the glass. “There’s a schoolyard directly behind this property,” he continued. “We think the perp climbed up onto the jungle gym and watched the house from there before he broke in. Maybe he had binoculars, I don’t know. But we got another wet boot print off the apparatus and a cigarette butt that might have been his.”