Simple (15 page)

“Wood shavings were
inside
the door, not outside.” This is Potocki.

Nice. Christie wondered who would be the first to come up with that.

“The pattern is odd, as if to make it
look
like a break-in. Also,” says Potocki, “taking a wallet is an easy feint. The first thing a person would do who wanted to get us to think it was a robbery. I hear there is a cell phone missing, too, but I'd say the same thing about that.”

Christie writes on the board,
Robbery possibly not motive.

“Somebody could have had a key,” murmurs Janet Littlefield. “Do we know about her relationships?”

He writes,
Key used for entry?

“If somebody faked the robbery, that person might have faked the gloves.”

“That means a certain amount of … premeditation.” Christie writes the word on the board.

“I'm wondering, who did she have a margarita with?” Littlefield continues. “Maybe a person she gave a key to?”

Margarita partner
, he writes. He says, “Very likely someone in a gray car. We have a neighbor reporting a gray car following Cassie in the street in front of her house, and Cal reports a gray car following her in the alley until she parked.” He writes,
Gray car
.

Colleen Greer says, “The woman in the neighborhood who reported seeing a gray car also saw a black car in the alley at roughly the time of the murder. This woman says she's often up in the middle of the night. She says the person going to the car reminded her in some way of—hold on, guys—an astronaut.”

“Oh, good, now we're really getting somewhere,” Coleson mocks. “Is this somebody we talked to? I know who it is, right?”

“Yes. Iris Mender. She told your man the part about the black car, but she saved the part about the astronaut for us.”

“Needless to say,” Coleson continues in his light tone, “astronaut, alien, the woman knew who to confide in.”

“Some of my best colleagues are aliens!” Colleen retorts.

Christie writes,
Unidentified visitor?
while everybody talks at once.

Then things settle down.

“The powder on the floor? Drugs?” one of the juniors asks.

“We did a presumptive,” Baitz says. “Not drugs. We don't have what it is yet.”

“And then,” Christie says, “Dolan and I have something bugging us. Tell them what we noticed.”

“Perp was almost certainly right-handed.
But
when we visited Cal Hathaway in jail, Boss handed him a pad, a pencil, asked him to write some stuff down. He used his left hand. We wondered if this was purposeful.”

Christie nods. “So, we went back to the video, the part where the primaries handed him a pad and a pen. Left hand is what he used repeatedly. He's a lefty.”

“I'd say he didn't fake it,” Dolan asserts. “Totally natural.”

“What do you make of that?”

“Could he have used the weak hand for some reason we haven't figured, like maybe he needed the stronger hand to restrain her?” the same junior detective asks. “Is there more of her hair in the left glove?” Eager fellow. Name? Yes. Melanowsky.

Coleson and McGranahan brighten.

“Maybe,” Christie says. “It's unusual, but believe me I will consider it.” He turns to Baitz. “Anything else for us?”

“We used luminol at night. Saw a spot of blood. Very small. Got excited. It turned out to be a mosquito full of dinner. We took it in case.”

“Any evidence of a bite on the deceased?”

Meakie shakes his head slowly. “No.”

“Hm.” Christie goes back to Baitz. “You can DNA it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Before the hearing?”

“That would be pushing it.”

“How hard would it be to push it?”

“Very hard, sir.”

“But of course being a good guy … you'll try.” He smiles.

Baitz shrugs helplessly.

Of course one way or the other defense will say the mosquito blood doesn't prove a thing. If it's Cal's blood, why couldn't the mosquito have bit during working hours? Christie doesn't say these things aloud, but he makes a note to have a medic at the prison look over Cal's body.

He dismisses Meakie and Baitz and gives his detectives their assignments. Some of them he dismisses for the day. Coleson and McGranahan he puts on the search for more particulars on the black car—“Get me everybody Cassie Price knew who drives a black car.”

“Yoy.”

“I wanted to give you time with the astronaut,” he jokes. “In other words, neighborhood plus black car is your search term.”

Somebody whistles. “Hey, Commander, you're getting better at this computer thing.”

“Getting literate,” Christie says. “Denman and Hurwitz, same deal, see who she worked with that has a gray car. There'll be plenty. Once we have the list, we'll work on alibis.”

He points to two others. “All the recent robberies in the neighborhood. Any break-ins. Especially anybody who takes just the money. Or targets phones. All of Oakland.”

He says to Potocki and Greer and Dolan, “I want the four of us to work the funeral home today.” Colleen's eyes roll back in her head. She hates death. Can't stand it. Which is really funny when you consider she opted for Homicide.

“Littlefield, what do you have on Price's computer?”

“I was at her e-mail yesterday and this morning. Dull isn't the word. Totally boring so far.”

“Well, go through it and report tomorrow.”

*   *   *

COLLEEN IS DRIVING
this time.

“You were gorgeous last night.”

She feels suddenly shy. Men will say anything. Shameless.

“Really. The way you move. Everything.”

“Well, thank you.” She squints at the road as if the glare is bothering her, which it isn't since there's cloud cover.

“Need your glasses?”

“Oh, yes, thank you.”

He roots around in her bag without looking. “What do you think? Boss is going nuts this morning or what?”

“I think he has a strong feeling Coleson and McGranahan rushed it. And I kind of agree, but between the
for sure he did it
column and the
not for sure,
we're about even. If it were my case, I'd go with the not for sure. And the other thing … like he said last night at dinner, he doesn't know if Cal Hathaway can survive in prison. Or even in county jail. Whether he killed her or not, he's not a fighter. There's something gentle about him.”

Potocki finds the glasses and hands them to her. “This is a three-hour drive. Plus three, maybe. Visiting hours start at two. We might end up with time for lunch. I wonder what kind of place we're going to find up there. If traffic is smooth and we're sure we have time, we should maybe stop in State College, where they have a lot of restaurants.”

“That would be great, but—”

Potocki's phone rings.

“As I was just saying, it's going to be a four-way lunch,” she whispers hurriedly before he answers. “That'll be our invitation.”

“Hey, Artie,” Potocki says, winking at Colleen.

Her prediction is right—Boss saying they might as well talk while eating lunch someplace when it hits twelve or one, get their ducks in a row.

They stop in State College, all four of them.

Lunch is totally cheerful, but all the while she's thinking they could have driven up in one car, so why didn't they? Was Christie letting her have time with Potocki or simply not wanting to be around them for the full three-hour drive? Maybe it's all work—two cars, two options for escape.

She feels nervous. She isn't at all sorry she slept with Potocki last night, though it makes her predicament at work worse. She's a bad liar, so there's no sense pretending to Christie, who sees everything, that she and Potocki are
not involved.

*   *   *

CAL HAS BEEN STARING
at the ceiling all morning. After breakfast he twisted a bit, trying to block out the sounds of voices, TVs, speakers, and metallic echoes until he succeeded and all the sounds whirred like machinery, a big factory of voices.

All the morning long, he's thought of Cassie, as if thinking could bring her back to life. Still, hours later, he tries to remember anything that suggests he got up in the middle of the night, got himself dressed, walked up the road to her place. But the blackouts of his youth were significant. He'd lost whole days or parts of days.

And so with the voices and TVs chattering, he tries to create a scene in which he did the awful thing. In his mind he gets himself dressed and up the road. But then what? Perhaps he didn't understand the time of day because he was dreaming. Perhaps he started working on the porch, frustrated there was not enough light. What if he tried to get into the house to turn on the porch light and he frightened Cassie. But he would have
run
, wouldn't he? Backed off? Apologized?

He forces himself to imagine it. What if she screamed or said she was calling the police. And that … scared him enough to try to stop her. What if?

He shudders. The tears begin to form again.

He thinks hard. He wore the baggy jeans and a blue shirt on Friday. What the day before? Then he remembers. A striped jersey. Yes, and the older jeans! Yes, he's sure. He is so happy with this memory, he ignores the fact that he might have donned the blue shirt and baggy jeans twice, once in the middle of the night. He lets his mind turn over and over. He remembers the priest just sitting with him, asking if there is anything he can do. Nice. It makes him cry. He falls into a drowsy wakefulness.

“Trays up,” goes the call.

He thinks, No, I won't eat.

Levon passing his cell, says, “Come on, man.”

He gets up. “Roast beef for lunch,” he hears someone say.

He moves out of his cell and gets into line to get his roast beef.

*   *   *

THEY ARE LINED UP,
the sisters, like contestants in a beauty pageant. They stand next to their mother, who is not particularly beautiful but is clearly a vessel for beauty. In their faces, combined, are the ingredients for Cassie's face.

There are flowers everywhere, and the workers keep carrying more in until it's clear there simply will be no room for them all.

In the Price family the grieving process has only begun, the ravaged expressions just being hinted at. The pretty sisters standing in a row are wide-eyed, stunned or in denial.

“This is hard, I know,” Colleen murmurs to the girls, repeating herself a few times. “I'm going to go outside for a while. I'd be grateful for the company if you take a break.”

She gets a flicker of interest from the older sister, so she reaches over and squeezes her hand. Then she passes back through the room toward the exit, toward the outdoors, hoping. Potocki is sticking with the father and the males in the group, especially anyone that looks like he might be or had been one of Cassie's boyfriends. Christie and Dolan are talking together in a hush, but both of them are observing those who come and go.

There is a minister holding court in the hallway, many mourners gathered around him. Colleen picks up a card from the table in the hall. It is filled with Bible quotes and a list of prayer services that will take place in the next day and a half—a significant number of them, amounting to a royal send-off in religious terms. The funeral is to be on Tuesday morning.

Outside is not exactly comfortable. Although it's sunny, it's also eighty degrees and Pennsylvania humid—a condition that just sort of hangs over the state for days and keeps the dehumidifiers running in most basements. So she's hot and she dabs at her forehead. And she wonders about those sisters, all of them sexy looking. Is the homeschooling a way of keeping them in check?

There are three media cars. Some of the crew are inside scoping the crowd; the others are outside wielding cameras and waiting for something to shoot. They recognize her as police and take a few minutes of film, especially when she stops a group of young women going into the building and later when she talks to two others coming out. Friends from high school, friends from college, some crying, all thinking, thinking about this thing called death. From them she extracts facts she already knew: Cassie was gorgeous. She worked like a demon. She had the best grades. She was very religious. She was uptight. (Well, they didn't put it that way. They said she wasn't interested in dating, that she was “very strict with herself.”)

“Golly, weren't boys calling her all the time?”

“They were,” one girl says. “I think she had secret crushes. I don't know. She wasn't mean to the guys. I mean they liked her a lot. I think they always ended up thinking it might work out.”

“It sounds like they didn't get angry at her for being unavailable.”

The girl says, puzzled, “No, they didn't.”

The conversation is interrupted by Colleen's awareness that the media has come to attention, one running to a camera, some adjusting cameras surreptitiously. All for one particular car. Who are the celebrities? Cadillac limo and all. The car pulls up to the front door. A gray-haired man and woman emerge. Then a middle-aged couple who look uncomfortable. Then a handsome middle-aged man and woman, and with them a solo man who has a lively, cheerful look and might have been brought along to keep the jokes flowing.

“Senator Connolly,” one newsman says, addressing the handsome one, “could we have a word?”

“Not now.” His refusal is kind, even regal. “I'll make a statement in a bit if you'd like to wait.”

“Yes, sir. I'll be here.”

They watch him walk into the building, shooting of course all the while in case it's all they get.

Colleen sidles up to the newsman who spoke first. “Senator?” she asks. “Ex, isn't it?”