Vanished in the Night (15 page)

“Maybe you should go back into the kitchen,” Zach suggested. “Let us finish up here, and we’ll come and let you know what’s going on. Is there someone we can call? Someone who can come and sit with you?” Someone needed to get her out of here.

She didn’t even turn around to face him. “Do you know the time of death?”

“Around midnight last night. That’s my best guess for now,” Little Hillary told her.

Veronica’s knees started to buckle. Zach caught her by the elbow, keeping her upright. She pulled herself up and snatched her arm away from him with a glare.

“That was only a couple of hours after I saw him.” Her voice broke a little. “I shouldn’t have let him go.” She looked at Zach. “I told you it wasn’t safe.”

Murdered. They were saying her father had been
murdered.
It didn’t make any sense.

She’d seen him and assumed he’d lost his balance on the stairs, hit his belly on the way down, and his cirrhotic liver and half-destroyed spleen had him vomiting up blood and bleeding to death in his own home. Alone. She blamed him for his own death instantly.
She added another rock to the weight that seemed to be crushing her heart.

She couldn’t look at the cops or the coroner’s investigator or her father any longer. She retreated into the kitchen.

By reflex, she pulled a coffee filter out of the drawer and began to spoon coffee into the cone.

“Veronica.”

She’d known Zach would follow her, but she needed a minute or two to pull herself together. She didn’t want that low voice, full of sympathy, cascading over her.

“Veronica,” he repeated. “Are you okay?”

She laughed. Her favorite coping mechanism. They’d probably all think she was stark raving mad.

Maybe she was.

“No. I’m not okay. I’m several million miles from okay.” She started running water into the coffeepot, her hands rock steady. She was every bit as much of an addict as her father; she just happened to be addicted to adrenaline. A stiff shot of whiskey in his morning coffee had always stilled the shakes in her father’s hands. She needed a good shock to her system to make her strangely calm.

“You need to stop.” He needed to stop using that deep, gentle voice. She knew precisely what he was doing and it was pissing her off. She turned to say so,
but he went on, “This is a crime scene. You need to leave everything alone. In fact, you need to get out of the house while we process this place.”

She froze. She hadn’t thought about that. She backed away from the counter. “I’m sorry. My fingerprints are going to be all over this place anyway, though. I’m here a couple of times a week.”

He nodded. “Got it. Still, let’s get you out of here. Is there someone we can call?”

She glanced up at the kitchen clock. Tina would already be in bed. Monica would already be at work downtown. She would be here in a heartbeat if Veronica called her, but what could any of them do? Nothing could bring her father back from the dead.

She looked down at her hands. “I’ll be fine. Where should I wait?”

“It would probably be best if you went home. Someone will be by as soon as possible to tell you what we know.” He took a few more steps into the kitchen. “I am so sorry, Veronica.”

She hated the sympathy in his voice. She hated the fact that his broad shoulders looked like a perfect place to lay her head and cry. She hated more than anything that she wanted him to take her in his arms and let her cry out all her hurt and sadness and regret.

His hands began to reach toward her. She looked up into his eyes and for a moment, her breath caught.

“Hey, Zach, Martinez is done. Okay with you if we move the body?” Rodriguez came into the kitchen and Zach’s hands dropped back to his sides.

He turned to his partner. “Sure. If Martinez says we’re done, we’re done.” He turned back to Veronica. “You okay to drive?”

She nodded.

“You sure? It’s normal to be a little shocky right now. I can get one of the uniforms to drive you. No problem.”

“I’m fine. It’s only a couple of miles, anyway.” It would probably be better if she walked home. She could use the time to clear her head.

“You’re sure?” he asked again, glancing over his shoulder at the activity going on behind him.

She nodded.

“It might be better if you went out the back,” he suggested.

Oh, yeah. People didn’t like to see their loved ones being zipped into black plastic body bags. She’d escorted many family members out of ER bays to keep them from having to see that. Again, she nodded.

She looked around for her purse. It wasn’t on the kitchen counter, where she usually set it when she came by the house. She bit her lip and tried to remember where she could have put it. She’d come into the house, she’d seen her father . . .

“What is it?” he asked. “What do you need?”

Dammit. Did he have to be so intuitive? “My purse. I don’t know where I set down my purse.”

He held up a finger and went back into the entryway. He was back in a second or two, holding her bag. It looked ridiculous hanging from his big hand, like a child’s toy, really.

One of her coworkers, an older nurse named Jan, said you could tell how many people a woman was responsible for by the size of her purse. The bigger the purse, the more people she carried on her shoulders. Veronica’s purse was pretty small. She supposed it was about to get a little bit smaller. At least she could throw out the business cards she carried around of all the bail bondsmen.

“Thanks.” She took the purse from him and headed toward the back door.

Zach opened the door for her, but just as she was about to step out, he grabbed her arm. “Hold it,” he barked. “Don’t move.”

“What the—”

He pointed to the step.

He’d grabbed her about a nanosecond before she walked through a perfect boot print on the back step.

“Martinez,” he called into the house. “Can you get somebody out back, please?”

11

“Somebody was back here for a while.” Phong Lee, the crime-scene tech, looked at Zach from underneath the oak tree in the backyard.

“Anything you can tell me about him?” Zach asked. The likelihood of the murderer being a woman seemed vanishingly small. It would take a good-size man to have hauled George Osborne up those stairs. He’d seen plenty of buff women at the gym, but he doubted any of them had the strength to haul the dead weight of a fully grown man up a staircase and then hurl him back down.

Lee shrugged. “I’ll look at some charts and get you some approximate weights and heights when we get back to the lab. At this point I’m figuring a dude who’s about six feet tall.”

“I’m also pretty sure it’s not the same person who kicked the crap out of your vic before he threw him down the stairs.”

Now, that was interesting. “I’m listening.”

“I didn’t get a good look at the body, but Little Hillary said something about a dress shoe.” Phong pointed over at the step. “Not too many dress shoes with waffle soles. That looks like a work boot.”

“So we’ve got two perps? One inside, and maybe one keeping watch back here?” That didn’t make sense. Why post a lookout back here? You should be watching for someone coming to the front door.

“That’s up to you to figure out, Detective. But I don’t think whoever was back here ever went into the house. Near as I can reconstruct, he hunkered down here under this tree for a good long while.” Phong pointed to where the ground had been disturbed. “Then he went up to the back door, stood looking in, spent a little time crouched under that window, and then took off.”

“So some kind of voyeur?” Who the hell would watch someone being murdered and do nothing about it? “Thanks.”

Zach headed back into the house, which was buzzing like a beehive.

Frank was standing in the kitchen, talking to two crime-scene techs. He turned to Zach as he came in.
“So what are you thinking? You think this homicide is linked with the kid’s bones turning up?”

Zach blew out a deep breath. “On the one hand, I can’t imagine that they are linked. There’s what? Twenty years between the two? On the other hand, I can’t imagine that they’re not linked. It’s way too much of a coincidence.”

“I got the same set of questions.” Frank chewed on a toothpick he’d pulled from his pocket. “I don’t like coincidence in a homicide investigation any more than you do, but I’m having trouble figuring out why a really old set of bones would get someone killed. It’s not like we’re hot on anybody’s trail at this point.”

“Is someone pulling all his phone records?” Zach asked.

Frank nodded. “I got some uniforms doing a door-to-door, too. Maybe somebody saw something or someone. A car. A guy. Something.”

It was the kind of neighborhood where somebody might indeed have seen something. On the other hand, it was also the kind of neighborhood where people went into their houses, shut the door, and watched some TV once they got home. It was a long shot, but one that was worth taking.

Zach’s cell phone buzzed in his pocket. It was the ME again.

“I got some more information for you. On your old bones.”

“We’ll be right over.”

Veronica headed right to her bathroom, shedding clothes and belongings as she went. She dropped her purse and keys by the front door. Next she kicked off her shoes. Her scrub top and pants followed. Her panties and bra hit the floor right by the shower.

She stayed under the hot water until it ran out. Her skin was pink and raw, but still she didn’t feel anything. The heat of the water and the scent of the soap were dulled, as if she was experiencing them from a distance. This was shock, she knew that. Giving it a clinical name didn’t change anything, though. Sometimes knowledge was not power.

She pulled on flannel pajama pants and a tank top and went to the kitchen. She wasn’t hungry, but she knew she would need her strength. She poured herself a bowl of cereal and milk.

In all those movies and books, when someone died the place was flooded with casseroles and cakes. The likelihood of that happening with her dad’s death seemed slim. When her mother died, a few neighbors had brought over some food and so had her nursing school friends. Her father had been less than gracious
about people’s offerings. He’d spent years alienating pretty much everyone in the neighborhood, so they were more likely to throw a celebratory party now than to offer their condolences.

Veronica laid her head down on her folded arms on the table, next to her untouched cereal. She wished that her father had been a different man. She wished that the neighbors would be devastated and that his friends would feel the pain of loss.

She wished that she wasn’t the only person on the planet to mourn him. Of all the many times that she’d felt alone in her life, this was the worst.

She finally sat up and ate her frosted mini-wheats, thinking about what she should do next. There were arrangements to be made, but she wasn’t sure when they’d release her father’s body. How was she supposed to plan a funeral when she didn’t even know when she’d have the body?

Who was she fooling? Who was going to come to a funeral for her father, anyway?

So, no funeral planning. Tuck that thought away. If she was the only person sitting in the chapel when it was time, that was okay. Her heart clenched up a little, but it would be okay.

There were probably people to notify. His boss at work, for one. He’d need to know that George wasn’t coming in. She glanced up at the kitchen clock. He
was already way late. She looked up the number for the Jiffy Lube and dialed.

It took a few requests before she was connected to the manager, but she made it eventually. “Hi, my name is Veronica Osborne. I’m George Osborne’s daughter. I wanted to let you know that he, uh, won’t be coming in today.”

“He sick again?” the manager asked. His voice was cigarette raspy. “Or I guess I should say hungover.”

Her voice caught as she said, “Well, no. My father passed away last night.”

“Excuse me? Did you say he died?” She couldn’t blame him for the incredulity in his voice. She felt pretty incredulous herself.

“I’m sorry, yes. I know the news is shocking—”

“And who did you say this is?” he interrupted.

“His daughter, Veronica.” Patience, Veronica. Patience. Don’t snap.

“I didn’t know George had a daughter.”

She laid her head back down on the table and gently bounced her forehead against the wood. It was so good to know that her father talked about her so often that his coworkers didn’t even know she existed. She knew what her father would have said if she had complained about that to him. He’d point out that he was there to work, not to socialize—whether he had a daughter was none of their
damn business. She supposed he was right. But that didn’t make it hurt any less.

“Yes. George had a daughter. Me. He won’t be in to work today. He won’t be in to work ever.” She hung up.

Maybe she’d put off making any more phone calls. She brushed her wet hair into a ponytail and climbed into bed, exhausted. Each limb felt like there was a ten-pound weight hanging off it. Maybe she could sleep her way through this.

Fifteen minutes later it was clear that she would have no such luck. She lay watching the ceiling fan make lazy circles above her. Every time she closed her eyes, all she could see was her father’s body lying at the bottom of the stairs in a pool of blood.

She thought about taking a sleeping pill, but didn’t want to feel groggy later. She was barely putting one foot in front of the other as it was. She couldn’t just lie here, though. She had to do something. But what?

She ticked through all the things that normal people did at times like these. There was no one to notify. No arrangements to be made. Wasn’t there paperwork? There was always paperwork. She didn’t even know if her father had a will, much less who his attorney might have been.

Maybe there’d be something at the house. She looked over at the clock. Surely the police were finished.
She kicked off her blankets and went to find her purse. She found Zach’s card and called him.

“McKnight,” he answered on the second ring.

“Hey, it’s Veronica.”