SCHULTZ SAT DOWN HEAVILY on the edge of his bed and stuck his legs into his pants. Another body had been found. Couldn’t the schmuck who discovered the body have been considerate enough to wait another hour or three?
Why are we getting this call, anyway? We’re not busy enough?
Out of the corner of his eye he could see PJ buttoning her blouse and putting on her shoes. Her phone call had been from her boss, Howard Wall, who could maybe be forgiven for the timing of his call, because he didn’t know where PJ and Schultz had snuck off to, or that they’d done their sneaking together. His had been from Anita, calling from her car. Anita probably did know, because women talked about those things even when they swore they didn’t, and she called anyway.
Fuckus interruptus. Latin for “a cop’s life.”
They drove together, in his car. Because he was pissed off, Schultz went slow enough to earn him several horn honks from people behind him. He also took the time to stop in a post office and mail a letter containing a check he’d written for one hundred ten dollars to Ernestine Bradlock. It was better than facing her in person again.
The victim’s house was in the Bevo neighborhood, near the railroad tracks. There were two black-and-whites parked out front and the scene was already secured. A small group of neighbors, some wearing nightclothes even though it wasn’t late in the evening, gathered behind the tape. He’d seen that look on their faces many times before. They were trying not to show how eager they were to see someone else’s fatal misfortune. The ultimate reality show.
Schultz was the first detective to arrive. Dave was in Chicago tracking down the disappointed clients that were supposed to meet with Arlan Merrett. Anita was on her way to talk with May Simmons. It would be interesting to see what the woman had to say about the Merrett marriage and the fact that her husband had been arrested for murder.
After showing identification to the officer controlling access, Schultz and PJ plucked disposable slippers from the box on the front porch. After slipping them on—a process accompanied by grunting on Schultz’s part as he bent over far enough to reach his feet—they went into the house. The front door had been knocked off its hinges. He noticed that the lock on the door was a lock in name only. It looked capable of keeping out a lamb, and that was probably stretching it. In the living room, a uniformed officer sat next to a distraught man on a tired couch that dated from the 1950s. Schultz and Julia, his ex-wife, had bought one exactly like it secondhand when they had furnished their first apartment. Next to the couch there was a blonde wood end table with spindly legs set out at an angle.
Check. Had that one, too.
Schultz looked around for the starburst wall clock and the green bubble glass hanging lamp.
Must be in other rooms.
The officer came over to them.
“Detective Schultz,” the woman said. “I guess you caught another one.”
“Yeah,” Schultz said. The officer was a new face. “Name?”
“Officer Ran Suhao, sir.”
“Officer Ran, bring me up to speed.”
“This is George Huber, the deceased’s fiancé. He’s the person who discovered the body. Mr. Huber visited the deceased tonight and later returned because he’d forgotten a book he meant to borrow. Marilee Baines is in the bathroom.” At the sound of Marilee’s name, Mr. Huber whimpered and buried his face in a handkerchief.
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.”