EARLY FRIDAY MORNING, ANITA came by and whisked PJ off to a low-priced car rental company downtown. She wheedled her way into a rental only days before Christmas, and came out with the keys to a new Ford Focus in Sangria Red. Awed by the array of goodies on the dash, she pushed buttons, slid levers, and turned dials until she was familiar with the controls. Mirrors adjusted, she ventured into downtown traffic, wishing she had a CD handy to try out the player. All that was missing was the new car smell.
PJ felt a lot better this morning and ready to tackle two projects at work. One was the Shower Woman scenario, and the other was contacting Jasmine Singer, the maternal aunt of May and June. She was also expecting some progress reports today on an assortment of other interviews that had been done by Dave and Anita. Busy women don’t have time to reflect on things like black cars bearing down or deadly, six-foot insects in the house.
She stopped at a bakery and bought two dozen doughnuts with red and green sprinkles for Christmas. At Headquarters, she had plenty of offers to help carry in the boxes, but graciously declined them all because she didn’t want to pay off the helper in goods. Her team converged on her office and swarmed over the doughnuts.
“Hey, leave me some of those,” she said. “At least one.”
“Make some more coffee, will you?” Anita said.
PJ sighed and did as she was told. “Ready to get down to business now?”
“Sure, Boss,” Dave said. “We’ve finally worked our way through the list of attendees at May’s open house who might have planted the bloody knife. We had to make phone calls to Europe and Australia to do it. Some of those people don’t believe in ‘home for the holidays.’ ”
“Let’s hear the abbreviated version without the travelogue,” Schultz said. He was using a napkin to catch the doughnut sprinkles, and doing a very poor job of it.
“We didn’t come up with any leads. Nobody there saw anything suspicious. Background work on all the attendees didn’t come up with anyone with a connection to Arlan, other than the people we already know about,” Dave said.
“People like May and Frank,” PJ said. He nodded.
“I’ve been talking to friends of May, June, and Fredericka, plus the victims’ friends,” Anita said. “All three of the women seem to have a lot of acquaintances but no best friends. There was a general consensus that Fredericka was having an affair with Arlan, but little else. None of these women opened up to anybody.”
“How about friends of Frank? He hasn’t been ruled out as Arlan’s killer.”
Anita looked at her notes. “A tough but fair businessman, a good father, a man with a lot of outside interests like music and art. He was the type who could have gotten very upset if Arlan was pressuring him into something illegal. He was a real straight arrow.”
“Except that he was engaged to June before he married May,” Dave said. “That’s a weird triangle if you ask me.”
“Maybe he was still screwing June, and her husband found out about it,” Schultz said. “Could be blackmail. Arlan was trying to raise money for his pet project in Chicago. Maybe he saw a bundle of it because his wife spread her legs for her former fiancé.”
“As kinky as Arlan was, I wouldn’t be surprised if he liked that idea. Probably had a photo album of it he secretly collected,” Dave said.
“Our cup runneth over with motives,” PJ said.
“Next up, the Chicago businessmen,” Dave said. “It’s rough getting anybody to say anything, but from what I can gather from second and third hand sources, the guys were ticked off but not riled up. They just wrote Arlan off as a loser and moved on to the next project. Never thought much of him in the first place and didn’t have high expectations.”
“Okay, we’ll scratch them for now,” PJ said. “What about the tenants’ association that was angry with Frank?”
Dave shook his head. “Tempest in a teacup. The tenants won. Frank had already backed off. They had no reason to kill him. With him dead, someone even worse might take over ownership of the building.”
“My favorite guy is next,” Schultz said. “Thul Volmann, the interior designer trashed by Frank. Still an open situation there. Volmann had hired an attorney and filed a defamation of character lawsuit. I spoke to the attorney, and he seemed to have Frank dead to rights. All Volmann had to do was let justice be done, but he may have figured monetary compensation wouldn’t undo the damage to his reputation. People who work for Volmann say he’s vain, dictatorial, and has a quick, vicious temper. Makes you wonder why they work for him. Anyway, I’d move him up a notch in consideration for Frank’s murder. Connection to the other homicides seems nil.”
PJ explained her theory about the gardener trying to kill her because she linked him with the cart.
Schultz shook his head. “I thought there was something to it because this Jimmy Drummond, the gardener, worked for a landscaping company run by Arlan. I found the guy and sweated him a little. Not only is he Mr. Upright College Student, but he’s got alibis for the times that PJ was attacked, and they checked out.”
The meeting wound down and the two men started telling raunchy jokes. That was PJ’s cue to kick them all out of her office.
As he was leaving, Schultz pointed to the remaining two doughnuts. “You going to eat those?”
“Yes. Be sure to close the door on your way out.”
When PJ checked her email, she found a message from Merlin, which was very rare. She didn’t bother to trace the source of the mail and try to find out who or where Merlin was, since she was sure he’d use an anonymous remailer, probably several levels deep.
Keypunch,
Where have you been hiding? You should tell your sweet Uncle Merlin. I haven’t been able to get through to you, and thought you’d want to know some gamer friends of mine located the tunnel creep. He’s Kevin Hannings, 4568 Tessabee Road, in Pacific, out I-44. They’re a hundred percent sure of this. He’s been banned from online gaming, period. Worldwide. Forever. Under any name he tries to come up with. I have to admit I’m a little curious how they did that, since I’m not confident I could. This has caused quite a stir among ’core gamers. People in assorted countries offered to come over and personally beat the shit out of him and then do worse things. Gamers have been known to have poor impulse control, so unless you’re okay with having Hannings’ guts ripped out and tied around his neck (that one won the vote), you should probably give Schultz the creep’s name and address and have him picked up. Soon. Very soon. I believe several have already boarded their airplanes.
Yours,
Merlin
p.s. I had to give out Thomas’s game ID, so they know him now. I trust these people. I wouldn’t be surprised if Thomas starts moving up in the rankings, though.
p.p.s. Thomas didn’t happen to mention where Hannings got the costume, did he? I have two gamers pestering me.
PJ responded, giving a brief description of the events at her house and indicating that Hannings was already in custody. Thanking him for his efforts, she asked him to call off the gamers if possible, and sent the message on its way. She thought about what he’d mobilized on her behalf. Here was a person who cared so much about her and could call on help of every description from around the world if she asked. Selflessly. What had she ever done for him? Of course, some of Merlin’s good ideas seemed to get away from him, but it was usually possible to control the damage. In this case, the only fallout would be that Hannings’s neighbors might notice strangers casing the house for a few days.
Locating Jasmine Singer was easy. PJ enlisted the help of the chief of the Hannibal Police Department, who recognized the name immediately.
Aunt Jasmine, as PJ was already thinking of her, lived in a residential care home, but she wasn’t one of the poor elderly scraping by on Medicare payments. She was a multimillionaire, and could easily have maintained her own home and hired whatever help she needed. She lived at Riverview Elder Care because she liked the company of the other active retirees, the security of living in a place with a twenty-four-hour staff, and the food. There was an on-site gourmet restaurant. The place apparently wasn’t low end.
PJ phoned to ask if today would be a good day to visit. A staff member checked with Mrs. Singer, who said that she’d receive company after her nap, which was over at four o’clock. PJ made an appointment for a visit at four-thirty. On a map of Missouri, she picked a route. Highway 61 was probably faster, but if she took Highway 79, a two-lane road that paralleled the Mississippi River, she could stop at the city of Clarksville. Her son had brought home information from school about bald eagles that wintered there, fishing in the river below Lock and Dam 25.
She got the idea that she would take Thomas with her, even though he’d have to sit around in the lobby while she interviewed Jasmine. He would love the trip. It would be a Friday afternoon off school, and they could talk the whole way there and back. Excited, she immediately phoned Mr. Archibald at the academy to let him know she’d be picking up her son at one o’clock. The man gave her a hard time about pulling Thomas out during the school day, but relented when she made it clear there was an educational aspect to it.
PJ set to work on recreating Marilee Baines’s murder in virtual reality. She had a few hours before leaving, and was already wondering if the trip to Hannibal was justified in terms of hard information for the case.
“Shower,” PJ said. The null world resolved into a scene of a city street. Narrow homes lined the block, each with one or more banged-up trashcans out front. Quite a few cars were parked at the curb, since these homes had no garages and only a few of them had driveways. It was dark, with the light of the old-fashioned streetlights six houses in either direction barely casting a shadow as she moved. Once between two houses, she was invisible.
At the back of the house, one window had its curtains partially open. Light spilled from it, slicing across the yard like a knife. She approached the window carefully, staying out of the light. When she reached it, she squatted low to make sure no part of her head showed. On her feet were outsized, fuzzy bedroom slippers with smooth, leather soles, and her hands were sheathed with several pairs of latex gloves.
The window was open a couple of inches. She could hear water running in the shower. Cautiously raising her head, she peeked into the window. Inside was a small bedroom, inexpensively furnished but clean and neat. PJ tried lifting the window, but it wouldn’t slide up smoothly. Probably a little stuck with layers of old paint above the two-inch mark. PJ reached into a pack around her waist, and found a knife patterned after the one that forensics determined was used on Marilee Baines. She used the knife to pry at the painted-over window track, then remembered that the police report said there’d been no pry marks at all, inside or outside the bedroom window.
“Stop, restart entering the back yard,” she said. There was a dizzying moment as the scene reset itself. She went up to the window again, and this time, after carefully looking around for people looking out their windows, she wiggled the window back and forth slightly, then shoved it up. She felt the resistance of the paint holding, then breaking free. There was some noise, but neighbors had their windows closed due to the freezing weather.
Once the window was up, she had to act fast. Having practiced getting up into the back of the pickup truck in the barn scenario, she had no trouble controlling the Genman’s motion to get up and over the low windowsill.
Inside, she quickly lowered the window so that if anyone did happen to look out, they wouldn’t see Marilee’s window standing wide open and become suspicious. She glided across the wood floor in her slippers until she came to the bathroom, which had vinyl flooring.
Now what? In spite of the bloody shower stall and some smeared blood on the floor, no bloody footprints had been found, either in the shower or in the bedroom. She ducked away from the doorway to think about it. There was a large mirror on the bathroom wall, and it would be possible for Marilee to see her coming, especially if PJ stood there thinking for a long time. The victim wasn’t going to stay in the shower forever. The killer must have come prepared for this.
“Pause, free Genman,” PJ said. Instantly the sound of the running water stopped, the droplets frozen in midair. Marilee, bent over scrubbing her legs with a loofah sponge, rear plastered against the steamy glass doors, halted in that inelegant position. Genman, free to move, stepped into the bathroom to look around.
And stood on a pink, shaggy bathroom rug.
Of course! Why didn’t I notice that? There had been no rug at the scene, confirmed later when she examined the photos. The bathroom had been scanned into the computer, rugless, but its artificial intelligence had conjured a rug based upon stock photos of hundreds of bathrooms in its database. The majority of them must have had rugs outside the shower door, for wet feet.
PJ thought about what to do, stepped back out of the room, and then said, “Resume.” She took off her slippers and left them right outside the bathroom, noticing when she did so another detail from the crime scene photos. There was a pair of slippers near the bed, similar to the ones she was wearing.
The killer staked this place out and knew a lot going in.
In her bare feet, PJ took a large step and planted her feet on the rug. She slid back the fogged-up doors and confronted Marilee. It was not a fair fight. PJ had a knife and Marilee had a sponge. With surprise on her side, PJ’s first lunge was a solid strike.
Having seen the clear trend of how things were going, PJ became a FOTW for the rest of the murder. It was mainly a matter of not getting scratched by the frantic and weakening woman. Although Marilee had defensive wounds on her hands and forearms in the autopsy photos, there had been no skin cells under her fingernails.
She watched Genman complete the killing, take the finger, and make the heart design on the back of the door in blood. Then she took over the role of killer again.
Her feet were bloody, but she carefully stepped into the waiting slippers. Then she reached into the bathroom, tugged on the rug, and when it got close enough, peeled off one of the pairs of latex gloves, tossed them on the rug, and rolled the whole thing up to take with her. It had a rubberized backing that did a good job of keeping in the blood.
Across the wood floor in her slippers, out the window, pull the window down to two inches, walk carefully out to the sidewalk with the rug. She stopped the simulation there. Somewhere on the street, the killer had a car parked, and would be away into the night, taking his bloody footprints with him.