The tattered screen looked ominous, but the front door itself was intact. No slashes in the metal frame. A tiny wooden entry table topped with lace sat on spindle legs just inside the door, a knick-knacky ceramic vase on top. The lace whipped around with the chill draft from outside like it wanted to fly away.
Petrosky squeezed past two techs into the kitchen. A pot rack over the sink held four saucepans, the handles all facing the same way. He ran his finger along the top of the fridge—clean. This was the job—looking, examining, pausing to take in every detail, seeing what others couldn’t. But it took time, and there was a kid out there somewhere, probably terrified. The thought hooked a spot in Petrosky’s gut, though surely that hook was smaller than whatever this psycho had used on Ms. Salomon.
Kneeling on the spotless kitchen floor, a twenty-something woman with jet black hair was powdering the lower cabinet drawers while a pimple-faced ginger peered at Petrosky and Morrison from behind owlish glasses. What was he, twelve?
“Thought there were rules against child labor,” Petrosky muttered to Morrison.
“There should be laws against working the elderly, but then you’d be out of a job.”
Petrosky snorted then asked the kitchen: “Anything yet?”
The black-haired girl turned. She looked ready to spit at him, so they’d probably worked together before, but he always remembered the idiots—she must be competent. Good. “Looks like normal patterns so far,” she said, “no signs of an intruder, but we’ll get everything down to forensics to make sure.” She drew a breath through flared nostrils and brushed at the next cabinet.
Petrosky turned to the entryway. Freckle-face had disappeared.
Morrison put a hand on Petrosky’s arm and the weight of that paw was so unexpected that Petrosky stared at it until Morrison let go. “Drink your coffee, then we’ll check the bedrooms for signs of disturbance. Single woman, that’s where I’d keep valuables. Jewelry anyway.”
“You ordering me around, Surfer Boy?”
“No, sir.” Morrison gave him a mock salute. “Just suggesting that the elderly need more breaks.”
There was a snort from the floor. Petrosky decided he didn’t like the black-haired spitfire after all. He watched Morrison go, sipped his coffee, wishing it wasn’t so fucking good, and eyeballed a door at the back of the kitchen. Probably the garage. But … the garage was detached. Had to be the basement. He tried the handle, but it held fast, and above the knob gleamed a newer model deadbolt—no way to jimmy that one with his Swiss army knife. He could break the door down, but—
“I haven’t found anything yet, sir.” The ginger had miraculously reappeared, freckles now redder than his hair. “But I’ll make sure everything gets to the lab.”
Evidently it was repeat-obvious-bullshit day. If only Petrosky had gotten the memo. “Got a key to this door?”
The tech’s face fell. He shook his head and Petrosky pushed past him. They’d worry about it later.
The living room was immaculate. Unblemished floors. Couch cushions in a floral velour fabric, no stains, no evidence of sagging, unlike his own lazy bastard of a sofa. The two potted plants near the bay window didn’t even have dirt on their leaves, not a smudge of grime beneath the pots. Nothing disturbed, no evidence of breaking and entering, no dust mites, even. Just their mess in the foyer: fingerprint dust, and the occasional leaf skittering around in the icy breeze from outside. Oh, and that hacked-up doorframe. If there was such thing as an afterlife, Ms. Salomon was looking down, royally pissed.
He headed upstairs. The guest bed was made so tight you could bounce one of the crime techs off it. Through a Jack and Jill door in the bleach-scented bathroom, Petrosky entered the master bedroom. The closet door was open, one neat row of clothes visible inside, but a wooden hanger sat lonely on a carpet where he could still see vacuum tracks. The bed was unmade, the comforter crumpled at the foot of the bed. Messy enough to be an anomaly.
“Looks like she heard something, grabbed her robe, and ran downstairs,” Morrison said from his spot by the window, scribbling on a sheet inside his manila file folder like the notes would matter later—and they probably would. That was why the kid was in charge of the paperwork.
“Think she caught our guy trying to break in?” Morrison asked.
Who brings a kid on a robbery mission? But then again … people did weird shit. And they had to rule out all possibilities or they weren’t doing their job. “She heard something unusual, that’s for sure. But that weapon … a gun’s far easier for robbery or even for a murder mission if he wanted her dead.” Petrosky scanned the bedroom, disheveled by this woman’s standards, exceptionally neat by his own. “I can’t imagine he planned to come here and hack her up on the lawn. If theft was the motive, maybe she spooked him, and he grabbed the weapon from his car.”
“Or she.”
“What?”
“A female killer with an axe would have gotten enough power behind her swing to do … that.” Morrison abandoned his notes and pulled one curtain panel back to gesture out the window. “Hopefully forensics will get something off the tire tracks.”
“Any signs of disturbance besides what Salomon did herself trying to get downstairs?”
“Not in here. But there were some other footprints out back and around the side of the house. And the basement window—glass was broken with a rock.”
“The door to the basement’s locked,” Petrosky said slowly. Too much of a coincidence that the one place someone smashed a window was the one place that was locked up. Either the killer was trying to get in or the kid was searching for a place to hide. “Maybe this psycho was looking for something—it could still be down there.” He crossed to the dresser. A silver-handled hairbrush sat on top—fancy, not that cheap plastic shit he always bought—along with a pincushion and a paperback novel.
“The killer wasn’t trying to get into the basement, Boss. The prints around the side of the house next to the window were the child’s.” Morrison went on to describe a larger set of running prints they’d found closer to the drive, a man’s boot, sized eleven or twelve. Same as the larger prints out front. Morrison’s expression was pained as he said, “I’m guessing the kid was running from the suspect and tried to crawl through the window to hide, but the opening was too small. The window breaking was probably what woke Ms. Salomon.”
So the kid had tried to get into the basement and failed. If she’d escaped into another house, someone would have alerted them by now. And if the killer had simply been ambushed by a child there’d be another body on the lawn. A killer caught hacking up a woman wouldn’t have hesitated to hack up a witness, child or not. So what were they dealing with?
A headache was taking root in Petrosky’s temples, and the muscles in his neck twitched as if little electric currents were trying to jolt their way down his spine. “We’ll check the basement anyway.” Petrosky rubbed at his neck, trying to loosen the cramp. “Want to make sure Ms. Salomon doesn’t have some huge coke stash down there.”
“She doesn’t seem like the type,” Morrison said. “Though I guess they rarely—”
“Sure they do. Almost always.”
“That’s just because you’re suspicious of absolutely everyone.”
“Like you should be.” Petrosky knelt to look under the bed but saw nothing, not even a single dust bunny like the ones that overran his place. “There’s got to be more here than we’re seeing.” This guy had swung his weapon hard enough to lodge it in the wall, at least six times—way more force than was necessary to incapacitate an old lady. He hadn’t just wanted to make sure she was dead. He’d wanted to tear her apart.
Raised voices from somewhere downstairs cut through Petrosky’s thoughts—a female, yelling. He and Morrison looked at one another and hit the stairs.
“No, this is my mother’s house,” a female voice was pleading. “I have to talk to someone in charge.”
Just what we fucking need. Petrosky’s legs were leaden—his shoes felt tight. He needed a freaking nap already and it wasn’t even lunchtime.
At the bottom of the stairs, Krowly stood with a pale, blond woman in heeled boots, pajama bottoms, and a poufy jacket that all but swallowed her thin frame.
“No family in my crime scene,” Petrosky barked.
“Please, I—”
“What’s your name?”
“Courtney. Courtney Konstantinov.”
He cut his eyes at Morrison and Cali whipped out his pad to make a note. “I’ll speak with you at the station,” Petrosky said.
Her face was streaked with tears. “I just want—”
“Since you’re here, we’ll need a key for the basement door.”
“I … don’t have one on me, but—”
Petrosky turned to Krowly. “Break it down.”
“No, please, I’ll get the key! It’s around here somewhere!”
“We don’t have time for a blind search.”
“I just lost my mother, dammit!” Her voice had become shrill. “She loved this house, just—”
“We don’t have time for a search,” Petrosky repeated more softly. “There might be something in the basement of relevance to this case. I’m trying to catch your mother’s killer, not play housekeeper.”
Morrison put a hand on his elbow. Petrosky shook him off, but moved aside so Morrison could have a word with Salomon’s daughter. The kid was better at that grief shit.
“Why is the door locked, ma’am?” Morrison’s voice was so slow and calm Petrosky could have believed he’d just smoked a fucking joint.
The woman’s shoulders relaxed and she took a deep breath. “I know it’s weird, locking the basement like that, but it made her feel safe.”
Safe. Maybe Ms. Salomon had a reason to be afraid … but a lock on the basement door wasn’t going to keep anyone from hurting her. Hadn’t kept her from bleeding out on the lawn. What was she hiding? Petrosky stepped forward. “Was someone after your mother? Did she keep something special down there?”
“Oh, no, nothing like that.” The woman shook her head. “Mom kept it locked because she has bats living down there; bats and mice and maybe rats too—she was always freaked about disease or whatever. She never could get rid of them no matter what she did, and she is such a clean freak … was such a clean freak …” Her eyes filled with tears. “Please don’t break it down. Please. I’ll get you the key.”
Petrosky stared past her into the kitchen where the basement door called to him like a siren, practically begging him to find a way inside. But the woman’s sniffling, the beginnings of grief or maybe denial … she was trying to hang onto something, anything she could control. Sometimes it was the little things that gave you comfort. Like a dead daughter’s rose-pink night-light above the kitchen sink. And unbroken doors.
“There’s no evidence that the killer even tried to get into the house,” Morrison whispered behind him. “Just the kid. And the opening in the window is definitely too small for the child who made those prints to have squeezed through. I’ll show you in a minute.”
Mellow Mushroom was right. With the scene out front—the deep prints in the mud, the blood spatter—they’d have evidence if the killer’d broken in to snatch something in the basement. But … they still had to look. Not like they could ignore potential clues.
“I can break it down.” The ginger was staring at him expectantly, and Petrosky’s blood pressure rose, pulse pounding in his temples. Who the fuck did this kid think he was?
“We can search the basement tomorrow,” Morrison said. The kid seemed keen to save Salomon’s door, perhaps as a consolation prize for her grieving daughter. “We’ll station someone outside in the meantime, in case the killer comes back.”
True, that would preserve the evidence until tomorrow. Everybody wins. Well, except the carved-up lady on her way to the morgue.
Morrison squeezed past Petrosky into the foyer to address Courtney something-or-another, asking her about any valuables. Nothing expensive but a hundred and fifty dollar pearl necklace that she kept in a safe deposit box at the bank. Petrosky kept his eyes on the basement door.
“What about personal files?” Morrison continued. “Insurance papers, tax forms, bank account information?” The kid knew what he was doing. They didn’t need tax forms; they needed access to the bank box in case there was any evidence that Salomon’d had an enemy—and with a crime this brutal, someone with a grudge was a definite possibility. A safe deposit box could hide a blackmail note. Unlikely … but missing the smallest detail could spell a cold case.
Petrosky left them in the foyer and headed for the kitchen. Mice. Rats. Bats. He put his ear against the basement door. Nothing.
From the foyer, Courtney said, “Not here. She kept everything at the bank. Her accountant takes care of her taxes, or has since Dad died.”
“What about passwords to her accounts?” Morrison said. Petrosky’s head throbbed with a dizzying ache, but the chill wood of the doorframe calmed the heat in his temple.
Courtney sniffed. “Never wrote them down.” Her voice shook. “She’d just tap her head and tell me her brain was a steel trap. I was worried she’d get old and senile, you know? And we wouldn’t be able to manage her money. Now old and senile sounds … wonderful.” Her voice cracked on the last word and something in Petrosky broke. Every morning, Julie’s princess night-light reminded him why he still worked the beat. Why he still bothered with anything. No child should die in a field alone, raped and burned and with her throat slit the way his baby girl had. And this woman’s mother shouldn’t have died on an icy lawn, a murderer standing over her, watching her bleed. A hook for fuck’s sake.
“What about a boyfriend?”
Courtney snorted. “Absolutely not. She said my dad was her one and only.”
Might be true. Might also just be what she’d told her daughter.
“Did your mother mention seeing or hearing anything strange in the neighborhood? Conflicts? Anyone who seemed sketchy?” Morrison asked.
“No, she really liked it here. I tried to get her to move over to Rochester Hills once I had the kids, but she wouldn’t leave. ‘Born and raised in Detroit,’ she’d say.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “I just can’t believe this.”
“She go to church?”
“Not since they got this new Pope. She says he’s making a mockery of Catholicism.” She blew her nose. “I really like him.” She pressed her lips together and their silence stretched, the only sounds the crime techs scratching at cabinet doors and rustling evidence bags and some imbecile out front humming “Welcome to the Jungle” like a fucking tool.
Petrosky headed back to the foyer and her tearful gaze met his—not only sad, but afraid, a nervous twitch at the corner of her eye. Because of him? Or did she know more than she was saying?
“Any idea where that basement key might be?” Petrosky asked. Unless forensics came across it, locating a key would take time—time their missing kid probably didn’t have.
She sniffed and looked back at Morrison, the safer one—or at least the more stable one. “I have copies of all her keys at my house. And I’ll call pest control and have them meet us here tomorrow, just in case Mom was … right.” Her voice cracked again and she covered her face with her hands.
Grieving. In shock. She’d surely seen the bloody lawn, even if they’d already taken the body away. Petrosky peered past her toward the front door, then dropped his eyes before she noticed.
The yard was where the action was—not the basement. “You can call pest control, but don’t let them down there until we’ve checked it out,” Petrosky said. “Why don’t you go home and let us finish up here. Bring the key in the morning and we’ll look downstairs.” He was a fucking sucker.
No, not a sucker. Their priority needed to be finding this little kid with the pink socks. Courtney was in the way, and Ms. Salomon was already beyond help—whatever was in the basement could wait. The child was the one in danger.
Morrison showed her to the door to make sure that she didn’t touch shit, jotting down a list of things she needed to bring tomorrow. When she was gone, Morrison turned to Petrosky. “We’ll have the car keys tomorrow too—no sign of disturbance out there anyway. For now, you want to check out the prints?”
Petrosky followed Morrison out the front door to the driveway and then up the drive to the side of the home. In the mud next to the house, one small set of stockinged prints led from the front lawn to the side basement window. They were covered with dust and what might have been that clay the techs used for casting indentations. The jagged remains of the window were gray too—the break itself no more than eight inches wide, marred with fingerprint powder and grime. Apparently Ms. Salomon’s cleanliness did not extend to the exterior windows of a rat-infested basement.
“They take the rock she used to break the window?”
“Bagged in evidence.”
Petrosky knelt beside the prints outside the window. Small. “Maybe six years old?” he said. “Seven? But they’re wider than I’d expect.”
“Might be the socks themselves, or the kid was wearing more than one pair,” Morrison said. “But with the treads—looks like these bulky slipper-sock things Shannon bought Evie and Henry.”
“Your son can’t even walk yet.”
“He’s learning, though.” Morrison beamed. “And Shannon wants to be ready. He misses you by the way. And Evie keeps asking about Papa Ed.”
Shannon must not have told her husband that she’d visited Petrosky two hours ago to tell him the same. “I’ll come by this week.”
“You said that last week.”
“I mean it this week.” He glanced into the backyard where the earth was hidden beneath a sea of cement pavers. No bare ground anywhere. “Looks like Salomon didn’t even want dirt outside,” Petrosky muttered.
“Nope. And they didn’t find much back there with the sleet last night. Hard to tell where the kid came from. But at least the prints in the grass are intact.”
Petrosky gestured to the divots in the earth, sporadic indentations beside the prints. “I was thinking he had a baseball bat or something to threaten the kid or even Salomon with, but the way these are smeared … looks like knees, maybe. Like the kid was running and fell.” But there were so many, as if the child had fallen over and over. Drugged? Or just scared, tripping, constantly checking behind her? He could almost see the girl, face still round with baby fat, panting and scrambling across the frozen ground, her screams lost on the howling wind. Her pursuer was brutal, and surely angry after chasing her. They needed to find the girl now or they’d be picking up her corpse.
Morrison nodded. “I thought knees too, but I was hoping”—he dropped his gaze—“for anything besides a kid sliding and collapsing while running from a killer in the middle of the night.”
“There’s no room for hope in this job, California,” Petrosky said. He could almost hear the little girl’s screams.
“I’ve got you to keep me grounded, Boss.”
“You won’t always.”
“You’ll be around for a good long time yet.”
“There you go again with the optimism. You need to think darker.”
“Maybe I’ll balance you out.”
“Don’t count on it, Kid.” Petrosky touched the basement window and leaned down to get a closer look. Too dark to see anything, but he could hear a subtle rustle like tiny claws, then a tinny squeak that stopped abruptly when he shifted at the opening. Maybe a feral cat, but probably not. A cat would have made more noise if it took off across the floor. Rats. Probably had fucking rabies. No wonder the old woman was paranoid.
“You hear that, Cali?”
“Hear what?”
“The rodents down there—scratching.” Petrosky scooted closer to the window, planting his knee against the brick. “Hello?” he called into the opening, half certain a bat would come flying out and slap him in the fucking face, all wings and claws and fangs. “Police … anyone in there?” Of course there was no response save the keening of the wind and the distant prattle of the officers out front. Stupid idea—the opening was far too small for a child to climb through. He pulled his head from the window. “Glad the pest guys are coming out tomorrow. I’m allergic to varmints. All varmints. Rats and bats and cats.”
“You’re not allergic to my cat.”
“I’m allergic to the idea of cats. Those antisocial assholes would eat your face off in ten minutes if you died of a heart attack in your living room.”
“So would you.”
“Yeah, but I smell better.”
“That’s debatable.”
Fucking surfers. Petrosky started for the driveway. “Let’s go talk to the neighbors and see what Krowly missed.”