SHE PUT IN a call to Amanda Pinkham as soon as she dropped Calvin off at school Monday morning.
“Hi, Julia. You’d better be calling about Mary Brannigan.”
“Who?”
“She went by Miss Mae.”
“Um, yes. Of course I am.” A call she should have made a day earlier. It would take her a week of scrambling to make up the time she’d lost during the move into her new home.
“I can help you cut to the chase. Same manner of death as William Williams. Deep, crushing blows to the head. Something like a tire iron again. Maybe a pipe or piece of rebar. It’s what killed her, but if it hadn’t, the exposure would have. Whoever did it stripped her bare. Which nobody did to Mr. Williams.”
“So I heard.” Julia braced herself, and practically collapsed across her desk in relief at Pinkham’s next words.
“No sign of sexual assault. No semen in or on her body, or—as best as anyone could tell—at the scene. Of course, that doesn’t mean anything. Your serial offenders these days, a lot of them use condoms. But there were no other injuries that would indicate it.”
“Oh, thank God.” At least they couldn’t pin that on Ray.
“Weird, though. What kind of pervert gets off on taking the time in the freezing cold to strip someone? You’d think this weather would kill anyone’s libido.”
“You said it yourself. A deviant. But while I’ve got you on the phone, I just wanted to check something you said about Leslie Harper.”
“You too?” Sudden frost rimed Pinkham’s words. Julia rubbed at her ear as though the chill had made its way through her phone. Pinkham knew full well Julia had no official reason for asking and had often complained about questions both gossipy and ghoulish that wasted her time.
“She was dead for at least a couple of days before they found her. But I thought alcohol went out of a person’s system within hours.”
A bit of information picked up quickly by anyone working in the criminal justice system. Usually cops arrested a drunk driver on the spot, but occasionally one sideswiped a block’s worth of parked cars or, far worse, hit a child and then drove away in a panic, managing to avoid arrest until a day or two or even more later, by which time the alcohol would have been absorbed by his body, undetectable by standard tests and thus removing a drunken driving charge from a prosecutor’s arsenal. Which was good for Julia but bad for the world at large.
Julia couldn’t figure out how to ask her question without it sounding like a challenge. On the other hand, Pinkham was no fan of obfuscation. “So how did you know she was drunk?”
But Pinkham seemed unperturbed. “Hair sample. It stays in the hair for up to three months. We take them in homicide cases. We don’t know she was drunk, though.”
Even through the phone, Julia could sense Pinkham’s waspish enjoyment of her befuddlement. “Okay, I give up.”
“She’d been drinking. Last I checked, though, drinkers got killed too. Case—cases—in point: William Williams and Mary Brannigan.”
Julia detected the slightest of thaws. They were back in Pinkham’s bailiwick now, talking numbers on a scale. She pressed her advantage.
“How much had she had?”
“No clue.”
So much for an advantage.
“What do you mean?”
“Hair just shows that somebody’s been drinking, not how much.”
Julia thought back to that anguished, late-night phone call from Harper’s sister, the one that had ruined her first bath in her new tub. “I heard she’d been sober for years.”
“A lot of people have heard a lot of things about Leslie Harper. And they all want me to confirm them. For what reason is anyone’s guess.”
“Like whom?”
“That reporter.”
Duh. Of course Chance was asking. It was his job. “C’mon. Tell me something I don’t already know. Who else besides Chance?”
“And some cops.”
“What cops?”
“That new deputy, for one. The woman.”
Julia was glad they were talking by phone so that Pinkham couldn’t see her silent ohhh of surprise. She swerved away from dangerous territory. “You asked me if Harper had ever been into the hard stuff. Why?”
“Just wondered. I got the tox screens back, though. Nothing.”
Caroline Harper’s face swam before Julia. Those haunted eyes, fury at war with grief and puzzlement over her sister’s death.
“How strong are the chances that this was anything other than an accident?”
A faint tapping came through the phone. Julia smiled. She’d seen Pinkham a few times on the witness stand, giving expert testimony as to cause of death, and knew her habit of tapping the stand with one of those long, shiny black fingernails as she collected her thoughts.
“There was blood on the kitchen counter. I collected that sample myself. The blood was hers,” Pinkham said finally. “There wasn’t anyone else’s blood in the house, and the crime lab folks didn’t find any fingerprints. But Harper was a busy woman, always holding meetings in her house.”
A few more taps.
“Which doesn’t necessarily mean anything. She obviously didn’t invite anybody into her house after she died. And maybe she went on some sort of cleaning frenzy before she died. Or—” She waited for Julia to figure it out on her own.
“Or somebody wiped it down. Jesus, Amanda. That’s TV crime-of-the-week-special stuff right there.” She hoped her light tone belied the chill zinging through her at the thought of someone methodically walking through Harper’s home, erasing invisible marks from doorknobs, drawer pulls, faucets, and even toilet handles.
“Not to be cynical, but if you ask me, they’re having a hard time tracking down whoever might have done this, and they just want a tough case to go away. It’d be a shame if they’re wrong and they don’t find the person who did it.”
Julia followed the thought to its logical conclusion. “Because then a killer will have gotten away with it.”
“That too.”
“What else?”
“Because then I won’t be able to take the stand and prove exactly how right I was to be skeptical.”
Her next call was to the clerk at the sheriff’s office, where she put in a request for the original report on the unattended death of one Leslie Harper.
“You too?” the clerk said. “Poor woman. Whatever happened to letting the dead rest in peace?”
“Who else?” Julia started to ask.
But the clerk’s other line rang. “I’ll email it over.”
The report, when it blinked its arrival in her in-box, was several degrees short of helpful. It was, however, written by Deputy Sheriff Wayne Peterson, a stroke of luck as far as Julia was concerned, though it was strange that a sheriff had handled the case rather than the town police. The two agencies cooperated closely, though. If the cops had been busy that day, they might have kicked the call over to the sheriff’s office. Julia printed the report out and reread it.
Leslie Harper had lived alone and had never married or had children. Her absence went unnoticed all through Monday and well into Tuesday, at which point she failed to show up for one of the legislature’s interim committee hearings. Subject was noted for her punctuality, the report read.
Her absence occasioned a desultory round of telephone calls. Several more hours went by before a legislative aide was dispatched to knock on her door, but he heard only the faint yips and whines of a puppy. The police were then contacted to do a welfare check.
Entry obtained by forcing door. Subject found prone on kitchen floor fully clothed, but for shoes.
Nothing unusual about that. People in Duck Creek routinely took off their shoes as soon as they came indoors, especially in winter, so as not to track snow inside.
Subject appeared to have been deceased for some time—accompanied by the queasy-making indications of same.
Gash on back of head, attributed to possibly striking on kitchen counter during fall. Blood found on counter edge. No signs of a struggle. Open bottle of wine, partially consumed, noted on counter, as well as prescription sleeping medication in medicine cabinet, nearly gone. No note was observed.
Wayne hadn’t come right out and called it an accidental overdose—he wasn’t qualified to make that determination—but his unofficial conclusion was clear.
Julia read the report a third time, then reached for her phone and scrolled back through her calls until she came to Caroline Harper’s number. She braced herself and tapped it.
“Caroline? It’s Julia Geary, your new tenant. I’m terribly sorry to bother you.”
“Oh God. Is something already wrong with the house? I meant to line up a property manager in town—I’m not cut out to do it myself—but I haven’t gotten around to it yet. There’s just so much to deal with.”
Caroline’s words came in a ragged rush. Julia wondered if she’d had a single full night’s sleep since her sister’s death. On the other hand, Wayne’s terse report had referenced sleeping pills. Maybe insomnia ran in the family.
“Caroline, the house is fine. It’s wonderful. My son is thrilled.”
“And Jake? Is he all right?”
In their short time in the house, the puppy had chewed through one of Calvin’s brand-new sneakers, had half eaten a bra that fell from the armful of clothing Julia had dumped down the laundry chute, and had somehow hoisted himself onto a kitchen chair and then the table, after which all that remained of the contents of the butter dish was a glistening slick around his furry muzzle.
“He’s fine. He’s … adorable.” Which wasn’t what Julia had called him after the butter dish incident. “Caroline, I don’t want to cause you any more pain, but who, uh, cleaned out the house after your sister’s death?”
A short, sharp exhale. “I did.”
Her sister had lain dead for days. At least it was winter. Julia hoped Leslie Harper was one of those people who went around bragging about their low thermostat settings.
“I’m so sorry.”
“I had help. There’s a company that specializes in such things. Can you imagine? But thank God for them.”
“Oh.” Julia’s heart sank. “Did they move the furniture and all the household goods too?”
“That was another company. But I had to sort through things first. Why?”
“This is going to sound crazy. But was there any wine or liquor or even beer anywhere in the house? Or in the trash or recycling?”
Julia knew the police would have taken the bottle on the counter as evidence, just in case. But others might provide a different sort of evidence.
“I already told you. She’d been sober for years.”
Julia apparently didn’t chime in fast enough this time. Caroline ended the silence first.
“You think she fell off the wagon. And police said there was an open bottle of wine. But my guess would be she’d had company and was being polite by offering someone a glass. She was so many years into her recovery she was comfortable doing that. I know my sister. I talked to her the Friday before that weekend, and she was sober as a judge. She was planning to come visit me once the legislative session was over. She had some big bill she was sponsoring and something else, some sort of panel she was leading. So she didn’t commit suicide either.”
By now, Julia knew her role. Agree fast and, with luck, Caroline would keep talking. “It doesn’t sound like it. Especially since there wasn’t a note.”
It was Caroline’s turn to agree. “There wasn’t. Believe me, I looked. Probably in more places than the police did.”
Julia cleared her throat. “The report said something about sleeping medication.”
Caroline gave an unambiguous snort. “Ambien. She kept it for when she had to fly, mostly when she visited me. My guess is, the prescription label on that bottle was years old. She was scared to death of flying, and her way of coping was just to conk out during a flight. I take it too, for insomnia. She knew that and she was forever warning me to be careful with it.”
In the course of her job, Julia came into contact with her share of addicts and knew well their tendency to deflect; to accuse others of worse behavior than their own. She was a long way from being convinced of Caroline’s theory.
“Wait a minute.” Caroline ended another lengthening silence. “Why are you asking? Aren’t you a public defender? That means you protect the bad guys, right? Are you involved in my sister’s case? Do they have a suspect? Have they arrested someone?”
The rising hope in her voice knifed through Julia. She felt like a murderer herself when she stumbled through an apology, telling Caroline that no, she was just curious.
But when she hung up, even though she spent long moments lecturing herself about the foolishness of Caroline’s protestations—that the half-bottle of wine seemed at odds with Leslie Harper’s long-standing sobriety; that she rarely resorted to Ambien; that the lack of a note was proof positive the woman hadn’t killed herself—Julia had to admit those same things stuck her, too, as odd.
At which point, she gave herself a final lecture. Whatever had happened to Leslie Harper was none of her business. At least it wasn’t until Marie returned from wherever she’d been, cheeks reddened with cold or excitement or both, practically bursting in her phlegmatic way.
“How’s your day going, Julia?”
“Fine.” Julia knew she was supposed to ask in return but didn’t feel like opening herself to another conversation that would give Marie a chance to flaunt her supposed superiority. She pulled Ray’s file toward her and flipped through it, scanning the court dates she already knew by heart and making a pretense of checking whether she’d entered them into her phone.
Marie logged on to her computer, sneaking frequent glances at Julia.
“For God’s sake,” Julia said finally. “Whatever it is, out with it.”
“I just had coffee with a law enforcement source.” Her eyes glittered.
Apparently she’d forgotten that Julia had suggested she talk with Wayne. Julia wondered if she herself should have a different sort of talk with Wayne. Attention from a starstruck young woman was probably flattering, but the last thing any of them needed was an interoffice entanglement. Those occurred with depressing regularity in the hothouse atmosphere of the courthouse—see Adonis—but they rarely ended well, resulting in whole divisions barely speaking to one another for weeks on end as people chose sides.
Julia formed cautionary phrases in her head, but just as she was ready to start lobbing them, Marie spoke again.
“Looks like they’re thinking about starting some sort of internal investigation.”
Another pause.
“Okay, Marie. I’ll bite.”
“He talked in circles”—for sure, that sounded like Wayne—“but as best I can tell, it’s about that woman deputy. I got the feeling he thinks she’s sitting on some evidence in Ray’s case.”
Marie had Julia’s full attention now. “Such as?”
“Maybe it’s something that can help us, although I got the sense from him that it might firm up the case against Ray. Either way, it’s best we know what it is, right? Hey, where are you going?”
Julia had her coat half on and one foot out the door.
“To find Cheryl Hayes and talk to her.”
The minute a formal investigation was launched, Hayes wouldn’t be able to talk to anyone about it. Julia aimed to get to her first.