The front door key wouldn’t work. Frankie pulled the door tight and tried again. She pushed hard, jiggled it. The two officers standing next to their vehicle on the street were watching her with their arms crossed. A third cop with hands like mitts and a slab of flesh for a nose stood on the porch directly behind her. The three officers had secured the outside of the victim’s Cape-style house. Now it was time for her to do her job. But she couldn’t get the damned door open. The victim must have changed the lock and not given her mother the new key, possibly on purpose.
The cop behind her belched, emitting an odor like tuna fish.
“Need a hand with that lock, Detective?” he said, crowding in. He had pockets of fat beneath his eyes and an inner tube of flab circling his waist.
“No thanks. Would you step back please?”
Some of the uniformed officers believed she’d been promoted to homicide because of the attention she received after the Sid Garrett case. To hell with them. Six years of patrolling the streets of Key West and Memphis and she’d dealt with drunks, petty criminals, crazy people, and plenty of regular Joe tourists she had arrested for aggravated ignorance. She’d earned the promotion to homicide with her top fitness report and nearly perfect test scores. That, plus Billy’s recommendation, had landed her a spot on the squad.
So, she wasn’t about to let this damned house key throw her.
She took out a bump key, a blank with the pins filed down to the lowest point. Positioning the key in the lock, she simultaneously turned and whacked it with the back of the hard plastic brush she carried for these occasions. The door opened. She stepped in and entered the alarm code.
The officer with tuna breath was now standing in the driveway, munching a Snickers Bar. She decided to nickname him Snackbar. It lightened her mood.
“We’re in,” she called, and stepped inside.
The house smelled of green apples and cedar. Nothing appeared out of order in the living room, a space lit by sunlight filtering through French doors. She could see that the front hall led to a large tidy kitchen. A study opened on the right of the entry with a desk, a laptop, and a wall of built-in bookcases. Several shipping boxes had been stacked on a card table and on the floor by a corner window. She saw no evidence of a struggle or that the place had been tossed.
Snackbar followed her in crinkling the candy wrapper as he shoved it in his pocket. At least he hadn’t dropped it on the driveway.
“Check the laundry room, back entry, and garage,” she said. “I’ll take the rest of the house.”
He grunted and lumbered down the hall.
“Don’t touch anything,” she called after him.
She drew her SIG for the walk-through of the two guest bedrooms, two bathrooms, and into the master at the back of the house. She checked bathtubs, showers, closets, and under the beds as she went. The entire place was show-house neat, not a book out of place or a piece of clothing on the floor.
Snackbar was waiting for her in the entry. “All clear. It’s a damned clean house except for the litter box in the laundry room.”
“Did you see the cat?”
“Nope. Must be hiding.”
“Please wait on the porch. And let me know when the investigators show up to knock on doors. Detective Able will bring a photo of the victim.”
She pulled out her mobile and used the video recorder to pan across the study, stopping at the desk for a quick look through a stack of folders. Inside were household receipts and paperwork from the wedding. These would go with her to the Criminal Justice Complex. Because the victim was an attorney, the laptop would have special encryption that would take the computer techs a couple of days to hack.
A coat tossed on the desk chair caught her eye. So far it was the only thing she’d seen out of place in the house.
She went to the bookcase and videoed family photos, most of them snapshots of the victim as a child. One was of five kids in their Sunday clothes grouped on the lawn in front of a grand house and holding Easter baskets. She recognized a young Martin Lee by his dark hair and glasses. There was little Caroline in her pink smocked dress, holding her basket in front of her with both hands. A taller sturdy kid grinned at the camera, his arm draped over the shoulders of a young boy who was squinting against the sun. Standing a little away from the group was an awkward-looking girl with frizzy hair and gawky legs.
Frankie moved on to a recent shot of the victim wearing a black bikini and sitting by a pool in the shade of a striped umbrella with a frosted drink on the table beside her and a cigarette in her hand. She held herself with the cool confidence of a Ralph Lauren model, blond hair swept back from her face. Her eyes appeared to be following someone outside the shot with a hint of smolder in her gaze. Frankie glanced around, not seeing a single photo of the victim with her Indian fiancé. Had she been angry about the breakup and ripped up his pictures out of spite?
Moving to the shipping boxes on the card table, she poked around in the bubble pack, uncovering sterling serving pieces and crystal stemware. A folder labeled Wedding Gifts Returned contained a list of two hundred names and addresses, most of them lined out in red. The boxes on the table must be the gifts left to return.
Down the hall, the kitchen was like those HGTV makeover shows—granite countertops, a farm sink, a Sub-Zero fridge, custom cabinetry, a six-burner gas stove, and two ovens stacked in the wall so the cook didn’t have to throw out her back lifting a twenty-five-pound turkey. No smudges on the stainless steel appliances, no crumbs on the counter.
Frankie’s duplex had a forty-year-old kitchen with ripped linoleum and an electric stove with only two working burners. She had to prop the oven door closed with the back of a chair. She loved to cook, so yeah, she envied the victim her kitchen. But she didn’t envy the part about being dead.
She opened the fridge expecting to see skinny people food. Instead, she found four bottles of Cordon Rouge Brut and six bottles of Piper-Heidsieck Champagne lying on the bottom shelf. The only food was four containers of zero fat Greek yogurt, an apple, and a solitary head of iceberg lettuce in the vegetable bin.
“For God’s sakes,” she mumbled, and removed the lettuce, snapping off the plastic bottom to pull out a wad of hundreds. Every burglar who can bump a lock or pop out a pane of glass knows about these fake lettuce safes. Better to leave five twenties in plain sight for a snatch-and-run rather than have scumbags tear up your house looking for cash. In the freezer, another favorite hiding place, she found eight containers of gelato, all nearly empty. The victim was either eating every meal out or binging on gelato and champagne. One cabinet contained forty-eight cans of cat food. At least the cat was well fed.
She’d been through the entire house and was videoing the living room when Billy came in.
“How’s it going?” he asked.
“She kept this place like a showroom. How did you do with the ladies?”
“Lots of tears. Nothing of consequence except Caroline’s assistant said that Caroline and her cousin Zelda had an argument behind closed doors on Monday. The assistant assumed it was a family matter. The cousin is the artsy type. Drama is a staple in her repertoire. Definitely something to follow up.”
They went outside to meet with the ten uniformed and plainclothes investigators who would conduct the neighborhood canvass. Frankie distributed Caroline’s photo and briefed them on the kind of information they were after. Had anyone seen the victim on Monday evening? Was someone with her? Had they noticed a strange car in her driveway or parked on the street? Any unusual sounds or an argument? Had the victim expressed concern for her safety?
Those were the direct questions. Then there were the rumors and innuendos a good investigator can cajole out of the neighbors. That sort of information won’t hold up in court, but it can point in the right direction.
The photo Billy brought for the canvass showed a very different person from the confident woman Frankie had seen posing under the beach umbrella. This Caroline was frail-looking with hollows around her collarbones and a forced smile. Frankie wondered if her weight loss had been due to wedding jitters or the stress of having her mother ride her about marrying an Indian national.
She held up the photo for Billy. “I’ll bet she starved herself for the wedding. She called it off and regained the weight by eating gelato and drinking champagne. Probably the reason she couldn’t zip the dress.”
“Good eye. What else?”
“Follow me.”