The deputy watched from her cruiser as a compact, blond EMT with a teased hairdo straight out of 1987 tended to Mrs. Wilkins, who was seated on an Adirondack chair so weathered the deputy winced at the thought of sitting on it and getting splinters in her ass. Mrs. Wilkins’s friends, Mrs. Hamner and Mrs. Backlin, had accepted the scene at their home with greater equanimity, and now that it seemed clear that Mrs. Wilkins was not in fact having a heart attack they were ready to make their statements.
Mrs. Hamner, the more dour of the two, went first, seated in the back of the cruiser. “Magda house-sat for us twice, when we still had cats and a dog, a big Newfoundland mix named Baxter we couldn’t leave at the kennel because he’d refuse to eat. I don’t know if that’s a Newfie thing, he was a great dog otherwise.”
“Where’s the dog right now?”
Mrs. Hamner looked startled. “What’s that got to do with it?”
“I assumed the dog had some relevance.”
“He’s dead. This was several years ago. The cats, too, we stopped replacing them when they died so we didn’t need a house sitter anymore. I guess Magda must have kept the keys.”
“We haven’t established that the dead woman is Magda Schuller.”
Mrs. Hamner leaned back and stared at her in the rearview, and the deputy guessed she was a retired schoolteacher. Maybe a principal. “If not Magda, who is she, then?”
“We haven’t established the dead woman’s identity yet.” She snapped it, mostly in frustration with herself; this was no way to take a statement. “How long has the house stood empty?”
“We’ve been gone since last fall. I suppose Magda and her scummy boyfriend might have been coming in on a regular basis, which really would have been fine—her mother’s a dear friend of ours. I’m told Magda was living in a horrid little apartment in Moorpark, probably just wanted a nice place to relax in occasionally.”
“And you got back tonight?”
“Around six. Freyda picked us up at LAX at four and took the slow route up. Did you hear about the wreck at Trancas this afternoon? Freyda didn’t, and it cost us at least an hour.”
“Ma’am, if you could stick to the subject at hand, we’ll be done a lot quicker.”
“I’m just trying to give you some context.”
“When’s the last time you spoke to Ms. Schuller?”
“I suppose it’s been a couple of years. She didn’t spend much time in Ojai anymore, not since she took up with that junkie scum.”
“Wait, he was a junkie?”
“Oh, he was always knocked up with that methamphetamine, according to Cheyenne.”
“That’s a tweaker, Mrs. Hamner, not a junkie.”
“I’m seventy-one years old, forgive me not being fully up-to-date on my narcotics slang. Anyway after she got together with Mr. Wonderful, she and Cheyenne had a few fairly bitter rows about her prospects for the future.”
“Cheyenne is her mother?”
“Haven’t you met her? I thought this was a big missing persons case.”
“I don’t work missing persons cases. The officer on that case is contacting Mrs. Schuller right now.”
“It’s not Schuller, that was her ex-husband’s name. It’s Cheyenne Burning Tree.”
“And Ms. Burning Tree is Native American?”
Mrs. Hamner hesitated. “Let’s say she self-identifies as such.”
“Do you and Mrs. Backlin have a place to stay tonight?”
“I hadn’t thought about it. I don’t suppose we can stay here, can we?”
“Not while it’s an active crime scene. After that you can do as you please, but in my experience, you’re going to want to hire a crime scene cleanup outfit. That place is going to have a powerful odor sticking to it for a long time if you don’t, and even if you do, you’ll find yourself catching the odd whiff of it when you least expect it for months. I can give you a phone number if you like.”
Mrs. Hamner got out of the cruiser to fetch Mrs. Backlin, standing next to Mrs. Wilkins in the Adirondack chair. The deputy was certain she’d get nothing useful from any of the three, but she’d rather be taking their statements than processing evidence in the house. Of all the crime scenes she’d ever worked, this was the foulest-smelling by far, three corpses roughly two and a half weeks dead, going by the date the Schuller woman went missing. Of course the dead woman was Magda Schuller, and one of the dead males was almost certainly Billy Knox, to whom the piece-of-shit pickup parked by the door was registered. One of the two men had been dead a considerably shorter amount of time than the other corpses, and his wound appeared to be self-inflicted. A trio of low-lifes, one of whom had ties to elderly bourgeois Ojai hippiedom and thus would rate a column inch or two in the Ventura County edition of the L.A. Times, snuffed out in some kind of shady crank deal gone south in a squat: not exactly the kind of case to waste a lot of man-hours on. The lab tech on the scene pointed out that the first two bodies had deteriorated in a manner consistent with very high temperatures like those experienced, unseasonably, in mid-May. Deceased White Male Number Two showed considerably less of what the ME would expect from such exposure, and when the women entered the house, the air conditioner was cranked up full blast. The way she saw it, DWM Number Two killed Knox and Schuller over some crank or some money and then came back to the house, got high and started feeling guilty and blew his brains out, but before he did it he cooled the house down. Why? Out of consideration for the owners? Or perhaps out of disgust at the condition of his victims, and possessed of a fear of his own decay. The deputy had been a psychology major before switching to administration of justice, and she maintained a strong interest in the field; what a fascinating case study this would have been, had the victims and the perpetrator been worthy of the law’s full scrutiny.
Unless DWM Number Two turned out to be Knox. In that case, Knox must have found Magda and Deceased White Male Number One together and shot them out of jealousy—the Schuller woman’s state of undress supported this scenario—then returned and in a druggy state of remorse shot himself. It was ugly but easy, and once these nice ladies got their house all cleaned up and smelling normal again no one would give a shit whether any of these jokers had ever existed or not.