Even though I’d grown up in St. Louis County, I knew little about Mehlville. The town didn’t make the news often except on severe weather reports, but there were grocery stores, drug stores, hotels, and restaurants just off the main highway. If I looked hard enough, I was sure I’d find bars and movie theaters somewhere, too. It looked like a nice place to live.
I drove through town before turning into a neighborhood of small, single-story homes about ten minutes after leaving the interstate. Laura owned a brick ranch-style house with a bright yellow front door. An unmarked police cruiser had parked out front, while a red Honda occupied the driveway. A plainclothes detective sat on a rocking chair on the porch.
The detective was about my age—a rarity among detectives—and his shaggy jet-black hair framed his angular, thin face well. He wasn’t a handsome man, but he held his head high and kept his shoulders back. A lot of women found confidence attractive, so I bet he did all right for himself in that department.
I parked on the street near the cruiser and held my hand out to him as I walked up.
“Joe Court,” I said. “St. Augustine County Sheriff’s Department.”
“Mathias Blatch. County police. Nice to meet you.”
I nodded my agreement and looked toward her house. “You knocked yet?”
“Yeah. Nobody’s home,” he said, reaching into the inside pocket of his navy jacket for a stack of papers. “Our prosecutor’s office got a search warrant while you were driving up here. We’re ready to go when you are.”
“You get keys too, by chance?”
“Nope,” he said, stepping to the porch and lifting his leg as if he planned to kick the door down. I whistled before he could move. He turned and looked at me with his eyebrows raised.
“You got a better idea?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said, reaching into my purse. “I’ll pick the lock. The victim’s got family, but even if she didn’t, I’m not into destroying property if I can help it.”
He lowered his leg.
“My partner never lets me kick the door down, either.”
I pulled out my lock pick kit and stepped past him to reach the door. The deadbolt took about two minutes. Blatch whistled as I stood straighter.
“Not bad, Detective Court,” he said. “Still, we would have saved time kicking it down. Would have looked cooler, too.”
I stood and slipped my lock pick set back in my purse before walking into the home’s small entryway. Linoleum tile with a textured grip covered the floor. An odor of stale cigarette smoke hung in the air. I looked over my shoulder to Blatch.
“How about you get the kitchen and public rooms, and I’ll get the bedrooms and bathrooms?” I said.
Blatch nodded. “Sounds good.”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a pair of blue polypropylene gloves before heading deeper into the house. The home was laid out like a double-wide trailer. Hallways branched left and right from a central family room. The kitchen was in back.
I started my search in the guest bedrooms, and for twenty minutes, I didn’t find a damn thing. Detective Blatch, however, found a small Ziploc bag of marijuana in a flour canister in the kitchen and some car keys on a hook beside the interior garage door. The drugs were a good find, but nobody had killed Laura for a quarter ounce of weed.
After striking out in the guest bedrooms, I turned my attention to Laura’s master suite. She had a king-sized bed, a chest of drawers, a dresser, and two nightstands in a matching dark stain. Dirty clothes filled a hamper in the corner, while dresses, blouses, slacks, and other less formal clothing filled the walk-in closet. Several dozen pairs of shoes lay scattered on the floor throughout the room. Before I touched anything, I snapped pictures to give us a record of how the room looked before we entered.
Then, I got to work.
She kept a pack of condoms in an end table beside her bed, but she didn’t keep men’s clothes or toiletries anywhere in the room. If she had a boyfriend, he didn’t live with her. Her other drawers held nothing but clean clothes.
Beneath her bed, she kept long shallow totes, two of which she had filled with sweaters. The third, though, held a digital scale that weighed to the hundredth of a gram. If I had found that in the kitchen, I would have assumed she used it for baking. Hidden in the bedroom, though, it gave me pause. A lot of drug dealers kept scales like that for weighing cocaine.
“Hey, Blatch,” I called. “I’ve got a digital scale that weighs to the hundredth of a gram.”
Detective Blatch banged pots and pans in the kitchen before coming into the bedroom to see what I had found.
“You find any drugs?” he asked.
“Not yet,” I said. “Other bedrooms are clean.”
He nodded and thought.
“I’ll call my narcotics squad and get a dog to go through the house,” he said. “We know she’s got weed. If she’s got something else, we’ll find it.”
“Sounds good,” I said, standing. Blatch left a moment later, and I walked into the closet. Laura had stacked shoe boxes along the walls and hung her clothes from racks around the room. The first couple of shoe boxes held strappy black and white shoes that would have looked nice with cocktail dresses. Laura had good taste, but that didn’t help my case.
In the fifth box, I found dozens of two-inch-by-three-inch mylar storage bags—the kind high-end drug dealers used to package weed. I took out my phone and snapped pictures before setting that box aside. In the next box, I found seven well-used cell phones. I tried to power one on, but the battery was dead.
I put that shoe box beside the one containing the mylar bags and opened the last four shoe boxes. One box held sealed mylar bags full of marijuana, while the other three held aluminum cylinders that looked like high-tech coffee thermoses. I unscrewed the top of one and heard the airtight seal break. Inside, I found a lot of weed. If the other containers held a similar amount, she was sitting on a couple thousand dollars’ worth of marijuana.
“Detective Blatch. I need you in here.”
He didn’t answer, so I called again. He didn’t answer me then, either, so I left the room and found him outside, searching Laura’s Honda in the driveway.
“You find anything out here?” I asked, squinting in the sunlight.
“She left a briefcase with some documents in it on the front seat,” he said. “Other than that, the car looks clean.”
“Grab her briefcase. I’ve got stuff you need to see.”
Blatch reached into the vehicle for a soft black leather briefcase with silver buckles. It looked like a nice bag. I led him to her master closet, where he saw the stash of drugs and opened his eyes wide.
“Good find.”
“Yeah,” I said. “She’s got cell phones, mylar storage bags, airtight canisters full of marijuana, and about a dozen individual packets of marijuana in vacuum-sealed mylar bags.”
He whistled again and put down her briefcase before snapping pictures with his cell phone. Then he looked at me.
“I’ll call my narcotics squad and my crime lab. We’ll get a proper search team down here to see what else we can find.”
“Good idea,” I said, nodding. “You mind if I look at her briefcase?”
“Go ahead,” he said. “I’ll call this in.”
Blatch dialed, so I carried Laura’s briefcase to the small breakfast table in her kitchen. Flour had spilled onto Laura’s cheery yellow laminate countertops. Detective Blatch had left Laura’s Ziploc bag of marijuana out in the open. Before opening the briefcase, I stared at the drugs, thinking and trying to put the scene together. It didn’t add up.
The airtight, opaque containers in her closet would have protected her drugs from both mold and sunlight, guaranteeing that her weed would keep its potency for years to come. The Ziploc bag in her kitchen wouldn’t even keep out flour. Already, light, fuzzy mold had grown on the drugs. If she had smoked that, she would have gotten sick. If Laura were a drug dealer—or even a frequent user—she would have stored her personal stash in a container that would keep it fresh.
Not only that, I’d found vacuum-sealed bags of dope but no vacuum sealer. The drugs brought more mystery than insight. Something wasn’t right here.
I turned away from the drugs and focused on her briefcase. Blatch had opened the latches already, so I flipped the top over to give me access to the interior compartments. In one compartment, she stored a very thin laptop complete with a power cord. If we were in St. Augustine, I’d search the laptop myself, but Detective Blatch came from a department with at least two or three thousand officers and hundreds of support staff members. They’d have their own technical people with skill sets far beyond my own. They’d search the computer. In the other compartment, she kept manila file folders. Those, I could handle.
I pulled everything out and snapped pictures with my cell phone. The first folder held receipts and invoices from office supply stores, the phone company, and an accountant’s office. Nothing helpful.
The second folder held two yellow legal notepads, both of which were full of handwritten notes. Laura was an attorney, so her conversations with clients were privileged. I wanted to flip those notes and see what she had written, but I couldn’t.
I stacked them on top of each other and snapped pictures. The front page of the notepad showed nothing important, just a list of names. Aldon McKenzie, Austin Wright, Mike Brees, and Ruby Laskey. I didn’t recognize them, so my photograph alone shouldn’t have violated any privilege.
The other folders held personal documents, including flyers from a realtor’s office in St. Augustine. If the flyers she printed off were any sign, she was looking for a three- to four-hundred-thousand dollar detached house with several acres. It was a healthy budget for our area. It was also surprising. If Laura owned a thriving practice in Mehlville and St. Louis, why would she move to St. Augustine? We weren’t the middle of nowhere, but we weren’t Rome, either.
I left the briefcase and its contents on the kitchen table before returning to Laura’s master bedroom, where I found Detective Blatch talking on his cell. He nodded at me and then took his phone away from his ear.
“I’ll knock on some doors and see what the neighbors say about her,” I whispered.
“Sounds good,” he said before putting his phone back to his ear. He continued coordinating the rest of the search while I took my badge from my belt and hung it from a lanyard around my neck.
I spent the next two hours walking up and down the street and visiting Laura’s neighbors. People weren’t excited to have me interrupt their dinners, but most of the neighbors were cooperative. Most of them liked Laura. Her friends came over occasionally, but she didn’t throw parties except on Halloween—and then, she invited everyone on the street. Few late-night visitors came by the house, and no one knew whether she dated. None of the neighbors knew she was considering moving to St. Augustine, either.
Importantly, no one mentioned anything about drugs. If she dealt drugs—and it looked like she did—she kept it quiet and didn’t sell out of her house.
The evidence told me she was a drug-dealing lawyer. Her neighbors told me she was a personable but quiet young woman with few friends. The two sketches weren’t incompatible, but neither gave me the complete picture of this young woman’s life. We were missing something. There was a bigger story here, and I needed to find out what it was before her murderer dropped another body.