GRIMES. HE HADN’T returned my calls after I received his message about the payphone Friday night. I’d pushed it to the back of my priorities when I plotted Tom Weaver’s murder. I called his number as I headed over to the address Leah had given me for him. No answer. The call went straight to voicemail but the mailbox was full. Shit. It sounded like Grimes hadn’t returned anyone’s calls since he left me that voicemail.
PIs working a case don’t ignore calls from the person that hired them. Jim Grimes was laid up somewhere. In a hospital or in his car in a ditch. Or he was dead. The odds, unfortunately, favored the latter.
I thought of Midnight waiting for me at home and called Moira before I got to Grimes’ house.
“Jesus Christ, Cahill, you were going to call me last night.” Her hole punch voice frenzied.
“Only if something went wrong. Everything’s okay.” Not if Grimes was dead. A bridge yet to cross.
“Everything’s okay doesn’t tell me what I need to know, Rick.”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t play stupid. I know you and what you’re capable of. When you tell me to prepare to meet you in the middle of the night with Midnight, I know what you were planning to do.” A deep, brittle breath. “Did you do it?”
“No. And I’m not going to.” As far as I knew. “But I’m not exactly sure when I’ll be home.” I thought of Grimes and the unreturned calls. “It could be later today or a couple days. My neighbor is going out of town. Could you go by and pick up Midnight? His food is in the pantry.”
“Midnight is fine. I’m already at your house. I couldn’t just wait around for you to call. Where are you?”
I didn’t have many friends, but I had one no one could replace.
“Santa Barbara.”
“What the hell are you doing up there?” She knew my past.
“I’m not sure anymore.” I ended the call.
Grimes’ house was on West Micheltorena Street, just a few blocks from the apartment Colleen and I lived in for our too-short time together. The house was a small cottage with light blue shiplap on a block with a view of the Santa Ynez Mountains through old-growth trees.
No car in the driveway. I parked in front of the house and peeked inside the garage. The rear wheel and side of a dark sedan were visible. Grimes drove a dark blue Chrysler 300. Shit. If his car was home that meant he should be too.
Home. Not answering his phone. Dead.
I walked over to the front door and knocked. And held my breath. No noise inside. Another knock followed by the doorbell. Nothing. I didn’t expect Grimes to answer, but prayed he would. I tried the doorknob. Locked. I walked over to a wooden side gate and went into the backyard, then into the garage. The car inside it was a blue Chrysler 300. Grimes’ car.
I looked inside. Thankfully, he wasn’t in there. I tried the door leading into the house. Locked. I went out into the backyard. The lot dropped away in the back and the house had a wooden deck. I went up the stairs and tried the sliding glass door. Locked. The drapes were drawn over the back windows. Next, the kitchen door. Locked.
I went back out into the front and scanned the street. Clear. No one that I could see staring out windows either. I opened the trunk of the rented Corolla, opened the duffle bag, and slipped on a pair of nitrile gloves and grabbed my lock pick set. It was right next to the modified murder weapon I almost killed Tom Weaver with. I went back through the gate and into the garage. The door into the house was easy. I wiped it down with my shirt to erase my prints from my earlier attempt to enter the house and unlocked the door in forty-five seconds.
I’d gotten good with the pick set. I used it whenever there was a locked door between me and finding the truth. I used it following hunches without consideration of the law. My father’s credo. Sometimes you have to do what’s right even when the law says it’s wrong. I’d become the sole determiner of what was right and wrong. Even when my gut, my hunches, my certainties were wrong.
Today I hoped they were. The second I opened the door into the house, I knew they were right. The hint of death floated in the air. Cloying and putrid. Early in its hunger for decomposition, but unmistakable. Grimes or somebody else was dead inside his house. I shut the door and stared at it. I had to call the police. A call to dispatch about the smell of death from someone who’d smelled it before would be enough to get a squad car to Grimes’ house. I didn’t have to go inside and contaminate a crime scene to confirm.
Except I did. Grimes and I weren’t friends, and we were barely partners, but we’d both worked to try to bring justice to Krista. Him within the law, me whatever it took. Different tactics, but the same goal. The truth. He might have gotten closer than I did.
Maybe that was why he was dead. I had to see his body. To get a look before a police department I still didn’t trust did. I owed Grimes that much.
I held my breath then opened the door and closed it quickly behind me. The door opened into a small laundry room with a stacked washer/dryer. I went into a galley kitchen and then into a living room.
And found Grimes. He sat in a leather chair in front of a TV. The TV was off. So was he. Permanently. His body slumped to the left. Left arm dangling below the arm of the chair. Dried thick black blood matted his gray hair above his right ear and ran down his neck, frozen like river runoff in an Alaskan winter. A black winter. A handgun lay on the floor a couple feet to the right of the chair.
Grimes and I had spent most of the last fourteen years as enemies. We still weren’t friends even after working Krista’s death together, but I think we’d developed grudging respect for one another. At least, I had. I’d never know now how he felt about me. He’d been a cop and a PI. He’d dedicated his life to finding the truth. He deserved better than an anonymous death. Body decaying, waiting for someone to discover it.
I let go the breath I’d been holding and inhaled death with my next one. I didn’t want to get any closer to inspect the body. The manner of death would be an easy call for the medical examiner. Another ex-cop eats his gun. Or in this instance, shoots himself in the temple. A shock, but the statistics would say, not a surprise. Except that it wasn’t true.
I hadn’t known Grimes well, but I knew a bulldog on the scent. That’s what he was the night he left me a message about the payphone. That’s what he’d been the whole time he investigated Krista’s death. We may not have agreed on everything, but he was on a quest for the truth as much as I was.
His death looked to be over a day old. That would put it back to the night he called me about the payphone. When he left a message that he had to check something out.
Whatever it was had gotten him killed. Which meant that Krista and Colleen’s killer had gotten onto him and maybe onto me. I may have been wrong about Weaver and Mitchell, but I hadn’t been about Krista’s killer not being some random drunk driver. He was out there covering his tracks and the real reason he killed Krista.
I scanned the living room for a computer. None. I searched the rest of the house. No computer. I went back into the garage and searched the Chrysler 300, even popping the trunk. No computer. No notebooks. No evidence of what Grimes found out the night he died.
I unlocked the front door, opened it, and went outside. I took off my gloves and closed the door behind me, careful to use my bare hand on the doorknob.
With Grimes dead inside his house, I knew my mission wasn’t complete. It just had a new target. One I couldn’t see yet.