Diane Grey wasn’t home. Leo phoned her from outside the house, and she said she’d meet them in an hour, so Leo and Lucy drove to the McMahon house, which was less than a mile away.
The planned community meandered through the hills with two-story houses on large lots, though they seemed to repeat each other in style. An upscale division, Lucy guessed, and most of the homes were well maintained and on quiet streets. Definitely the suburbs, and seemed a good place to raise kids. Now that it was after six and the worst of the heat had passed, kids were playing in their yards, and the pools that they could see from the street were filled.
The McMahon house was on a cul-de-sac with several large trees helping shade the picture windows. The lawn had been mowed and hedges trimmed, but that was the extent of the work. “Did McMahon take care of his yard or did they have a service?” Lucy asked.
“I don’t know. Would it matter?”
“If he was taking care of the house, his behavior would be even more odd. His wife said she came over a couple of times and the place was a mess, and she had to start paying the bills because he’d let them lapse. Mowing the lawn wouldn’t fit with that behavior.”
“I see your point.”
Lisa McMahon had given them a key to the house and her permission to enter and search. They could have gotten a warrant just to cover themselves, but it wasn’t necessary.
They first walked around the exterior, checking doors and windows for explosives or other booby traps. All the blinds were closed—not uncommon in Texas especially in the hot summer months when residents wanted to keep the house as cool as possible during the day.
There was no car in the garage—McMahon’s vehicle, a Ford F-150, had been found parked at a meter two blocks from the coffeehouse. The McMahons also owned a Ford Explorer, which Lisa drove.
The house had an empty feel—no noise at all, no radios or air-conditioning unit or television running.
Leo said, “Proceed with caution, Kincaid. We clear the house room by room before we search.”
She followed the SWAT leader’s direction. He had her unlock the front door, and he kept his focus on any movement in the house. Nothing.
But as soon as she opened the door, she smelled death. She immediately drew her gun.
They cleared the living and dining room, then the kitchen and family room. It was in the den they found the body.
“Well, shit,” Leo said. “It’s Paul Grey.”
Paul Grey was long dead. He was on his back on the floor in the middle of the den that was clearly Charlie’s home office—books on science, memory, Alzheimer’s, textbooks, and more. Fiction ran to Michael Crichton and westerns. And Charlie’s best friend, Paul Grey, was in front of his desk, as if they had been having a conversation and Charlie had shot him.
The house was hot, leaving him bloated. Though Lucy would have to inspect him to be certain—which she couldn’t do before the crime scene team came in to process the house—she thought he was past rigor mortis, meaning he had likely been dead for longer than twenty-four hours.
She put on gloves, though had no intention of touching anything. She used a pencil to flip on the light switch, then visually inspected his body. Dried blood on his right temple and a larger, messier exit wound on his left indicated that he had been shot. But the blood on both sides appeared dry, and she looked all around the room. There was no blood spatter, and only a small amount on the floor beneath him.
“He wasn’t killed here,” she said. “At least, not in this room. There’s hardly any blood.”
“We need to clear the house and call it in,” Leo said. “It’s going to be a long night.”
* * *
The FBI’s Evidence Response Team arrived on scene. They were in the county, not the city of San Antonio, otherwise they would have had SAPD process the scene. But Leo didn’t want yet a third jurisdiction—the sheriff’s—in the middle of the investigation, so it was better to keep the evidence in house and share with SAPD.
Paul Grey hadn’t been killed in the McMahon house. There was no visible blood in any other room or on the grounds, but no indication of how he’d been brought inside. Agents canvassed the neighborhood, and no neighbor claimed to have seen anything suspicious.
Lucy spoke to the next-door neighbor, a young stay-at-home mother of three children under six named Annie Greene.
“I’m shocked,” Annie said. “Until Charlie lost his job, he was wonderful. He was out in the cul-de-sac every weekend with half a dozen kids playing baseball. Throwing with his son. For the Fourth of July every year we had a street party and Charlie is the one you always want around. He had a kind word to say about everyone, and he was funny. Kids especially loved him. This year we didn’t even have a party because Charlie and Lisa always organized it.”
“And after he lost his job?”
“When Lisa left he fell apart. Maybe before he wasn’t himself—didn’t say hi when he saw me, for example. Kind of in his own world, as if deep in thought. But when Lisa left—most of the time I didn’t even see him.”
Lucy didn’t comment that Lisa left before Charlie lost his job. “When was the last time you saw him?”
“Weeks. Mid-June maybe? Austin—my son—finished kindergarten on June fifteenth, and it was a couple of days before then.”
That surprised Lucy on the one hand—although, on the other, the house had an un-lived-in feeling. They’d found stale Chinese takeout in the refrigerator, and a receipt in the bag indicating it had been bought on June 12—four weeks ago. Had he not been here for four weeks? Where had he been living? Could the witness who thought he was homeless have been right? Maybe he was living out of his vehicle.
Lucy asked, “In the last two or three days, have you seen anyone at the house? A car in the driveway?”
She shook her head. “I’m here most of the time, I try to keep an eye on the street. We don’t get a lot of traffic here. But I go to bed early—the kids wear me out. My husband doesn’t get home until seven on most nights, so I get the kids to bed by eight and we have some quiet time, but I’m usually asleep before ten.”
“Is your husband home?”
“No—he’s out of town this week. Japan. He works for an oil company and travels a lot.”
“When did he leave?”
“Sunday morning. He’ll be back Saturday.”
He wouldn’t have been here when Paul Grey’s body was dumped. They needed a better time line of Grey’s day on Monday, but the likelihood was that he was killed after four thirty when he left work, but before Tuesday morning. But why would Charlie McMahon kill him—and then bring his body to his house? Maybe Charlie really did have a psychotic break.
Lucy thanked Annie for her time, then regrouped with Leo. “No one has seen him since a few days before June fifteenth, the witness isn’t sure of the exact day.”
Leo concurred. “The mail goes to a PO box and I talked to Lisa—she had it forwarded to a PO box in San Marcos in May when she learned Charlie had stopped paying bills. She also said that he hadn’t accessed their joint bank account but has been living off his credit card—which she’s paid off every month. She’s going to bring the statements to headquarters tomorrow morning. It’ll help us retrace his steps.”
“And hopefully find out where he’s been living. Because it certainly isn’t here.”
“Proctor!” Mike Jackson, the head of their Evidence Response Team, motioned for them to come over. Mike was tall and lean with dark skin and unusually attractive green eyes. He’d been in the San Antonio office for ten years, and had run the ERT for the last five. “I found out how the body came in. Oh, and while you were talking to the neighbors, the coroner arrived. You’re right, Kincaid, he wasn’t killed here—not enough blood. So I processed the garage—someone drove into the garage and brought the body in through the door that goes into the laundry room. There was some trace evidence on the doorframe and floor. The body had to have been partially carried and partially dragged—at least, that’s my best guess based on the evidence we have.”
“Carried? Or could one person have done the job?” Leo asked.
“I can’t say. Grey was on the shorter side, but slightly heavy. One large person could carry him, I suppose, but he’d have been a deadweight. I’m leaning to two people, but I can’t swear to that. He might have been dragged, but we’ll have to wait for the autopsy. We’ll print, of course, and finish processing, but I don’t know what we’re going to get. No smoking gun, that’s for certain. But did you notice there’s no computer?”
Lucy nodded.
“It wasn’t taken recently—my guess is that it’s been gone for weeks. There’s dust on the desk. But there was no dust on the drawer handles. Someone went through them in the last couple of days.”
“That’s good, Mike,” Proctor said. “Whatever you can get, let me know ASAP. And plan on being at the debriefing tomorrow at SAPD at oh-eight-hundred.”
“So much for my beauty sleep,” he said and went back inside.
“We need to tell Mrs. Grey,” Leo said to Lucy.
She nodded. As they drove over, she asked, “Where’s his car?”
“That’s the million-dollar question.”