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Truman Isles stepped back from the door to let them come in, then turned to walk back into the house with a considerable limp. Cal followed him, and Harry took up the rear. She unlocked the holster of her gun, wary of the giant on his own turf but not sure why. She peeked through each open door and into all the hallways as she passed them. Everything was pristine—except for the smell.
"I'm glad you're here," Truman said. He edged down into a recliner with a grimace, then indicated that they should each take a seat on the sofa in front of him. "You can finally get this thing out of my house."
Harry stopped mid-sit and gawked at him. "What thing?"
"The body, of course." The voice, throaty and deep but definitely feminine, came from the kitchen doorway. Harry turned to watch as the woman walked in with a black metal teapot to join the china set on the coffee table. "Would you like some tea, officers?"
She was slight of frame, like a dancer, but the fabric of her pants suit stretched taut across her hips. Her black hair was short, and coiffed to the side of her head like a 1930’s starlet. Her bright eyes had the smoky makeup to match.
"What body?" Cal asked, and stood like a restless dog. "We're not here about a body."
The woman gave Truman a pointed look. "I told you to call about the body," she said, and poured tea in each of the four cups. She walked around the coffee table and handed a cup of tea to Truman, then turned her to face Harry. "Would you like cream or sugar?"
Harry forced her mouth to close, but she couldn't force the squint out of her eyes. "What body?"
With pursed lips, the woman put down the tea service, then stood up. "In a civilized society, people take tea before they get on with the nasty business," she scolded, but gestured for Harry to follow her. She stopped beside Truman's chair and put a hand on his shoulder. "I asked you to call about this."
He shrugged her hand off and took a sip of tea. "I guess you got all the brains in this family," he said with a sneer.
She pinched him, then walked out of the room and down a hallway. "I'm sorry about my brother, Detectives. He's on pain medication for the stab wound."
"What stab wound?" Cal asked from behind them.
The woman looked over her shoulder. "The one given to him by his wife's lover, of course." She led them to a closed room, put her hand on the doorknob, but didn't turn it. She looked from Cal to Harry, her face impassive. "I must warn you, it is quite the mess."
She turned the knob, pushed open the door, and stepped back with her hand over her nose and mouth. She looked less upset than disgusted at the smell. Harry walked inside and up to the bed. The body had only recently begun to decompose, but the smell was overpowering. The woman pinched her nose between two prissy fingers.
"Who is it?" Cal asked.
"We have no idea," the woman said from under her hand. "Maybe Ruby knows."
“Your sister-in-law?” Cal guessed. The woman nodded agreement.
Harry pulled out her cell phone and called the precinct. After a few rings, she got Briggs on the phone, told her everything, and asked for a crew to gather evidence and take the body to the morgue. With her phone tucked away, Harry walked back out of the room and closed the door behind her.
"Can we...?" Harry asked, and indicated the hallway.
The woman led them back out into the sitting room. "Please, sit and have some tea?" she asked.
"Of course," Harry said, and sat down. She motioned for Cal to sit across from her. "No cream or sugar, thanks," she said, and took the cup.
"I'll have both," Cal announced.
"If you don't mind, we have some questions for you," Harry said. The woman turned to face her. "First, I never got your name."
The woman smiled as if she was about to tell them something that would change their lives. "My name is Evangeline Isles, and I'm Truman's sister."
Harry jotted it down in her notebook, then looked back up at her. "And when did you first discover the body?"
"Oh, when was it, Truman?" She plucked a piece of lint from her pressed pants and flicked her gaze to the ceiling. "I guess it was two days ago. Really," she picked up her teacup and took a sip, then put it gently back on the saucer, "I didn't actually discover it until last night when we got back from the hospital."
"Why didn't you call the police then?" Cal asked.
Evangeline set him in her gaze. "Would you be thinking clearly if you had just found your brother lying in a pool of blood in his own home?"
Harry cleared her throat and scooted closer to Evangeline in her seat. "I'm sorry that you had to go through that," she said, and laid one hand on Evangeline's knee. "And we're going to do everything we can to figure out what happened here."
"I can tell you exactly what happened," Truman said from behind her. Harry let her hand drop and swiveled around to face him. "My wife invited some kind of street trash into our home. I was attacked and robbed. No telling what happened to the corpse in there," he said, and pointed with a thumb over his shoulder. He leaned forward with a grunt and dropped his teacup unceremoniously into its saucer with a clatter. His face was contorted into a pained and furious snarl as he pushed himself back into the chair. "The idiot girl went and got herself kidnapped, to add insult to injury."
"So, your wife is missing?" Harry flipped a few pages back in her notebook as Truman nodded. "Did you report that?"
He shrugged. Harry turned to Evangeline in hopes that at least one Isles was concerned for the safety of the abducted woman. Evangeline sipped her tea thoughtfully, then placed it back into its saucer and looked over to a picture on the mantelpiece. A smirking Truman stood beside his brightly smiling bride, one hand draped firmly over her in a gesture that was more possessive than protective.
"I don't really think she's missing," Evangeline said. Truman swore, but Harry kept her eyes on his sister. "A woman can never really be happy in catering to an Isles man." She turned to face Harry, expressionless. "If I were her, I would have begged her to take me."
––––––––
"WELL, THOSE TWO WERE the creepiest people I've ever met in my life," Cal said as they drove back out of the picturesque neighborhood. "And I've met all kinds of psychopaths and weirdos."
Harry chuckled uneasily. "You got that feeling, too?" She signaled, turned onto a side street, and the neighborhood around her started to darken and go to seed. "What do you think she meant by that thing she said?"
"What? The, 'I wish I could be kidnapped, too,' thing?" he asked. She nodded and turned down another, seedier street. Cal whistled. "That girl was a whack job. Whatever happened to her in her childhood, it was rough."
Harry pulled out onto a larger street, and they were downtown again. She twisted through traffic like a snake, and they pulled up to the station in record time. "Neither of them seemed too worried that the wife-slash-sister-in-law was missing."
They walked up the steps and through the decaying copper doorway. They said their hellos to each passing suit, uniform, and coverall-clad CSS as they made their way to the elevator.
"You know what I don't get?" Cal asked, as he leaned up against the elevator wall and stared at the woman in front of them.
"Hm?" Harry asked. She recognized the D.A. but didn't want to garner any attention.
Cal cleared his throat, stood straight up, and watched as the door numbers lit up then dimmed in a slow procession. "Why would his sister stay around if she hated him and all the rest of the men in the family so much?"
Harry sighed. "It's hard to explain. With old money and old values like that, sometimes wills and trusts are written a certain way to, uh..."
The D.A. turned to look over the shoulder of her turquoise-edged gray jacket. "What Detective Thresher means to say is that the old bastards write their wills in such a way that their female heirs get nothing unless they're taking care of the men in the family, until they marry someone pre-chosen for them, at which point their husbands will take over their portion of the family estate."
As the detectives watched, she turned back to face the front. The elevator chimed and the doors pulled open. "It's called 'living in the past,' and wealthy assholes are extremely good at it." She adjusted her briefcase in front of her and stepped out of the elevator. "Good day, Detectives."
The doors closed and Cal turned to Harry, his mouth agape. "What was that about?"
"That was D.A. Shandra Castenby," Harry told him as the elevator started to move again.
"You mean the Shandra Castenby that was cast out of her family and their wills when she refused to quit practicing law and start pumping out Castenby-Dugrass heirs?"
"The very one," Harry said.
Cal chewed on a hangnail and looked at Harry through the corner of his eye not very subtly. The floors ticked up quietly, and he chewed until he had pulled the nail off his hand. He spat it onto the floor, then turned his head toward her and grinned.
"Oh, what?" Harry asked. Their floor number lit, the elevator settled, and the door pinged to warn that it was about to open. "Just ask."
"You used to date her, right?"
The door opened and Harry stepped off. She marched steadily through the hallway toward her desk without a word. Cal stayed on her heels like an overexcited puppy until she sat down in front of her computer. He plopped onto her desk and crossed an arm over his torso. The other arm propped at the elbow on top of it, and his fingernail went back into his mouth.
"You did, didn't you?"
Harry typed in her credentials to log onto the computer. As it loaded, she didn't answer, but pulled out the notepad on which she had scribbled down everything the two detectives remembered from their interview with Truman and Evangeline Isles. When the computer was ready, she opened a program, typed in her credentials again, then flipped to the page with their personal information written on it.
Cal dropped his hand and gave her a steady glare. He chewed a stray fingernail between his front teeth loudly. When she didn't respond, he groaned and nudged her with one sneakered foot. "Oh, come on, Thresher!"
Harry typed in Truman's information, then turned to face him with a sly smile. "Why is it so important?"
"I don't know," he said, and his hand returned to his mouth. He popped off a fingernail, then pulled his hand back out to examine the raw, bleeding edge. "I just like to know who my partner has done the nasty with so that I can be prepared when we get blindsided."
Harry snorted and turned back to the computer. She searched the file in vain, then entered in Evangeline's information. Nothing. "You're not going to be blindsided, especially not by Shandra. She's discreet." She tilted her head and gave him a pointed look. "And not a lot of people know about it, so I would prefer to keep that on the down-low for her sake and mine.”
Cal held up his hands in a gesture of no harm. "Hey, I'm a lockbox. No fire, no gun, no lock pick is getting into this brain," he said with a tap to his forehead.
Harry pushed back from the keyboard with a grunt. "I don't understand it. What do the Isles have to do with Sunny Galaviz and Lee Barsten? I can't find any connection, at least not one with a paper trail."
Cal spat out the last fingernail and let his arm drop. "Yeah, it's weird, right? It's like they just bumped into each other on the street or something."
Harry stared at him for a moment, then her face broke in a wide grin. "You're a genius, Cal."
He smiled back, then faltered as she got up and jogged toward the elevator. He struggled to catch up with her as the elevator doors were opening and she stepped inside. "What gives?"
Harry grinned up at him as they climbed onto the elevator. "I think I figured out a way we could possibly connect them all."
"Where are we going?" Cal asked.
The doors closed, and Harry mashed the button to take them to the next floor down. "We need to comb traffic footage. Where else do you bump into people more than in your car?"
Cal shook his head as the doors opened. "With the Moon Cycles case going, I doubt we can get any screen time with the IT guys. That internet weirdo has them scrambling."
"That may be true," Harry said as she glanced around. "But I think I know someone who would help me."
When her eyes lit on the person she was looking for, she licked her lips. Cal followed her eyes, then groaned and rubbed a hand over his face. "Are you really going to bother that girl? She's not going to help you. You're a total..." He cleared his throat as they passed a pinch-faced CSS with a low tolerance for depravity, then lowered his voice. "You're a total dick to her every time you see her."
"We've made our peace," Harry told him.
They walked up to a little desk in the south corner of the CSS division. Her head was down, but Harry recognized the shiny mass of barely-tamed mane from across the room.
"Busy," she announced as they stepped up to the desk.
CSS Busy Biznicki glanced up from the tablet she was unlocking with a wary look on her tired face. "Detectives Thresher and Gafferty. What can I do for you today?"
