Guardian of Lies

TEN

The fact that Katia told us about the note first, about writing it and leaving it on Pike’s desk, but never mentioned the dagger is, according to Harry, part of the deeper equation of truth.

“Think about it,” he says.

This morning Harry, I, and Herman Diggs, the investigator we have used for some years now, are inside the yellow police tape that surrounds Emerson Pike’s house on the hill above Del Mar. Herman is inside the house with one of the homicide detectives going over details of the crime scene.

The other homicide detective and a small cadre of uniformed cops stand huddled out near the front gate. Harry has the public defender’s file, including copies of the police and investigative reports from that night and for several days afterward as they processed the scene. Everything has now been transferred to us.

“If she plunged that dagger into Pike’s chest, then I’m a sword swallower and I’ll eat it whole,” says Harry. He is talking softly, under his breath, even though the officers are too far away to hear anything.

“You saw the look on her face. She didn’t know a thing about it. Nothing clicked until I mentioned her fingerprints and then only because she realized she moved the damned thing when she put it on top of the note.”

Harry is preaching to the choir. The entire chain of events leading up to and surrounding the murders reeks of contrivance. I had decided to take the case long before that point. Katia reminded me of my daughter. I could see Sarah caught up in circumstances in a foreign country, and I wondered if anyone would put out a helping hand. Katia had felt trapped and I knew it, though Harry did not.

“None of it makes sense,” he says.

“I know.”

“Then why don’t you say something?”

“Why, do you need convincing?”

He gives me one of those patented Harry looks. “Strangest damn house I’ve ever seen,” he says. “Looks like it’s falling apart until you get up close. Place gives me the willies.”

“It’s what Katia said, remember, when she asked Emerson about it. He just passed it off, told her he had a strange sense of curb appeal and that she’d get used to it in time. She didn’t understand what he was saying.”

What is clear is that Pike designed the house to avoid attention. It wasn’t what you would call an eyesore, just enough so that you wouldn’t look twice. It was all he had, that and the security system, to protect the place when he was away, which was most of the time.

“Weird,” says Harry.

“Maybe.”

“There’s so much, I don’t know where to start. Nothing we’ve heard, read, or seen so far makes any sense,” says Harry. “So I guess the house fits right in. We’re supposed to believe that Katia stuck the dagger into Pike in a rage, then stumbled into the maid downstairs and killed her, but then had the presence of mind to wash off the knife only to leave it on the sink…”

“With a trace of blood on it,” I remind him.

“Yeah, pure as a transfusion, no cross contamination,” says Harry. “She stabbed Pike and then the maid with the same knife and all we get on the knife is a trace of the maid’s blood, none of Pike’s.”

“And you would think she’d have rinsed her hands at the same time she washed off the knife,” I tell him.

Harry gives me a quizzical glance as we cross the grass near the side of the house.

“Begs the question, how did the blood get on the front door?” I ask. “According to the lab report, again, all of it belongs to the maid, no cross contamination, though they found evidence of Pike’s blood on the maid’s clothing.”

He thinks about this for a second. “The cops will probably say she touched the door before she realized it, then went back to the kitchen to ditch the knife.”

“I see, so she caught herself, but then forgot about the dagger upstairs, the one in Pike’s body with her prints all over it, and no blood at all on the handle, just her fingerprints. So why didn’t she wash them off?”

“Because she didn’t plant the dagger to begin with,” says Harry. “Some other dude did it. It’s the only thing we’ve heard so far that makes any sense.”

“To us, maybe.”

In the early going it can often look like a slam dunk, all the little inconsistencies in the state’s case, the things a prosecutor won’t be able to explain. In most cases, you can be sure that before they get to trial the state will find a way to wrap them all neatly into their case.

“We both know what the DA is going to say, through his experts, of course,” says Harry. “That your average killer is scared witless. That after the crime Katia panicked. And because of this she made stupid mistakes, blood on the door, dagger in the body. Three cheers for panic and stupidity.”

Harry makes all of this sound sufficiently plausible to worry me. Jurors might just believe it.

Harry is looking at his notes. “Seems for a while the cops thought they might have had evidence of drugs, but it turned out negative.”

I look at him.

“They found three or four little muslin bags, the tops tied off with string. They tested the substance. It came up catnip.”

“Three or four of these, you say?”

Harry pages through the report, finds it with his finger. “Actually five. One of them was ripped open. Some traces of dander on it, so they assume a cat must have gotten it.”

“Did Pike own a cat?”

Harry shakes his head. “Not as far as I know. No animals. Police would have brought in animal control. And there’s no indication in the report. According to the people who knew Pike, he was out of the country more than half the year, traveling. Mostly in Latin America, I assume for business. He would have to board an animal if he had one.”

“Let’s check it out. See if there’s any record of Pike having owned or boarded a cat.”

Harry makes a note.

We cease our aimless prowling along the grass at the side of the house and look for the motion sensors, part of the security system that was down the night of the murders.

“Do we know where the motion sensors are located?”

“In this area somewhere,” says Harry. He looks through the file. There is a diagram of the outside of the house, but it is not to scale. Harry can’t be certain where the nearest sensor is located. “Let me check with one of the homicide detectives,” he says. “Gimme a second.”

Harry heads off toward the gate, where the cops are all clustered.

In the meantime I wander toward the house. A breeze hits the line of camellias as I approach them and something catches my eye. The wind keeps the bush open for a second. It could be a piece of trash, perhaps a small paper wrapper. In the fluttering leaves I see it dangling inside the foliage, off white and oval shaped. As I peer closer, it appears to be streaked by a tea-colored stain.

For a moment I weigh whether I should have the cops come over and tag it. If it’s what I think it is, forensics already has five of them. One, more or less, isn’t going to make much difference.

I turn to look. I can hear the sound of Harry’s voice in the distance. He has not yet reached the clutch of cops at the gate. He is waving with his arm in the air and talking as he approaches them. I position myself between the gathering at the gate and the bush. Using my back to block their view I reach into the bush and pluck the little bag from where it is hanging. The muslin is damp, probably from dew, and tied with string. As I handle it I realize it is heavier than it looks. There is something hard inside, two or three items that feel like small pebbles cushioned by something softer.

Suddenly I hear Harry talking with someone as they approach from behind. Casually I slip my hand into the side pocket of my trousers and allow the tiny bag to slide down and join my change before removing my hand.

Harry introduces the detective. I shake his hand and a couple of sec onds later he shows us where two of the sensors are located. One near the base of a tree, the other in a planter bed twenty yards away.

“But they were off that night?” I ask.

“That’s what it says. I didn’t write the report,” says the detective.

“According to your investigating officers, the security company was forced to shut them down because of malfunctions.”

“If that’s what it says.”

“Do you know when the system was shut down?” I ask.

“If it doesn’t say in the report, you’d have to talk to the security company.”

I thank him and he goes back to join the small cabal of blue at the front gate.

“Mister helpful,” says Harry.

“Did forensics find anything else outside?”

“Not as far as we know. No blood. No footprints, though I doubt they were looking very hard. No evidence of forced entry, nothing suspicious…”

“Except for a security system that didn’t work,” I say. I stand looking toward the fence and the two motion sensors that are positioned less than a hundred feet apart. “We know one thing. The killer came this way, over that fence, probably right where we’re standing. He didn’t knock on the front door, so if I had to guess, I’d say he took those stairs.” I nod toward the back deck.

“Because of the security camera,” says Harry.

“Yep.”

“That was my guess too,” he says.

Pike’s house had two levels of security, the motion sensors and the cameras. All the other cameras were working that night. They showed nothing unusual until approximately ten thirty, when the cameras out in front caught a figure running down the driveway toward the gate. It was Katia on her way out. It showed her using the remote device to open the gate and then tracked her for only a few more seconds until she disappeared. This was in one of the reports. The only camera that wasn’t functioning properly was the one on this side of the house. It was blocked by a large magnolia leaf that the wind had blown and that somehow had lodged in front of the lens. At least that’s the theory the police are operating under.

Harry looks toward the camera mounted on a pole near the fence behind us. “That’s a big lens. First thing I noticed.”

“What’s that?”

“No magnolia leaves on the ground around it.”

“Maybe Pike has a good gardener,” I tell him.

Harry nibbles on his upper lip for a second, then shades his eyes with one hand. “No, that’s not it. You have to have a tree before you get leaves,” says Harry. “You see any magnolia trees out there?”

Harry is a bit of an amateur arborist. He knows more about trees than I do, which may not be saying much.

“Take my word for it, you don’t,” he says. “If the wind blew that magnolia leaf over that lens, it flew in on the jet stream from another county.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“As sure as I am that that leaf came by car. I’m getting a bad feeling,” says Harry, “the kind that sends little tingling pulses through what’s left of the hair on the back of my neck.”

“Why is that?”

“Our friend who jumped the fence and came this way, he seems abnormally inclined toward rearranging the things of nature,” says Harry. “And for some reason that scares the hell out of me.”