Catch Me

Chapter 11

RHODE ISLAND STATE POLICE DETECTIVE SERGEANT Roan Griffin had the voice of a bear and the build of a boulder. Big guy. Probably bench-pressed small automobiles after toppling sumo wrestlers and tackling linebackers. Good-looking guy, too. Officer Blue Eyes, the Providence Journal had dubbed him years ago, when he’d appeared on Dave Letterman to model the state police’s award-winning new uniforms.

Truth was, the Rhode Island State Police had a reputation for the best-looking cops in New England. No one knew how they did it. Maybe a special factory that chiseled out broad-shouldered, barrel-chested, square-jawed men. Either way, whenever there was an opportunity for cross training with their Rhode Island counterparts, the female officers of Massachusetts quickly signed up. Like, all three of them.

Currently, D.D. was on the phone with Griffin. A shame, really, because Rhode Island’s headquarters was only an hour south, and given the restaurants available for lunch in Providence’s Federal Hill…Missing out on sightseeing and Italian dining, D.D. thought with a sigh. So much for the new and improved lifestyle.

Griffin was a married man. Actually, his second marriage, as the first wife had died of cancer. Wife number two was a blond advertising executive named Jillian. D.D. had never met her, only knew her because of the press coverage. Jillian had survived the notorious College Hill Rapist about eight years back. Her younger sister hadn’t been so lucky. When they’d finally arrested a man for the attacks, Jillian had formed a group dubbed the Survivors Club in order to assist one another through the trial. Except there hadn’t been a trial, given that the suspect had been gunned down outside the courthouse and Jillian and her fellow club members had gone from sympathetic victims to prime suspects.

D.D. would be the first to admit she’d followed the case as zealously as Nancy Grace, especially when days after the alleged rapist’s murder, another woman was attacked. Seriously, there were days on this job when she thought not even a suspense novelist could make these things up.

Griffin and Jillian had two boys now. Ages four and six, D.D. was learning. The youngest, Dylan, had taken a page out of his father’s book and was all football all the time. The six-year-old, Sean, had recently discovered cooking. As in last night he’d prepared rack of lamb for the entire family.

“With a pomegranate molasses marinade,” Griffin was finishing now, “though I suspect his mom helped him with that.”

“He’s six. How’d he even lift a roasting pan into the oven?” D.D. wanted to know.

“Oh,” Griffin said breezily. “He gets that from me.”

“And the hot oven…not a problem?”

“Jillian did the honors of taking it out. And she helped him sear the outside on the stove. But he found the recipe-”

“Where? At the back of his comic books?”

“He checked out a cookbook from the library. He’s a how-to kid. No fiction, but brings home books on how to plant gardens, how to engineer robots, how to build boats. Guess now it’s gonna be how to cook.”

“Rack of lamb. That’s amazing.”

“Hell, it was fabulous. I’m ready to start a college fund for Johnson and Wales.”

“I don’t know about cooking yet for baby Jack,” D.D. said. “But last night he threw up something that might pass for molasses.”

Griffin laughed. That was the great thing about parents and homicide cops-nothing ever grossed them out. She could tell diaper stories all day, and her fellow detectives would actually find that charming. D.D. wondered sometimes how normal people lived.

“Is he sleeping at all?” Griffin asked.

“No.”

“Try driving around?”

“No. Too afraid I’ll fall asleep.”

“What about during the day? Does he nap?”

“Some. When you’re holding him, or when he’s in his carrier, then he passes out cold.”

“Okay,” Griffin said briskly, “so Dylan wasn’t much of a sleeper when he was an infant. I’d take him for short drives in the car seat, get him wiped out. Then return home and place his carrier directly in his crib, with him still strapped in. Worked like a charm for weeks. Then pretty soon, we could just place him straight into the crib. Maybe being in the carrier helped get him acclimated to the crib? Hell if I know, but it worked.”

D.D. pursed her lips, nodded. “Sounds like something worth trying. Or I could just sign up for the funny farm now.”

At the last minute, she realized maybe she shouldn’t have said that. Given Griffin’s own past, that little incident with the Candy Man, Griffin’s ensuing mental breakdown, the medical leave from the state police.

Griffin just laughed again, sounding unruffled. D.D. took that as a sign his new family was working for him. She hoped so. Griffin was a good guy and great detective. If he was happy, maybe there was hope for the rest of them.

“So,” she declared, “as delightful as our children are, I’m actually calling you about a case. Randi Menke, murdered in Providence two years ago. Guess the state police became involved because you were already investigating the number one suspect for fraud.”

“Jon Menke,” Griffin said immediately. “Slimy bastard.”

“You think he did it?”

“Please, at the time I would’ve bet my career on it, which it turned out, would’ve cost me, given the second murder one year later.”

“Jackie Knowles,” D.D. filled in. “So you heard about that.”

“Only four dozen times. The friend…Charice, Chartreuse…”

“Charlene. Charlie.”

“That’s it.” Griffin snapped his fingers over the phone. “Charlie something something Grant. She visited our fine headquarters many times. Made her wishes for swift and immediate justice known.”

“What do you think?”

Another sigh. “Crap, it’s January eighteenth. Just three days to go. Well hell…” Griffin stopped murmuring, seemed to collect his thoughts. “Okay, so I can only speak to the Providence scene, and there wasn’t much to it. First responders arrived to a quiet house. Front door was closed but unlocked. In the family room, they found the body of a woman. She was lying there so peacefully, one of the guys dropped to start CPR. Wasn’t until he was leaning over her that he saw the bruises around her neck and realized she was dead.”

“Fully clothed?”

“Dressed in some kind of upscale, dark green track suit-pants, long-sleeved white shirt, matching top. Fluffy white socks, L.L. Bean slippers. Comfy clothes, as one of the detectives put it. Like she’d gotten all settled for the night, then someone rang the doorbell.”

D.D. considered that. Women didn’t usually wear track suits and fluffy socks when expecting male guests, so she went with their theory-Randi had turned in for the night.

“TV?” she asked. “Was it or any lights on when the officers arrived?”

“TV was off, all lights had been turned off-”

“Print the switch plates?” D.D. interrupted.

“Duh,” Griffin informed her drolly. “Nada. Perp was definitely wearing gloves and, less quantifiable, but I’d say knew the house. Felt comfortable there. It’s like he showed up, did the deed, then tidied up. Turned off lights, mopped the floor, wiped down the kitchen for all we know. But the scene was tidy. Except for the dead body, of course.”

“So maybe there had been a struggle,” D.D. challenged. “Maybe Randi put up a helluva fight, and that’s why the perp cleaned up afterward.”

“Maybe. No signs of trauma on the body, though. No defensive wounds, no bruising. All in all, it’s like someone walked in, put his hands around her neck, and that was that.”

“You’ve said he a couple of times. So you’re thinking a male attacker?”

“ME’s best guess. It’s not easy to manually strangle someone. Takes a bit of muscle but also finger strength. Randi was an average-sized female, five five, hundred and twenty, did Pilates four times a week. In theory, it would take someone bigger and stronger to overpower her so quickly.”

D.D. pursed her lips. “And Jon Menke?”

“Weasel,” Griffin muttered. “Six feet, one ninety, physically fit, spent four to five mornings a week at the gym. Apparently, he felt a doctor should look the part. We learned his female colleagues appreciated that.”

“A ladies’ man?”

“Definitely not monogamous.”

“Did Randi know?”

“Apparently part of the cause for the divorce. The other part being that he liked to beat the shit out of her.”

“Document it?” D.D. asked sharply.

“Oh yeah. To give Randi some credit, she did her homework before leaving the bastard. Called a hotline, got some advice. She’d filled an entire safety deposit box with photos and walk-in clinic reports before dialing up the lawyer and making a break for it. And trust me, Menke was pissed off about that. His wife not only left, but got him branded as a wife beater while nailing him for alimony. Yeah, Menke had every reason to want her dead and was fully capable of getting the job done.”

“Except…” D.D. drawled out.

“Alibi,” Griffin supplied. “A cocktail waitress, mind you, some pretty young thing who probably saw his pecs, his paycheck, and his Porsche and promptly forgot things like his history of domestic abuse, but they were in a bar and several regulars backed their claim. In the end, we couldn’t break it.”

D.D. thought about it. “You said he had a history of smacking his wife around?”

“Yep. Fat lips, black eyes, a wrecked knee where apparently he’d kicked her.”

“Sounds like a guy who had trouble managing his temper.”

“Yep.”

“But, the homicide scene…”

“Looks like the work of someone fully in control,” Griffin agreed. “Which was the second problem with pursuing Menke. On the one hand, it just felt right to nail him for something. On the other hand, this something didn’t feel like his kind of something. He would’ve trashed the place. Not to mention, according to our criminologist, wife beaters who become wife killers almost always disfigure their spouses. Shoot them in the face, stab them five dozen times. It’s a personal, frenzied, dehumanizing attack. This…this was cold-blooded. More akin to murder-for-hire, which became our next theory.”

“Oooh,” D.D.’s eyes widened. “Menke paid someone to take down his too-good-for-her-own-good ex-wife.”

“Yeah. My theory. Real winner at the time, and maybe still the best theory, but we could never find a money trail. Now, the feds were investigating Menke for health care fraud at the time, and the money trail there was long and convoluted. Lot of suspicion that he was dealing prescription drugs on the side, which would’ve given him access to both cash and a certain ‘clientele’ we could never prove. So murder-for-hire remains the most likely scenario, in my mind.”

“Did you ever get him for fraud?”

“Feds got him. Small potatoes though. Could only prove the tip, not the iceberg. But it was enough to have his medical license revoked, plus he’s serving three-to-five in a Club Fed somewhere. You can contact a Boston FBI agent, David Riggs, if you have more questions. He ran the health care fraud investigation.”

“When you pressed Menke about his wife’s murder, how’d he take it?” D.D. asked. “Get hostile on the subject, or smug?”

“Moral indignation. He was totally over her, how dare we suggest otherwise.”

“Ah, moral indignation. Always a nice choice for a wife beater. Taking the high road.”

“Well, he was a doctor you know.”

Both D.D. and Griffin lapsed into silence. “No physical evidence at the scene?” she tried again.

“Only evidence was lack of evidence,” Griffin assured her.

“What do you mean?”

“Most homes have fingerprints. How odd that this one didn’t.”

“So the killer really did clean up afterward.”

“Stone cold and handy with a sponge. I’m still thinking murder-for-hire, and this guy has quite the résumé.”

“And the second murder?” D.D. tried. “In Atlanta?”

“Don’t know the details. Only heard after the fact from Charlie, plus some Atlanta Feebie, Kimberly Quincy, gave me a buzz. She’d heard there might be a connection between Jackie Knowles’s murder and a Providence case and was curious. She commented that the Knowles scene was equally pristine. Other than the dead body and all.”

D.D. frowned. She didn’t like it. “They gotta be connected,” she muttered now. “I mean, how many clean murder scenes have you seen in your day?”

“Counting Randi’s: one.”

“Exactly. So they have to be connected. But how?”

“Question,” Griffin corrected, “is who? We knew Randi had at least one enemy-her ex. But what about Jackie Knowles? Who had reason to want her dead?”

“Murder-for-hire suggests money,” D.D. said immediately. “But two different victims from two different families rules out inheritance.”

“Please, Randi wasn’t getting that kind of alimony. She had thirty bucks in checking, that was it. Look,” Griffin took a deep breath, “I gotta run in a minute, but for what it’s worth, when I heard about the Atlanta scene, I went back to the area hotels. Tried to see if maybe a mutual acquaintance of Randi and Jackie might be in town. They grew up together, right? So maybe a neighbor, classmate, friend.”

“Charlie yada yada Grant,” D.D. guessed.

“Not that I could prove, but maybe she paid for a room with cash…You know how it is.”

D.D. nodded. She did know how it was. “She found me, you know.”

“Charlie something something Grant?”

“Yep. She’s living in Boston now. Running from her neighbors, classmates, friends.”

“Three days until the twenty-first,” Griffin murmured.

“Yep. She wanted to meet me in person. She hopes, if she doesn’t survive the twenty-first, that’ll make me try harder to solve her murder.”

“Shit,” Griffin drawled.

“My thought, exactly.”

Griffin said, “You should call Atlanta. Try the Feebie. She seemed all right. Wish I could help you more, especially given the time line…”

D.D. agreed. Three days to solve two cold cases that hadn’t yielded any leads in the past two years…“So,” she asked briskly. “If you were me, who would you be on the lookout for?”

“Someone physically strong, mentally patient, good with his words, better with his hands, and absolutely positively soulless. Probably above average computer skills as well-the Internet being every stalker’s new best friend. Conversely, I’d tell Charlie that as long as she’s running, stay off the net. Logging on these days is like sending out smoke signals: Here I am. And mine the connections. How many people really knew all three women? In fact, here’s a thought-have you checked out Facebook? Sometimes there are pages in memoriam, you know, in honor of Randi Menke and/or Jackie Knowles. See who’s posting, then track them down. Might give you a start.”

“Lotta man hours for a case that’s not even a case,” D.D. muttered. Then in the next instant, she thought of Detective O, Internet predators, and online grooming and felt a satisfying click in the back of her head. Ten weeks of total sleep deprivation, and she still had it. “Thanks, Griffin,” she said hastily. “You just gave me an idea.”