No Safe House

Five

Detective Rona Wedmore was about to collapse into bed when she got the call that they’d found a body.

Lamont was already under the covers, and asleep, but began to stir when he sensed his wife was putting her clothes back on.

“Babe?” he said, turning over in bed.

She never got tired of hearing him talk, even a single word like that. Didn’t matter what he said, not after she’d been through that period when he didn’t speak a word. Traumatized after coming back from Iraq, the things he’d seen, he’d gone kind of catatonic on her. Not speaking for months, until that night three years ago when she got shot in the shoulder and he showed up at the emergency room and said to her, “You okay?”

It was nearly worth taking a bullet to hear those two words. No, actually, it was worth it.

“I gotta go out,” she said. “Sorry I woke you.”

“’S’okay,” he said, the side of his face still pressed into the pillow. He knew better than to ask how long she was going to be. She’d be gone as long as she had to be gone.

She locked up the house, got in her car, and, as she drove to the scene, thought this was just what Milford needed. Another murder. As if people here weren’t already on edge. Wedmore hoped it was something simple, like some guy getting stabbed in a bar fight. People dying in bar fights did not spread fear through a community. One idiot kills another idiot at a bar and most people shrug and think, What do you expect when a couple of yahoos have too much to drink? Sitting in the safety of their homes, the good people of Milford didn’t feel threatened by a crime like that.

But the Bradley double homicide, that was a horse of a different color, as Wedmore’s late father liked to say. Two retired seniors shot in their living room? For no apparent reason?

That freaked people out.

Damned if Wedmore could get a handle on it. Neither Richard nor Esther Bradley had had any kind of criminal record. There wasn’t so much as a single unpaid parking ticket registered against either of them. They had a married daughter in Cleveland, who checked out just as clean, too. There was no marijuana grow op in the basement, no meth lab in an old Airstream out back.

Yes, earlier in the evening Richard Bradley had stormed over to the house next door to tell some students to keep the noise down. At first, the kids were the only suspects Wedmore had. But the more she checked into them, the more convinced she became that they had nothing to do with killing the Bradleys.

So who the hell did it, then? And why?

The daughter had flown in from Cleveland, and when she wasn’t going to pieces about losing her parents, she’d helped Wedmore go through the house in an attempt to determine whether anything was missing. As far as the daughter could tell, nothing had been stolen, and besides, her parents didn’t have anything all that valuable anyway. And the killer, or killers, hadn’t even bothered to take cash or credit cards out of Richard Bradley’s wallet or Esther Bradley’s purse.

Which tended to rule out drug addicts looking for a way to pay for their next fix.

So maybe it was a thrill kill.

But there was nothing ritualistic about the murders. No writing of “Helter Skelter” in the victims’ blood on the living room walls.

Rona wondered whether the fact that they had both been teachers was a factor. One possible scenario: Some kid one of them had flunked years earlier believed that Richard or Esther had ruined his life. He’d come back for revenge. It seemed a bit out there to Wedmore, but in the absence of any other theory, she found herself reaching. And overreaching. But revenge killings were not generally so tidy.

Richard and Esther Bradley had each been killed with a single bullet to the head. A cool and efficient double hit. No fingerprints left behind. People who killed for revenge tended to overdo it. Twenty stab wounds instead of three. Six bullets instead of one.

So, okay. If it was a professional hit, why? Who the hell would put out a contract on two retired teachers?

It was driving Detective Rona Wedmore crazy.

Maybe another murder, if not what Milford needed, was exactly what she needed. Something to clear her head of the Bradley case. Focus elsewhere. That sometimes worked for her. It might mean that when she went back to the double homicide, she’d notice something she hadn’t seen before.

It wasn’t, as it turned out, a bar that Wedmore had been summoned to, but Silver Sands State Park, forty-seven acres of sandy beaches, dunes, marshes, wetlands, and forest on the sound. She went south on Viscount, past the seniors apartment building on the right until the street ended, then turned left onto the roadway that paralleled the beach and the boardwalk. She took it right to the end, where three Milford police cars with rooftop lights twirling were parked.

A uniformed male officer spotted her unmarked car and approached.

“Detective Wedmore?” he asked as she got out of the car.

“Yeah. What’s up, Charlie?”

“Same old. Wife and me just had a kid.”

“Hey, no kidding? Congrats. Boy, girl? Something else?”

“A girl. Calling her Tabitha.”

“So, what’ve we got here?”

“Dead male. White, early twenties. Looks like he took a couple in the back. Maybe he was running away.”

“Witnesses?”

Officer Charlie shook his head. “Not even sure it happened here. Think he might have been dumped.”

Wedmore was pulling on a pair of gloves. “Lead the way.”

She followed the cop down along the boardwalk. It had taken quite a beating during Hurricane Sandy, just like everything else along here, but had now been pretty much repaired.

“Over here.” Charlie pointed into the tall grasses to the left of the boardwalk, away from the sound.

There were several other cops there already. Some lights had been set up on stands.

Wedmore made her way through the waist-high grass. She caught a whiff of decomposition, but there was a breeze coming in off the water, so she didn’t feel the need to rub some Vicks beneath her nose.

“Who found him?” she asked of anyone who would answer while she got a penlight out of her jacket pocket.

A uniformed woman said, “Couple kids, making out, wandered this way. They ran out, called us, waited around on the boardwalk till we got here.”

“You let them go?”

“We got names, all that. Their parents came and got them.”

The body was facedown. The man was probably two hundred pounds, short blond hair, oversized blue T-shirt and khaki shorts with half a dozen pockets. White socks and running shoes. Wedmore knelt down, caught a glimpse of something in a lower pocket. She fished out a wallet, opened it up, shined her penlight on a driver’s license visible behind clear plastic.

“Eli Richmond Goemann,” she said. Wedmore studied the two bullet holes in the back of the blood-soaked shirt. “Roll him over.”

A couple of officers did the dirty work.

“Hardly any blood,” she said. “He didn’t bleed out here. So yeah — where’s Charlie? Anyway, what he said, that he was moved here, that seems likely. Joy been called?” The forensic examiner.

Someone said, “Yes.”

Wedmore took a look through the wallet. Sixty-eight bucks in cash. Credit card receipts from bars, liquor stores. That’d give her a place to start.

She took another look at the Connecticut driver’s license. The man was born in March 1992, so that made him twenty-two.

“Hello,” she said.

“What?” said someone.

Wedmore kept staring at the license. At Eli Goemann’s address.

“Son of a bitch,” she said.

She knew the street. She’d been there recently. Eli’s former address was just two numbers off from the house where Richard and Esther Bradley had been murdered.

Wedmore was pretty sure that was the house where the students lived.