The Wrong Girl

4

The crime scene cleanup people would have quite a job on their hands. Not as bad as some Jake had seen, but murder was never good. They’d arrive soon enough, whoever the landlord hired, see it for themselves. Jake closed his eyes briefly, making a promise to the woman on the linoleum floor. “We’ll find this asshole,” he muttered. Hennessey was right. Poor kids. Poor woman.

There’d been nothing on the stairway. He’d kept his gloved hands off the banisters and walls, hugging the wall to avoid possible suspect footprints, was careful walking up the three flights to the top floor. The wooden front door of apartment C stood open, leading to a threadbare living room, cheap couch with haphazard pillows, then a dining room with an oval table, white tablecloth, three twisty metal candlesticks in the center, no candles. Clean. No family photos, no keepsakes. No sign of forced entry, exactly as Hennessey had reported.

“Yo, D. What you got?” he called toward what must be the kitchen, but DeLuca had gone out a back door. Left it open. A spotlight glared from one outside corner of the minuscule back balcony, and Jake saw his partner’s lanky silhouette leaning over the wooden railing. Three floors up. No escape that way, probably. Unless the bad guy could fly.

It was four steps across the living room to an archway into the kitchen. Jake paused, getting a read on the place. Sniffed, as he always did. No gas, nothing burning, a sweet fragrance of-maybe some cleaning thing. He surveyed left to right, cataloging the elements, typing notes without looking at the keyboard. Dented white refrigerator, seen better days, but clean, no grubby smudges around the handle. He’d have to check inside it. Two saucepans on a gas stove. Open box of Quaker Oats on the drain board. An open box of Cheerios, on its side, a few pieces spilled on the floor. Cereal. Jake looked at his watch. Five in the afternoon. Huh.

No dishes in the sink, a stack of multicolored sponges in a plastic dish, some generic green soap on the side. Kitchen table. A high chair, aluminum and plastic, not new, the molded pink serving tray wiped clean. A little pink bowl with a rabbit decal.

And that body on the floor. One side of her face against the once-ivory linoleum, the other revealing an angry red welt. More than a welt. The skin had already turned purple. Her eyes were open. A trickle of blood made a jagged seam across the yellowed floor, the dark seeping into the cracks between the tiles. Blunt trauma? Jake typed. Weapon?

White female, approx 30, eyes brown, hair blond, he typed. It spilled across her back, clean, shiny, cared for. Arms splayed. Hooded sweatshirt. Levis, bare feet. If you ignored what seemed the cause of death, it looked like the woman simply decided she needed a nap. Or been dropped from the ceiling. Had she-tripped? Hit her head on the stove? Or floor?

Jake stood, assessing. A siren wailed in the distance, the sound keening through the open back door. All the streetlights had popped on, and the interior lights in neighboring triple-deckers. People would be gathering below, the neighborhood disaster irresistible. Photog should get snaps. Sometimes the bad guys did return. Yellow crime scene tape should be up. Where the hell was the new ME? Maybe she was the siren.

It wasn’t suicide, anyway. If the woman had been clonked with a frying pan, like Hennessey said, it wasn’t in sight. No sign at all of a murder weapon. The woman looked poor. Had a family. But the place was-same as her hair-cared for. She’d be sad to see her kitchen messed up this way. Blood and Cheerios.

Jake never got used to that first moment. The first glimpse of the victim. Murder was the consequence of greed or fear or drugs or anger or frustration or money or whatever made someone explode and decide their needs were more important than whoever was in their way. Jake and DeLuca had seen their share. Solved their share, too. Plenty of bad guys owed their current long-term residency in MCI Cedar Junction to the work of Brogan and DeLuca.

Her ID was somewhere in the shabby little apartment. They’d find it, then find who she knew, then figure out who had a problem with her. This was a domestic, Jake predicted. They’d close it fast.

“Yo, Harvard.” DeLuca stood at the back door, his sport coat open, black hoodie underneath, no hat. His hatchet nose red from the cold, he swiped the back of his gloved hand across it. “You ready to join us on this planet?”

“Yo, D,” Jake said. Jane always said D looked like he’d gotten thinner every time they saw each other. DeLuca lived on black coffee and roast beef subs-maybe that was it. Right now Jake had a bigger question. Besides the murder weapon, another important thing was missing from this crime scene.

“We’ve got a dead woman.” Jake zipped up his jacket, zipped it down, then up again, like he always did when thinking. “No apparent murder weapon. An empty apartment. Two little kids who can’t talk. So who the hell called nine-one-one?”