“Well, at least they’re not fighting,” Kate said, but made no move to get out of the car.
“Maybe she called an ambulance, and went with it,” Bob suggested.
Kate shook her head. “She would have followed it, so she wouldn’t have to call someone for a ride home.”
“You want to stay here while I go see if they’re home?” Bob asked.
Kate considered a moment, then shook her head. Her hand trembling, she opened the door of the Porsche and got out. With Bob behind her, she started up the walk to the front door.
When she found it unlocked, she breathed a sigh of relief. One thing she was absolutely certain of — her mother would never leave the house unlocked. She pushed the door open and stepped inside.
“Mom? I’m home!” she called out. An empty silence hung over the house, and Kate’s heart began beating faster. “Mom?” she called again, louder this time. She glanced nervously at Bob. “Something’s wrong,” she whispered. “If the door’s unlocked, Mom should be here.”
“Maybe she’s upstairs,” Bob suggested. “You want me to go look?”
Kate nodded silently, and Bob started up the stairs. A moment later he was back. “Nobody up there,” he told her. “Let’s look in the kitchen.”
“No,” Kate said. Then, her voice quavering, she spoke again. “Let’s call the police.”
“The police?” Bob echoed. “Why?”
“Because I’m scared,” Kate said, no longer trying to control the fear in her voice. “Something’s wrong, and I don’t want to go into the kitchen!”
“Aw, come on, Kate,” Bob told her, starting down the hall toward the closed kitchen door. “Nothing’s wrong at all. She probably just called an ambulance and—” He fell silent as he pushed open the kitchen door. “Oh, God,” he whispered. For just a moment he stood perfectly still. Then he stepped back and let the door swing closed. He turned unsteadily around, his face ashen. “Kate,” he whispered. “Your mom — I think … She looks like she’s dead.”
Kate stared at him for a moment while the words slowly registered in her mind. Then, without thinking, she started down the hall, pushing her way past Bob and into the kitchen. Wildly, she scanned the room, and then found what she was looking for.
Her knees buckled, and she sank sobbing to the floor.
Roscoe Finnerty glanced up at Tom Jackson. “You okay?”
Jackson nodded. “I can handle it.” He stared at Marty Lewis’s body for a moment, trying to get a handle on what he was feeling. It wasn’t at all like last spring, when he’d almost fallen apart at the sight of Alex Lonsdale’s broken body trapped in the wreckage of the Mustang. No, this was different. Except for the look on her face, and the pallor of her skin, this woman could be sleeping. He knelt and pressed his finger to her neck.
She wasn’t sleeping.
“What do you think?” he asked, getting to his feet once more.
“Until I talk to the kids, I don’t think anything.” A siren sounded, and a few seconds later an ambulance pulled into the driveway. Two medics came into the room and repeated the procedure Finnerty and Jackson had gone through when they’d arrived a few minutes earlier. “Don’t move her,” Finnerty told them. “Just make sure she’s dead, then don’t do anything till the detectives get up here. Tom, you get outside and make sure none of the rubberneckers try to come inside, and I’ll have a talk with the kids.”
Finnerty left the kitchen and went back to the living room, where he found Kate Lewis and Bob Carey still sitting on the sofa where he’d left them, Kate sobbing softly while Bob tried to comfort her.
“How’s she doing?” Finnerty asked. Bob looked dazedly up at him.
“How do you think she’s doing?” he demanded, his voice cracking. “Her mom’s … her mom’s …” And then he fell silent as his own emotions overcame him and he choked back a sob.
“It’s all right,” Finnerty told him. “Just try to take it easy.” He searched his memory; then it came to him. “You’re Bob Carey, aren’t you?”
Bob nodded, and seemed to calm down a little.
“Have you called your folks yet? Do they know what’s happened?” Bob shook his head. “Okay. I’ll call them and have them come over here. Then I’d like to talk to you. Will that be okay?”
“Nothing happened,” Bob said. “We just came over here, found her, and called the cops.”
Finnerty patted the boy on the shoulder. “Okay. We’ll get the details in a little while.” He found the phone and the phone book, and spent the next five minutes assuring Dave Carey that his son was all right. Then he went back to the living room.
Slowly he pieced together the story. The longer he listened, the more he was sure he knew what had happened. It was a story he’d heard over and over during his years as a cop, but this was the first time in his experience that the story had ever ended in death. Only when Dave Carey arrived did Finnerty return to the kitchen.
Two detectives were there, and Finnerty watched in silence as they went over the room, methodically looking for clues as to what might have happened there.
“How’s it look?” he asked when Bill Ryan finally nodded to him.
Ryan shrugged. “Without talking to anybody, I’d say it was premeditated, and pretty cold. No signs of a fight, no signs of forced entry, no signs of rape.”
“If what the kids say is true, it was the husband. He was drunk, and they were having an argument when the girl left this morning. In fact, that’s why she left — her father was pissed at her, and her mother was trying to get him to lay off. The girl thinks her mother was going to try to get her father into detox today.”
“And he didn’t want to go.”
“Right.”
Suddenly the back door opened, and Tom Jackson appeared, his right arm supporting a bleary-eyed man whose hands were trembling and whose face was drawn. Without being told, Finnerty knew immediately who he was.
“Mr. Lewis?”
Alan Lewis nodded mutely, his eyes fastened on the sheet-covered form on the floor. “Oh, God,” he whispered.
“Read him his rights,” Ryan said. “Let’s see if we can get a confession right now.”
“I still can’t believe it,” Carol Cochran sighed. “I just can’t believe that Alan would have killed Marty, no matter how drunk he was.”
It was a little after nine, and the Cochrans had been at the Lonsdales’ since six-thirty. All through a dispirited dinner which had gone all but untouched, the Cochrans and the Lonsdales had been discussing what had happened in La Paloma that day. Now, as they sat in the still only partially furnished living room, with Lisa and Alex upstairs and Kim asleep in the guest room, the discussion threatened to go on right through the evening.
“Can’t we talk about something else?” Ellen wondered, although she knew the answer. All over La Paloma, there was only one thing being talked about tonight: did Alan Lewis kill his wife, or did someone else?
“Don’t ever underestimate what a drunk can do,” Marsh Lonsdale told Carol, ignoring his wife’s question.
“But Alan was always a harmless drunk. My God, Marsh, Alan’s not very effectual when he’s sober. And when he’s drunk, all he does is pass out.”
“Hardly,” Jim Cochran observed. “Last time I played golf with him, he wrapped his putter around a tree, and took a swing at me when I suggested maybe he ought to lay off the sauce.”
“That’s still a far cry from killing your wife,” Carol insisted.
“But there weren’t any signs of a struggle,” Marsh reminded her. “As far as the police can tell, Marty knew whoever killed her.”