“Sure,” said Melissa.
“Okay,” I said, “now, I don't want you to take this in the wrong way at all. But I'd like to know if either of you could tell me if Edie was doing any dope, or alcohol, or anything even prescription, that could affect her moods.”
“Is that really your business?” asked Melissa. “Not to be taken in the wrong way, of course.”
“Fair question,” I said. “The answer is, probably wasn't my business yesterday. Now that she's dead, and my problem for now, yep, it is.”
“Aren't you going to do a blood test? I mean, won't you know from that?”
“Sure. But it won't be back for a few days, and when it arrives, it only gives the chemical information, not the substance. You know… it might say acetaminophen, but not a brand name. So if she took Tylenol for a headache, say, it would be a help to know that. That sort of thing.” I was also fishing for a known substance, although I didn't say that. A blood scan for everything cost a fortune, and took forever. You had to give them parameters.
“Oh,” said Hanna. “Oh, sure. Well, I know she'd drink a beer now and then, maybe some wine. No dope…?” and she looked at Melissa.
It was hard not to grin.
“She smoked clove cigarettes,” said Melissa quickly.
“That's it.”
“Okay,” I said, making a note. “You do know what those are?” Melissa wasn't being insulting, she was just a sincere twenty-something talking to a fifty-something. Usually, the only people my age she'd be likely to know were her parents, aunts, and uncles.
I smiled. “Either of your parents cops?”
“What?”
“I strongly suspect that your folks and I have vastly different, oh… What? Life experiences?”
“My father's a minister and my mother is a music teacher.” She paused as it dawned on her. “Oh.” A small smile started forming on her lips.
“Right. I think we definitely move in different circles.” The small smile grew larger, into a full-fledged one. “I'd say so.”
“And the real point's this: If she did occasional dope here, that's something we have to know. If there's a fair concentration in her fluids, and she did it here, that's one thing. If there's the same concentration and she didn't do it here, that's another thing altogether.”
Both the young women looked away from me as soon as I said that. I attributed it to the fact that there was probably at least some dope in the house, even as we spoke.
The phone in the hallway rang, and Hanna answered it. It was for me. As I left the room, I could hear both young women talking to each other in low tones. My best guess was that they were discussing narcotics.
I answered the phone. “Houseman.”
“Hey, no kidding?” Sally, at the office.
“Yeah. What's up?”
“There was a man here, came to talk with Lamar. Lamar said for you to talk with him instead, because he was going to have some family things to attend to.”
“Sure, okay.” Great. Not that I didn't understand, but I really didn't need the distractions, either. Ah, well. I could never say that Lamar didn't delegate.
“Man's name is”-she paused just an instant, so that I knew she was reading from her notes-“William Chester, from Milwaukee.”
My first thought was a pathologist that Harry had contacted regarding the death of Randy Baumhagen, late boyfriend of Alicia Meyer. “What does he do? Or want?”
“Beats me. He looks pretty straight arrow, though. About forty, but that's not all bad. Nice eyes. Slender. Still has all his hair… ”
“That's not quite what I wanted.”
She laughed. “I don't know. Not an attorney, that's for sure. I asked Lamar that, 'cause I knew you'd just shit-pardon the expression-if we sent somebody like an attorney up there.”
“You sent him here?”
“Well, to Freiberg. He'll get hold of Byng or somebody, and connect up with you later on. Not at the Mansion, though.”
“Okay.” That was a relief. “Anything else?”
“Nope. Lamar just said to let you know. He's over at his sister's, I think.”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, and guess what?”
I was too tired to play. “Tell me.”
“I'm assigned to duty as a reserve tonight, up there! Isn't that just so cool?”
I grinned to myself. “It's cool. Just remember to bring cookies.”
At that point, Hester and Toby came back. Hester was holding a legal pad, making the final touches to a diagram of the second floor. She handed it to me. According to her diagram, Edie's room was the first one at the top of the stairs, on the right. The northeast corner. The next room on her side of the hall was Toby's; the room after that was Hanna's. Across the hall from Edie was Melissa in the southeast corner, then Holly, known as Huck, and then Kevin.
“They're all about the same,” she said. “Basically thirty-six-foot by eighteen-foot rooms, with a dividing wall for the individual bathrooms at about ten feet from the end.”
Like I said, it was a big house. Over a hundred feet long, and about forty-five feet wide.
Hester handed me the pink copy of the “Seized Property” form, listing the knife from the tub. “It's from a set in the kitchen,” she said. “No doubt at all.”
As they sat down, Melissa handed the copy of the Freiberg Tribune and Dispatch to Toby. “Seen this?”
Toby looked a bit surprised, said he hadn't, and opened it up. He looked up at Melissa, rather startled.
“That's freaky,” he said, mostly to her.
I was curious. “What?”
“The bit about Dracula,” he said. “Just floating outside the second-floor window, I mean. Wow.”
“I'm sure he had help,” I said.
Melissa joined in. “In what way?”
“Oh,” I said conversationally, “I'd think a rope, for example.” I forced a chuckle. “He wasn't flying.”
“Did you, you know, find a rope?” Her large eyes were very steady on mine.
“No, but we found ringbolts.” I shrugged. “It's just a matter of the mechanics of the thing.”
“I'm sure you'll find an explanation,” said Melissa.
Hanna suddenly apologized for being a bad hostess, and asked if anyone else wanted coffee. We all did. We spent the next half hour discussing suicide, death, and how friends should deal with it. To me, it seemed that Hanna was by far the most affected by Edie's death. While she was telling Hester just how she'd found the body, I started to think about the possibilities we had. Somehow, it seemed to me that it just damned well shouldn't be this hard to determine the cause and method of death. What had we missed?
Hester interjected a new item. “Did you know the whole third floor is sealed off?”
“No.”
“Yes. It's the owner's private apartment, and nobody can go there unless she's here. According to Toby, here.” She shrugged. “The doors to that floor are both locked, anyway. Keyed. New.”
“That's right,” said Melissa. “We just never go up there unless Jessica's here.”
Hester looked up toward the ceiling. “Must be a pretty damned big apartment.”
The whole third floor would be about four thousand square feet. I could only agree.
There's a rule of thumb in homicide investigations, whereby you either solve the murder in the first forty-eight hours, or the investigation will drag on for months before an arrest is made, if ever.
It was beginning to look like we'd be lucky to know whether or not this was even a suicide in forty-eight hours.
Then some people arrived who would irrevocably tip the scales.
EIGHT
Saturday, October 7, 2000
14:50
I could see, through the glazed entrance, three vehicles pulling up to the front of the house. One of our marked squads, being followed closely by a dark blue SUV that just had to belong to my favorite forensic pathologist, Dr. Steven Peters. Third in line was an older, silver-gray Plymouth Voyager. That one I didn't recognize.
Since it was officially my crime scene, I went to the door with Hester, while Borman stayed with the three residents in the parlor. Although they were far from suspects at this point, it was always a good idea to have somebody about to gauge reactions, and to prevent any lengthy conversations. Just in case.