They walked up the stairs and into the kitchen.
“You think maybe Richards told him to come in that way?”
“I have no way of knowing that,” replied Decker. “I don’t know who arranged the meeting or why. Or even if it was a meeting or just a shoot-the-breeze sort of thing.”
They arrived at the spot where David Katz had been shot.
“He fell here and the beer he was drinking hit the floor but didn’t break.”
“Okay. And then Don Richards was shot—”
Decker put up a hand. He had just downloaded something from his “cloud” that was not making sense.
“What?” said Mars, who had seen this expression before.
“Two things. The beer bottle was nearly empty when it hit the floor.”
“How do you know that?”
“The spill pattern and volume of beer on the floor.”
“Wouldn’t some of it have dried?”
“We took that into account.”
“Okay, so he drank the rest.”
Decker shook his head. “He had almost no beer in his stomach when they did the autopsy.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. And the second point?”
Decker closed his eyes and brought two images up in his head.
“Katz was right-handed. The print of his we found on the beer bottle was from his left hand.”
“Well, that’s weird. You didn’t see that before?”
“No, actually I did. But I didn’t place any great importance on it because sometimes you hold a drink in your other hand. We’ve all done it.”
“But now?”
“But now I’m looking at everything that doesn’t seem to fit.”
“And what does that tell you, looking at it that way?”
“That someone could have pressed his hand on the beer after he was dead, but used the wrong hand.”
“To make it look like he was drinking beer? Why would that matter?”
“I don’t know.”
Mars looked at Decker nervously. “And if there was almost no beer in his stomach, that wasn’t a red flag?”
“Should have been,” admitted Decker. He looked down at the floor. “But if Katz didn’t drink the beer, who did?” He eyed the kitchen sink. “Maybe it went down there.”
“To make it look like he’d drunk most of what was in the bottle?”
“If that was their plan, they didn’t know how postmortems work. Not that it made a difference since I completely missed that because I didn’t fully read the PM report.” He slammed his fist against the wall and then rubbed the cut the blow had produced. “The fact is, everything changed when we found the fingerprint, Melvin. I was really eager to get the person who’d done this. And that print led directly to Meryl Hawkins. Nothing else mattered at that point.”
“I get that, Decker. And I know you want to beat yourself up over this, and maybe you’re right to do it. But you got another chance to get it right, so clear your head, get rid of the guilt, and focus. I know you can do this, bro.”
Decker took a couple of deep, calming breaths. “Okay, the problem has always been, how did the killer or killers get here? They had to come down that one road and pass the other houses. No one saw them. There was no trace of another car, and there would have been.”
“Maybe they came on foot.”
“They had to have come to the house after the rain started. Yet there was not a single trace of that in the house. They might have been meticulous in cleaning up, but to not leave a single mark?” Decker shook his head in disbelief. “Not going to happen.”
“Well, what if the killers were in the house before the rain started. Then they ambushed Katz when he came in. And killed everybody else.”
Decker thought about this. “That means they would have come to the house in broad daylight with no rain to give them cover. Someone would have seen them coming down the road.”
“Maybe they came from behind the house and not down the road.”
“And waited hours to kill everyone? Why?”
“I don’t know,” admitted Mars. “Maybe they were trying to get some information from them before they murdered them.”
“That’s a possibility, Melvin. And an intriguing one.”
“So the only car found here was Katz’s?”
“That’s right. Susan Richards had one car and the other was in the shop for—”
Decker froze as another image dropped from his cloud to rest atop another.
“What is it, Decker?” asked Mars.
Decker came out of his reverie and said slowly, “Don Richards and his son, Frankie, were shot once in the chest, both through the heart. Nonsurvivable. But Katz was different. He was shot in the head, twice. Temple and the rear of the skull.” He looked over at Mars. “Why would that be? Why change the scenario for Katz?”
“Maybe he struggled with them or he ran off, and they had to shoot him in the head. Got him in the back and then in the temple.”
“The order of the wounds was actually the reverse of that. Temple first, then the back of the head. The temple shot undoubtedly would have been fatal. He would have fallen to the floor. Why shoot him again in the head when they knew he was already dead?”
Mars shook his head. “Doesn’t make sense.”
“Abigail was strangled, I believe, because that was the most plausible way to get Hawkins’s DNA under her fingernails. If they were that purpose-driven in the way they killed her, maybe there was a similar purpose behind shooting Katz twice in the head.”
“But what would that purpose be?”
Decker pantomimed a gun with his hand and held it to his temple. “Bang. The guy drops. They bend over him and, bang, shot to the back of the head.”
“Right, but why?”
Decker straightened and looked at his hand. “Because they wanted to cover something up that the temple shot didn’t accomplish.”
“What would that be?”
“Maybe a contusion on the back of his head.”
“From what?”
“From when he was knocked out. Before he was brought here to die.”
Chapter 37
A puzzled Mars looked at Decker. “Wait a minute, are you saying that he didn’t drive his car here?”
“His car was driven here, certainly, but who’s to say he was the one driving? We just assumed all along that it was him. I think it’s possible he was in the trunk or the backseat unconscious, and the killer or killers drove him here. The neighbors only saw the car, not the driver. They didn’t know Katz from Adam, so they couldn’t have identified him even if they had seen him.”
Mars said, “And that would explain why they parked the car in the back and came in that way.”
“Right, they couldn’t exactly carry an unconscious Katz in through the front door. And that would also explain his left-hand print on the beer. They just pressed his hand against it. They might not have known whether he was right- or left-handed. They just wanted it to look like he had come here of his own free will and was enjoying a beer when someone shot him.”
“But you said there was some beer in his stomach.”
“They could have revived him and made him drink some, or else they poured some down his throat while he was unconscious. And it would explain the absence of any marks by another car, and the lack of rain traces brought in by the killers. They were in the house before the rain started, not because they were here before Katz came as you speculated, but because they came with him. They left the house after the rain started and therefore wouldn’t have left any traces of it inside.”
“And if they left out the back on foot, the rain would have covered all those tracks.”