“What are you getting at, Sergeant?”
Marge said, “I’m the sergeant, he’s the lieutenant.”
Decker said, “You can probably tell serious buyers from those who don’t belong. Maybe you remember someone from Sunday who looked like he or she didn’t belong? Take your time before answering.”
“I need a smoke,” Adele said. Before she pulled out her cigarette, Decker was there with the match. She blew out a plume of vaporized tobacco and wrinkled her brow-as best she could wrinkle her brow. Botox was doing its job. The agent sighed. “The place was a mob scene.”
“How about right before you were ready to lock up?” Decker said. “Anyone walk out of the place with you?”
The agent paused. “Now that you mention it, there were a few people hanging around. You know, trying to sweet-talk me into looking at their offers. One couple in particular… wait, wait… there was this young guy… I almost locked him in the house.”
Decker nodded. “Could you describe him to a police artist for a sketch?”
“Yes, I think I could. And I might even be able to do you one better. He might have signed my sheet. I don’t know if it’s his real name and phone number, but it’s better than what you’ve got right now.”
“What we’ve got is nothing,” Decker said.
“That’s why what I’ve got is better.”
Over the phone, Medical Examiner Dr. Charles Angelo told Decker that he had extracted scrapings from under the nails. “I’ll try to get the material into the lab sometime this week. How long the lab takes to get you a genetic profile is anyone’s guess. They’re backlogged over a year.”
“Maybe you can put a rush on it?”
“I can try, but you haven’t even ID’d the vic yet, let alone have a perp to match it to. This isn’t going to be high priority.” How right he was. Decker said, “Do the best you can.” “I do have other news for you. The vic was pregnant.” Decker cursed silently. “How many months?” “It wasn’t an embryo, but it wasn’t as far along as a fetus, either. Maybe a little over three months. Interesting to see if the genetic material under the nails matches to the father of the baby.”
As he passed out copies of the composite drawing, Decker regarded the sketch and winced. It featured a nondescript man in his thirties. Adele had told the police artist that he had a young face but a receding hairline; dark eyes, thin lips, average build. She remembered that he had a mole over his right eyebrow, and that was about the only distinguishing mark on him. Decker supposed he should stop bitching. Every little bit helped.
The detectives were sitting in the conference room in the Devonshire division of the LAPD. Five of them around the table, drinking cold coffee while comparing notes. Not much to talk about, but still the theories abounded.
Decker said, “So this is what I think happened. This guy came in on Sunday, looking the place over, acting like a prospective buyer. That way he could open and close the closet doors and look around without arousing any suspicion. He waits until the agent has locked up, then surreptitiously unlocks the back door. Then he pretends that he didn’t know she was about to leave and says something like, ‘Hey, wait for me!’ They walk out together. She’s not going to go back and check all the doors. She just assumes he was entranced by a toilet or something. So they just walk out together. Then he comes back on Monday night to dump the body.”
“But the agent came on Monday afternoon and checked out the closets,” Marge reminded him. “I’m sure she locked all the doors, Loo.”
“Maybe he came through a window?” Oliver suggested. “The agent would check the doors but not the windows.”
“I like that,” Decker said. “You’ll notice I’m using ‘he’ for the murderer. It could have been a she. It’s just a pain in the ass to say ‘he or she’ every time.”
Wanda Beautemps spoke up. She was in her fifties and the newest member of Homicide. “If he was looking for a place to dump the body, then are we thinking that the girl was already dead on Sunday?”
“Not necessarily,” Decker said. “The deputy coroner thinks that she was murdered about twenty-four hours before we found her, which would put her death sometime on Monday.”
“So he finds the dump spot before he kills the girl?”
“Perhaps,” Decker said. “That would imply premeditation. We’re checking everyone on the sign-in sheet, but so far we don’t have a hit. Adele’s description to the police artist is the best we have so far. If anyone identifies the guy, don’t go over and confront him. Don’t even talk to him. Let’s just identify him, find out who he is, where he lives, where he works. He could be a completely innocent schnook. Let’s try to avoid a lawsuit.” He looked at Lee Wang. “Are we anywhere close to identifying the vic?”
Wang checked his notes, written in a sloppy hand. He always claimed his Chinese handwriting was much better than his English penmanship, except that Lee was a born-and-bred American. “Nothing from our canvassing yesterday. I’ve been checking Missing Persons in the Valley-LAPD. That’s been a fat zero. I haven’t checked Burbank or San Fernando or Simi or the city. I’ll keep working on it.”
“Good,” Decker said. “Go out and canvass the area for this guy. And good luck.”
“Matthew Lombard,” Marge said. “He’s thirty-one and lives about four miles away, married with two kids. He works as a junior lawyer at a downtown firm.”
“You canvassed four miles from the house?”
“One of the clerks at the local 7-Eleven says Matthew comes in every day for coffee and a doughnut before he goes to work. He said it could be him. The face, he wasn’t so sure, but the mole, maybe. The guy doesn’t have any kind of a sheet.”
“All right, Margie, this is what I want you to do. Go get a black-and-white snapshot of him, put it in a six-pack, and see if Adele can pick him out. You can probably pull something off Google-yearbook graduation picture, something like that.”
“Not a problem. Some of the search engines have a ‘show me an image’ feature. No privacy anymore. Not that anyone wants privacy, judging from the moronic reality shows on TV.”
“That’s for certain. You tell the grocery clerk to keep quiet?”
“I told him if he didn’t, I’d check out his green card. I don’t think we have anything to worry about.”
The interview room had a table and four chairs. Adele Michaels sat on one side, Detective Scott Oliver across from her. She was playing with her pack of cigarettes, looking nervous. Oliver laid the photo spread-six front-face pictures, five stooges and Lombard, matched for age, race, size, and features. It took the real estate agent approximately twenty seconds.
“That’s him!” Adele hit the black-and-white of Lombard. “That’s the guy I almost locked in the house. He kept asking me questions.”
“Thank you, Ms. Michaels,” Oliver said.
“Do I get to pick him out of a lineup now?”
“No, ma’am. As far as we know, the man hasn’t done anything wrong except stay too late at your open house. If you see him again, don’t mention anything about this, okay?”
“Why would I see him again?”
“Maybe he was a legitimate buyer.” Oliver shrugged. “Or… not accusing anyone, but sometimes people who do nasty things enjoy returning to the scene of the crime.”
“No chance of that,” Adele said. “Body or no body, the house sold.”
“After going through the recent Missing Persons files in the Valley, San Fernando, Burbank, and Glendale, I came up with a dozen possibilities,” Wang told Decker. They were sitting in the Loo’s office. Decker was in his chair, Wang standing over the desk. “Unfortunately-or happily, for the families-nothing panned out.”