“I’ve been keeping an eye on Rut’s house ever since he moved out,” Nan explained to Des, standing there barefoot in the middle of Maple Lane, her eyes huge with fright. Nan had her big yellow Lab close to her on a leash. Her two boys were right by her side. “Rut still has a lot of his furniture here. His silver, some antiques. I-I thought I heard someone messing around over there.”
“Messing around as in…?”
“Tromping around in the brush. Maybe trying to break in. I didn’t know. And then Josie started barking her fool head off, so I figured I’d better call it in.”
“You figured right, Nan. Did you see anyone fleeing the scene? Anyone at all?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“How about you guys?” Des asked the boys.
Phillip shrugged his narrow shoulders. “We were in bed.”
“Past our bedtime,” Peter chimed in, nodding his head.
“Sure, I get you,” Des said easily. “You’d turned in for the night, lights out. But Josie’s got a mighty big bark. Maybe she woke you up. Did you hear anything? Or maybe go to the window and see somebody?”
The boys exchanged a long, hard look before Phillip said, “No.” His voice was very firm. “Nothing.”
“Nothing,” echoed his younger brother, blue eyes gleaming.
The last to arrive from Meriden was a two-person team of homicide investigators from the Major Crime Squad, led by Lieutenant Rico “Soave” Tedone, who’d been Des’s semibright weasel of a sergeant back in her glory days. Soave was still working on that goatee and shaved-head look. And still not quite making it happen. He was a bulked-up bodybuilder but way short and way, way insecure. Not that he had a thing to worry about. Soave was wired right into the Waterbury Mafia, the tightly knit clan of Italian-American brothers, cousins and in-laws who pretty much ran the Connecticut State Police. Soave’s older brother, Angelo, and Angelo’s brother-in-law, Carl Polito, were high up on the ladder-right there under Deputy Superintendent Buck Mitry.
Des made her way down to the foot of Maple Lane and said, “Evening, Rico. How’s Tawny?”
“Big as an Escalade,” he answered proudly. The man had finally married his girlfriend of nine years and she was currently expecting their first child. Real? Des found it hard to imagine Soave as someone’s, anyone’s, father. But it was going to happen. Life went on. “The baby’s due any day now. I never know from one minute to the next when I’ll be flooring it to the hospital.”
“You’re just lucky you got such quality backup, little man.” His partner, Sergeant Yolanda Snipes, showed Des her huge smile. “Miss Thing, I have been missing you.”
“Back at you, Yolie.”
“What have you got for us, Des?” Soave wanted to know. “No, wait, don’t tell me. It’s Saturday night in quaint, cozy Dorset, where everyone is rich and WASP-y and perfect. So I’m going out on a limb here: It’s whack.”
“It’s all that, Rico. And more.”
“Break it down, will you?”
“Break it down?” Yolie let out a guffaw. “Sorry, is MC Hammer back in the house and no one told me?”
“My bad,” he growled at her. The two of them bickered nonstop. It was how they communicated. “Please run it for us. Yo, is that cool enough for you?”
“Yo, I’m cool twenty-four/seven,” Yolie fired back, her Latina’s liquid brown eyes twinkling at Des. She was a brash, fearless, hard charger with braided hair out of Hartford’s tough Frog Hollow section-half Cuban, half black and all pit bull. Yolie had put on twenty pounds of rock-hard muscle since she’d played the point for Coach Vivian Stringer at Rutgers. Her knit top was cropped at the shoulders, tattoos adorning both of her bulging biceps. Barefoot, she stood five feet nine. In her chunky heels she towered over Soave. Intimidated the hell out of him. Intimidated most of the men in the state police. She was tough, smart and she didn’t do well around fools. “Talk to me, girl-how’s your cute boy Mitch?”
“It’s going great. We’ve never been happier.”
“When are you two getting married?”
“It’s going great. We’ve never been happier.”
“I hear you. Won’t go near there no more.” Yolie heaved a sigh. “Me, I can’t even get a man to ask me out for a cup of coffee. Don’t matter whether he’s black, white or mauve…” She’d had a brief thing with Soave’s cousin Richie back when Richie was on Narcotics, but he was married now. “Is there something wrong with my personal hygiene?”
“Not a thing, Yolie. You’re terrific.”
“Yo, can we talk about the dead guy now?” Soave demanded.
“First I’d better give you a little background, Rico. We have an ongoing situation that began two weekends ago. A certain party in a ski mask who’s been-”
“This would be your weenie waver, right? Channel Eight was all over that. The news anchors could barely keep a straight face.”
“Yeah, it’s been a laugh riot-until now.”
Soave raised his chin at her. “Keep talking.”
“He’s been leaving presents, too. I got a special delivery on my very own welcome mat last night-a nice, fresh turd of human origin.”
Yolie blinked at her. “Ow, that’s just disgusting.”
“And our victim…?”
“Mr. Donatelli moved here ten months ago. He was a widower. Also a retired New York City police detective.”
Soave made a face. “Damn, that means his buds will be all over this.”
“He lived and worked two doors down, at the Captain Chadwick House. It’s a high-end condo complex. He was caretaker there, although the head of the board assured me he’d be getting bounced soon. The man was an obnoxious boor as well as a drinker. Never around when the tenants needed him. Plus he was borderline stalking one of them, a good-looking widow named Beth Breslauer.” Des shoved her heavy horn-rimmed glasses up her nose. “Between us, I thought that he might be the Dorset Flasher. So I was tailing him on foot just now when it all-”
“Wait, wait,” Yolie broke in. “You witnessed the murder?”
“Yes and no. I saw him leave his apartment. Pursued him as he made his way through the brush in the vicinity of the crime scene. I was definitely nearby when it happened. Heard a blow struck. Heard someone running away. Maybe one person. Maybe more than one. I can’t be sure because I couldn’t see a damned thing. A neighbor, Nan Sidell, heard someone prowling around and called it in. But she didn’t see anybody either.”
Soave thumbed his moustache, pondering this. “So, what, someone else besides you was following him?”
“That’s certainly one possibility.”
“Who would want to do that?”
“That all depends, Rico. If Augie was, in fact, the Dorset Flasher, then what we’re looking at here could be an unsubtle form of payback.”
He stared at her. “You mean like a vigilante killing?
“I do.”
“Whoa, I don’t like the sound of that at all. Is there another scenario?”
“That Augie was out here following the Dorset Flasher himself-once a cop, always a cop. Yesterday, he suggested to me that he might have an idea who our man was. I advised him to stay out of it. Could be he didn’t follow my advice. Could be our Dorset Flasher graduated to the big time tonight.”
“Killed Augie Donatelli to conceal his identity?”
“Exactly.”
“Any chance it’s none of the above?” Yolie wondered. “How about this neighbor? What’s up with her?”
“Nan tips the scales at ninety-five pounds, tops, and has no motive.”
“We know this for a fact?”
“Yolie, we don’t know anything for a fact. And I have to lay something else on you folks that you’re not going to like. Augie and I had a public altercation yesterday. He did a lot of yelling and ended up flat on his butt.”
“You hit him?”
“I didn’t so much as touch him, Rico. He was drunk, that’s all.”
“But there were witnesses?”
“Several.”
“And now the man’s dead and you were on the scene when it happened. Des, is there any way a district prosecutor could mount a reasonable argument that you’re actually a suspect in this murder?”