“He wouldn’t have been coming here, that’s the one thing we know.” Jake ran a finger down the strip of the yellow tape sealing the perimeter of Lillian Finch’s front door. “Lillian Finch was dead, been dead for about two days when Niall Brannigan arrived. The back door’s taped up now, too. So no way was he inside this house.”
“True,” DeLuca said. “Seems like.”
Jake turned, looked out over the tree-lined Margolin Street, mostly empty front porches and empty driveways, each house with one blue and one green plastic trash bin wheeled to the sidewalk, waiting for the morning pickup. Each house with a shoveled front walk, concrete or flagstone or pavers, lined with browned grass and muddy flowerbeds. Was Niall Brannigan dragged down along one of them? Which one? “So. Police 101. His car was parked across the street. Who saw it?”
“The what’s-her-name woman, funny hat, remember? Any leads there?”
Jake pulled out his BlackBerry, following DeLuca’s gaze. “Dolly Richards. Hennessey and Kurtz say not. Their report says they hit every door half a block up, half a block back, and got zippo. According to their canvass yesterday P.M, no residents knew Niall Brannigan, no one’s positive they’d ever seen his car here before. So if you believe the Kurtz and Hennessey version of the world, we’re-”
“Screwed.”
“Yeah.” Jake ran the zipper of his jacket up and down, thinking. “The only logical reason Niall Brannigan would have come to Margolin Street is to see Lillian Finch-someone he knew wasn’t home. And to go inside a place he couldn’t possibly enter.”
“Even if for some reason he had a key, right? The place is sealed.”
Keys. Which only reminded Jake of the arrest of Curtis Ricker and the woodshed meeting in the Supe’s office that morning. First Jake had to admit he was iffy on the Ricker arrest, not the best beginning to an already inauspicious morning. After that, the Supe read them the riot act about the Brannigan thing, wondering why he and D hadn’t spotted the telltale mud pattern on the vic’s pants. A damn good question, and Jake didn’t exactly want to face the answer. What’s more, the mud evidence turned a natural into a potential homicide, and made Jake’s workload nearly impossible. Tillson. Finch. Brannigan. The baby. Even though no one else thought there was a baby.
And Jane.
Jake didn’t need easy. But he wouldn’t mind trying it about now.
“Yeah. The whole thing sucks.” Keys. “Okay. The keys. Niall Brannigan didn’t have any keys. No car keys, no house keys. Those keys are somewhere. Wherever he’d been. We have to canvass again.”
D took out his spiral notebook, flipped to a new page. “I live for door to doors, you know that.”
“You take this side, I’ll take that side.” Jake ignored D’s sarcasm, pointing his BlackBerry toward the cul de sac, then toward the cross street. They had no time. “You got a photo? There’s an hour before Brannigan’s funeral. That’s one hour to find out where the hell Niall Brannigan was going, and why. And some kind of a lead on who dragged him to his car.”
“That’s why we get the big police bucks,” DeLuca said. “Just another morning in paradise, redoing what Frick and Frack allegedly did already. Followed by a funeral.”
“Hang on.” Jake scanned the case notes Kurtz and Hennessey compiled, searching for a question and answer he’d realized was not there.
“You got to be kidding me,” Jake said. “Did those two bozos ever think to just ask Brannigan’s wife where he was going?”
52
“Is Carlyn Beerman related to Snow White?” Jane buzzed down her window, looking at the shingled cottage with the white gingerbread shutters. She’d parked on the side of the winding road near the white-posted mailbox marked 4102 North Ritter Lane. A wreath of greenery entwined with tiny red berries decorated the bright yellow front door, and a redwood birdfeeder on a metal pole twittered with starlings and fluttering sparrows.
“I know. Kind of Disney,” Tuck said. “She didn’t seem so-whatever this is-when we met at that hotel. I’d pictured a condo. Maybe a cat. Oh. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”
“Thanks. Least she’s not, you know, the evil one. Not in a middle-of-nowhere Hallmark card like this. But there’s no car in the driveway.”
“So what? There’s a garage.”
“Hey.” Jane pointed to one of the curtained front windows. “Curtain moved. Second from the left. Someone’s inside.”
As they watched, the curtain was pulled pack, and a woman’s face, barely visible, peeked out.
“That’s her.” Tuck unsnapped her seat belt, clicked open the car door. “You ready? We’re doing this.”
“I don’t care that your computer went down last night.” Jake couldn’t believe they were giving him such a hard time. “You’re the assessor’s office. I did mention this is Detective Brogan, Boston PD, correct? Happy to send a couple of uniforms over to pull the info, of course, but I figured you might prefer to do it this way… Sure. Delighted to hold.”
D had swerved the cruiser into a no-standing spot in front of All Saints Church, where Niall Brannigan’s funeral was scheduled to begin in fifteen minutes. Their neighborhood canvass resulted in absolute zero. Lots of nobody-homes. Nobody admitted to recognizing Niall Brannigan. A few were maybes on the green car. “I might have seen it” was about as specific as anyone got. No times or dates.
According to Kurtz, who alleged she had asked but “forgot to write it down,” Brannigan’s wife, Ardith, had no idea why her husband would have been on Margolin Street Monday night.
“She told me her husband was always off somewhere, that he never told her where,” Kurtz had reported when Jake called. “Said she’d ‘given up’ asking.”
“You set?” DeLuca unclicked his seat belt, drained the last of his coffee, tossed the empty cup onto the floor of the backseat.
“I’m still on hold with City Hall,” Jake said. “But what about the wife? Do we maybe like her for it? What she told Kurtz sounds like there was trouble in the Brannigan marriage. Right? ‘Always off somewhere’ and ‘given up asking’ is pretty much wife shorthand for a lying husband. Maybe Ardith killed Lillian.”
DeLuca nodded, considering. “I hear ya.”
“Okay. Say Brannigan is having an affair with Lillian Finch. The wife suspects.”
“So Ardith kills Lillian. Then, after Brannigan himself has a fortuitous heart attack, somewhere, the wife drives her dead husband to the love shack and leaves the body. And takes his keys. And where does she go, then?” D spun out a theory. “Pretty elaborate. I’ve seen weirder, sure. Still. Unlikely.”
“Yeah. But Brannigan had to be going there.” Jake heard the sound change on the cell phone, and raised a palm to put D on hold. “Yes, I’ll keep waiting. Okay, D, how about-what?”
“Well, maybe it’s not suicide. Maybe Brannigan offed Lillian Finch. For some reason? Even-an affair gone sour.” DeLuca pointed at Jake. “Hey. What if he was going to retrieve evidence? Then discovered the place was sealed, thwarting his plans, and then he had a heart attack.”
“Thwarting,” Jake said. “Good one. That works, except for the mud thing. And the missing key thing. Sure would be helpful to know how Lillian Finch died. Confirm it’s a suicide or not. Can’t you push your Kat on those tox screens?”
“She’s not ‘my’ Kat,” DeLuca said. “Tox screens take weeks, you know that.”
“Okay, yes, I’m here.” Jake told the voice on the phone. “And have been, for-Yes, I have a pen.”
Jake listened as the clerk at City Hall read him the ownership information for 343 Edgeworth Street, Curtis Ricker’s house.