The frown on LaTour’s face suggested he didn’t. But he said, “So you’re saying these two suicides’re different from most of the others in Westbrook.”
“Significantly different. Fewer than six percent of the population kill themselves when they’re facing a possibly terminal illness. That number drops to two point six percent when the victim has medical insurance and down to point nine when the net worth of the victim is over one million dollars. It drops even further when the victims are married and are in the relatively young category of sixty-five to seventy-five, like these folks. And love-pact deaths are only two percent of suicides nationwide and ninety-one percent of those involve victims under the age of twenty-one…Now, what do you think the odds are that two heart patients would take their own lives, and their wives’, in the space of two days?”
“I don’t really know, Tal,” LaTour said, clearly uninterested. “What else you got? Suspicious, I mean.”
“Okay, the Whitleys’d just bought a car earlier that day. Rare, antique MG. Why do that if you’re going to kill yourself?”
LaTour offered, “They needed a murder weapon. Didn’t want a gun. Probably there was something about the MG that meant something to them. From when they were younger, you know. They wanted to go out that way.”
“Makes sense,” Dempsey said, tugging at a sleeve.
“There’s more,” Tal said and explained about the gloves, the fiber, the tire tread, the smudges on the note. “I’m thinking that somebody else was there around the time they killed themselves. Or just after.”
LaTour said, “Lemme take a look.”
Tal pushed the report toward him. The big cop examined everything closely. Then shook his head. “I just don’t see it,” he said to the captain. “No evidence of a break-in or struggle…The note?” He shrugged. “Looks authentic. I mean, Documents’ll tell us for sure but look—” He held up the Whitleys’ checkbook ledger and the suicide note, side by side. The script was virtually identical. “Smudges from gloves on paper? We see that on every piece of paper we find at a scene. Hell, half the pieces of paper here have smudges on them that look like smeared FRs—”
“FRs?”
“Friction ridges,” LaTour muttered. “Fingerprints. Smudges — from the manufacturer, stockers, getting moved around on shelves.”
“The fiber?” LaTour leaned forward and lifted a tiny white strand off Tal’s suit jacket. “This’s the same type the Crime Scene found. Cotton worsted. See it all the time in clothing. The fibers at the Whitleys’ could’ve come from anywhere. It might’ve come from you.” Shuffling sloppily through the files with his massive paws. “Okay, the gloves and the tread marks? Those’re Playtex kitchen gloves; I recognize the ridges. No perps ever use them because the wear patterns can be traced…” He held up the checkbook ledger again. “Lookit the check the wife wrote today. To Esmeralda Costanzo, ‘For cleaning services.’ The housekeeper was in yesterday, cleaned the house wearing the gloves — maybe she even straightened up the stack of paper they used later for the suicide note, left the smudges then. The tread marks? That’s about the size of a small import. Just the sort that a cleaning woman’d be driving. They were hers. Bet you any money.”
Though he didn’t like the man’s message, Tal was impressed at the way his mind worked. He’d made all those deductions — extremely logical deductions — based on a three-minute examination of the data.
“Got a case needs lookin’ at,” LaTour grumbled and tossed the report onto Tal’s desk. He clomped back to his office.
Breaking the silence that followed, Dempsey said, “Hey, I know you don’t get out into the field much. Must get frustrating to sit in the office all day long, not doing…you know…”
Real police work? Tal wondered if that’s what the captain was hesitating to say.
“More active stuff” turned out to be the captain’s euphemism. “You probably feel sometimes like you don’t fit in.”
He’s probably at home humping his calculator…
“We’ve all felt that way sometimes. Honest. But being out in the field’s not what it’s cracked up to be. Not like TV, you know. And you’re the best at what you do, Tal. Statistician. Man, that’s a hard job. An important job. Let’s face it”—lowering his voice—“guys like Greg wouldn’t know a number if it jumped out and bit ’em on the ass. You’ve got a real special talent.”
Tal weathered the condescension with a faint smile, which obscured the anger beneath his flushed face. The speech was clearly out of a personnel management training manual. Dempsey had just plugged in “statistician” for “traffic detail” or “receptionist.”
“Okay, now, don’t you have some numbers to crunch? We’ve got that midyear assignment meeting coming up and nobody can put together a report like you, my friend.”
Monday evening’s drive to the Whitleys’ house took him considerably longer than the night before, since he drove the way he usually did: within the speed limit, perfectly centered in his lane (and with the belt firmly clasped this time).
Noting how completely he’d destroyed the shrubs last night, Tal parked in front of the door and ducked under the crime scene tape. He stepped inside, smelling again the sweet, poignant scent of the wood smoke from the couple’s last cocktail hour.
Inside their house — a side door was unlocked — he pulled on latex gloves he’d bought at a drugstore on the way here (thinking only when he got to the checkout lane: Damn, they probably have hundreds of these back in the detective pen). Then he began working his way through the house, picking up anything that Crime Scene had missed that might shed some light on the mystery of the Whitleys’ deaths.
Greg LaTour’s bluntness and Captain Dempsey’s pep talk, in other words, had no effect on him. All intellectually honest mathematicians welcome the disproving of their theorems as much as the proving. But the more LaTour had laid out the evidence that the 2124 was wrong, the more Tal’s resolve grew to get to the bottom of the deaths.
There was an odd perfect number out there, and there was something unusual about the deaths of the Bensons and the Whitleys; Tal was determined to write the proof.
Address books, Day-Timers, receipts, letters, stacks of papers, piles of business cards for lawyers, repairmen, restaurants, investment advisors, accountants. He felt a chill as he read one for some New Age organization, the Lotus Foundation for Alternative Treatment, tucked in with all the practical and mundane cards, evidence of the desperation of rational people frightened by impending death.
A snap of floorboard, a faint clunk. A metallic sound. It startled him. He’d parked in the front of the house; whoever’d arrived would know he was here. The police tape and crime scene notice were clear about forbidding entry and since this was clearly not a “case” in anybody’s mind but his he doubted that the visitor was a cop.
And he realized with a start a corollary of his theorem that the Whitleys might have been murdered was, of course, that there might be a murderer, a person not at all pleased about his investigating the deaths.