Ultimate Thriller Box Set - Crouch Blake - Страница 129

• Предыдущая
• 129/274
• Следующая

She got on her hands and knees, looking for hairs or other evidence. Found several graying hairs and some dog hairs but nothing long or blond. She took them as evidence.

Now for the refrigerator.

Lehman favored health foods, green leafy vegetables, white wine. A healthy guy. A neat guy and a healthy guy.

Expecting to move on pretty quickly, she slid out the crisper.

A chill crept up her back. The only occupant of the crisper was a screenplay. CANDY RIDE.

She hunkered down on her heels and aimed the MagLite at the script. After fixing its position in the crisper, she reached a gloved hand in and lifted it out.

She felt breathing on her neck. Buddy.

“Why would he keep a screenplay in the crisper?” Laura muttered.

Buddy shrugged. “To hide it, I guess. I wonder what’s so bad about it he has to hide it.”

Carefully, Laura pushed back the cardboard cover and read the first page.

Buddy, leaning over her, whistled, low.

The scene started with the abduction of a teenaged girl.

Buddy said, “Sick fuck.”

“You could look at it another way.”

“How?”

“I don’t know.”

“He hid it in the crisper.”

Laura stared at the first page, thinking that it could go either way. People wrote what came from their imaginations; it didn’t mean that they did what they wrote about. “Maybe he’s serious. Maybe he’s trying to sell a screenplay.”

Buddy just stared at her.

“Are you done with the bedroom?” she asked.

“I wanted to tell you. Couldn’t find anything in the bedclothes. He changed the sheets.”

“You sure?”

“They were black yesterday and they’re blue plaid now.”

She absorbed this. “He was afraid we’d come back.”

Buddy looked grim, which prompted her to ask, “What else?”

“What do you mean, what else?”

“There’s something else. What is it?”

“I think he vacuumed the bedroom. Place is so clean it’s sterile.”

Laura thought about the appliance surfaces. “He could just be a neat kind of guy.”

“Yes, except I checked his vacuum cleaner. And his hand vac. New bags.”

“So what he did, the minute we left, he vacuumed." She thought of something. “Why’d he leave the screenplay in the crisper?”

“He didn’t think we’d look there.”

“If it was me, I’d get rid of any evidence of it. He’d have to know we’d look in the refrigerator. He’d have to know we’d be thorough this time around.”

“How else do you explain it, then?”

“I don’t know. Did you find any floppy disks?”

“I found a box of them. Didn’t look at them, though. Some of these guys have a program where they can destroy everything on the hard disk if someone unauthorized logs on. No way I’d turn that puppy on.”

Laura concealed her disappointment. “He could hide e-mails on those disks, right?”

“Oh, sure he could." He straightened up and she heard his knees crack.

Forensics on a computer would take weeks, sometimes months, depending how careful he was in getting rid of any incriminating evidence. Just deleting files wouldn’t protect him for very long. Most of what was on his hard drive would be retrievable through various means, but it would take a long time.

She wondered if they’d finally find CRZYGRL12.

Ted Olsen stroked the beard lying on his chest as if it were a pet ferret. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “The mustache made a big difference.”

The owner of Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Show and Emporium squinted again at the row of six photographs on the table in the conference room at the Bisbee Police Department. He wore a polyester short-sleeved shirt, so thin Laura could see the individual hairs on his back. She noticed his odor, a peculiar combination of chicken soup and pencil shavings.

Buddy Holland alternated between leaning over him and pacing the small cubicle. “You sure?” he asked now. “Do you know any of these men?”

“That’s Chuck Lehman.”

“Think about what he’d look like if he had a mustache.”

Trying to influence the witness.

But Ted Olsen wouldn’t be influenced. His shifted onto one buttock and removed a snot-caked handkerchief from his back pocket, blew his nose. Leaned back and looked. Leaned forward so his eye was close to the photo. Leaned back again and scratched an armpit.

Milking it for all it was worth.

Finally he shook his head. “It could be Chuck. But I can’t tell without the mustache. He has blue eyes,” he added helpfully.

“What about his voice. Did his voice sound like Chuck’s?” Buddy asked.

Laura shot him a warning look, but he ignored her.

Olsen considered this, but finally shook his head. “I’m not sure, and I can’t put a man in jeopardy if I’m not sure.”

 “I think we’re done here,” Laura said wearily.

She was surprised at the virulence in the gaze Buddy shot her. He reached down and swept up the photos.

“Thank you for your help, sir,” Laura said.

He looked up at her. “Sorry I couldn’t help.”

“You did the right thing. If you could give me your opinion on these." She showed him photographs of the dress Jessica Parris had worn in death. “What about this dress? Do you recognize the pattern?”

He stroked his beard, then clasped his hands over his stomach. “Looks familiar … I never made that one.”

“Why not?” asked Buddy.

“Because I don’t like the sleeves. Too puffy.”

“But you’ve seen something like this before?”

“It could be in the catalog. Online.”

“And that would be?”

He marked them off on his fingers. “Inspirational Woman, Satin and Lace, Lynette’s Originals, Darcy’s Dress Shoppe …”

Laura wrote them down. “Must be a popular style.”

“It’s kind of alternative clothing, you know? The stuff girls wear today—kids in thongs, those midriff blouses.”

“You don’t like that kind of thing?” asked Laura.

“Nope. I should have been born in a different era. When women didn’t show everything they had.”

As Laura headed back to Tucson later in the day, she replayed her interview with Ted Olsen. After agreeing with him on the sad state of teenagers today and their lack of modesty, she’d eased into specific questions about his actions on the evening Jessica Parris disappeared. If he recognized that the thrust of the interview had changed, Laura didn’t see any evidence of it. He answered her questions innocently and with painstaking thoroughness, supplying the name of at least one person, a local woman, who had been to his shop that night. Her followup call to the customer corroborated his story.

Even though he made dresses and his shop was close to City Park, Laura found it hard to imagine this man killing Cary Statler and overpowering Jessica Parris. His shop was cluttered and dusty; his personal hygiene abominable. She couldn’t picture him scrupulously cleaning up Jessica with an almost scary attention to detail.

This driving back and forth between Bisbee and Tucson was getting old. Laura got some cheese crackers from the vending machine and headed to the squad bay. On the way, she ducked into the bathroom and gave herself a strip wash, using liquid soap from the dispenser and a half dozen small sheets of brown paper towels. It didn’t do much good. Her blouse was wrinkled and she still felt stale. She salved her lips, combed the sweat more evenly through her hair, and decided that was as good as it would get today.

Victor wasn’t at his desk, but he’d left her a copy of his autopsy notes.

It occurred to her that Victor wasn’t around much at all these days.

He seemed to be disconnecting from the case. She knew he was preoccupied with his wife and new daughter, not to mention his four other kids and the mistress everyone knew about but didn’t acknowledge. But it was more than that. He was acting as if the case were already solved and he had moved on.

Victor had always been a lazy investigator, but his charm made up for it. He was a brilliant interviewer and interrogator—had gotten some astounding confessions over the years. On the cases they’d worked together, his laxness in certain aspects of an investigation had never bothered her. She’d picked up the slack without complaint, not because she was a saint—she sure as hell wasn’t—but because she liked to keep her finger on the pulse of every case. She wanted to possess a case, know it up and down and inside out, the car parts on the tarp, so she could pounce down on any piece at any time. For this reason, she liked being teamed with Victor. He never got in her way.

• Предыдущая
• 129/274
• Следующая