Rite of Wrongs Page 3

  His frown deepened. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m asking—”

  “Our kids are in elementary school, Detective. They’re not even teens.”

  She let that go. He didn’t need to know the things she’d seen young kids do. She clicked off her pen, used it to scratch at her hairline behind her ear. “So, you or your wife never had arguments with any of their friends’ parents?”

  “No. Never.” He was adamant.

  Unlikely, but okay. “What about you and your wife’s friends?”

  He shook his head, kept shaking it, as if dislodging mites or fleas. “I don’t even understand what you’re asking me. Gina gets along with everyone she meets.”

  Looking down at her notebook, Miriam weighed several questions but wasn’t sure she was going to get anything solid from the doctor at this point. His emotional wreckage was understandable, and she really hated to push, but time was everything when it came to murder.

  “Tell me about your practice,” she said, switching gears again, hoping to cover as many angles as she could before he completely shut down. “Have you or your partners received any threats?”

  “It’s a pediatric clinic, for God’s sake. It’s not like we perform abortions.” And then he buried his face in his hands, and he sobbed, bent and broken, his pain causing a sharp hitch of another sort in Miriam’s chest.

  She gave him a moment to compose himself, drawing a series of tiny boxes down her notebook’s next blank page. Later, she’d go through her notes and the evidence collected and jot down every single question that came to mind. A line for each, and each easily checked off as answered. Those left open moved to a new list at the end of the day.

  It was how she kept her thoughts organized. It was also how she kept from losing them in a jumble of notes. Balancing as many cases as she did . . .

  “Do your children have a nanny or sitter, or tutors who come to the house?”

  He shook his head, then nodded. “We have a sitter when Gina and I go out. A neighbor’s daughter. She’s fourteen, I think.”

  “Were you having any repairs done?” If necessary, Miriam would come back to the sitter later and jotted herself an appropriate note.

  He answered with another shake of his head.

  “Anything being installed? Satellite TV, maybe?” More shaking. “Did you have a service call of any sort scheduled for today?” The shaking was vigorous now, Dr. Gardner’s hair flying. “Any reason for a workman to have come inside?”

  “Detective Rome?”

  She looked up at Ballard’s question. She hadn’t even heard the door open. “Yes?”

  “The kids are outside.” He nodded toward the doctor. “We should probably give Dr. Gardner a few minutes before they come in.”

  Blowing out a slow breath, Miriam slipped her pen into the loop on her notebook, then stood. She hated the interruption. She could do this all day. But Ballard was right. The horror show had only just begun.

  “Thank you, Detective. And thank you, Dr. Gardner.” She offered the grieving man her hand, then when he paid her no mind, let it fall. “We’ll speak again soon.”

  FIVE

  Monday, 6:00 p.m.

  Dot Lacey stared out through the big bay window at the lush green lawn and watched her children toss the Frisbee she’d picked up while she’d been in Wackers buying toilet paper.

  The red disk sailed across the yard. Someone jumped for it. She squinted but couldn’t see who, then someone else leaped even higher, and they fell together, wrestling until one of the boys ran up and grabbed it away. He walked off, taking the Frisbee with him, yelling back at the others. Then another of the children shoved him, shutting him up.

  Oh, how she wished her eyes hadn’t failed her. And that she’d purchased two of the toys. One red and one blue. And she should’ve allowed the children to keep the dog who’d followed them home from school. Dogs loved Frisbees, too. The next time she was in Wackers, she’d buy a Frisbee for everyone, and extras for any dogs who happened by.

  There was no such thing as too many Frisbees. Or too many dogs. Or children.

  She loved her children, every one of them, and wished so often she’d been blessed with more, but those no-good husbands of hers—

  “Miss Dottie?”

  She closed her eyes, hearing her name, frowning as another voice, one that sounded so far away, reached her, too: “And in local news, Gina Gardner, wife of Union Park pediatrician Dr. Jeff Gardner, was found dead of an apparent homicide in their Copper Acres home.”

  “Miss Dottie?” The first voice again. “Are you ready for dinner? We’ve got mashed potatoes and Swedish meatballs on the menu tonight.”

  She blinked. The yard was not hers. There were no children playing Frisbee, only useless old people stumbling here and there, with their canes and their walkers, or being moved around in wheelchairs by family members waiting for them to die.

  “Kurt?” She looked at her caretaker where he’d squatted in front of her, his hand on her chair’s big wheel. “Who is Gina Gardner?”

  “I don’t know.” His dark hair was too long. It was falling into his eyes. Had his mother never taught him about hygiene? “Where did you hear that name?”

  “There.” She pointed over his shoulder toward the TV. It was as big as a movie screen where it hung on the wall. There was bright-yellow tape and a reporter wearing too much makeup. The words scrolling across the bottom were too blurry to read, but as bad as her vision was, Dot’s ears were just peachy. “On the news. Gina Gardner.”

  Kurt moved behind her, unlocked the brakes on her wheelchair, and turned her away from the news. “I’m not sure.”

  “They said she was dead of homicide.” She looked back as he put her chair in motion. His whiskers were so scraggly beneath his chin. She really should go see his mother and have a talk with her. What kind of mother let her son leave the house without shaving? “Isn’t that murder?”

  “It is, yes.” He frowned, a silver ring glinting in his eyebrow. “Let’s get you to dinner before your food gets cold. Mashed potatoes just aren’t any good otherwise.”

  “Poor thing. Such a hard life. Those parents of hers, giving her away like so much stale bread. I don’t want dinner. I want to see my children,” she said, pounding her fist on the pillow in her lap. “I want to buy new Frisbees and go to the shelter for a dog. Can we leave now? Before all the puppies are gone? I think Wackers is having a sale.”

  “We’ll talk about it after dinner, okay?” He pushed her past the table where Donald Parsons was playing chess, and turned her from the common room into the cafeteria. Betty Lampley looked up from her plate and waved. She probably wanted to talk about her bowels again. All she ever talked about was her bowels.

  “All right, dear,” she said to Kurt. But there wasn’t anything to talk about.

  It was too late for Gina. Greedy, thankless bitch. Dot would just have to do what she could to help Kurt instead.

  Young people. Did they never think about consequences?

  She waited until he’d pushed her to sit next to Betty. “And I know it’s none of my business, but if you want to wear a ring, you should do so on your finger. If you tripped and fell while running, that one might tear your eyebrow. It might even poke out your eye.”

  SIX

  Monday, 6:30 p.m.

  Returning from the evidence lab with a copy of Gina Gardner’s diary, Miriam glanced through the window of the soft-interview room on her way to her desk. Through the slats of the mini blinds, she could see Dr. Gardner huddled on the couch with his children.

  The walls were painted a cheery butter yellow and hung with framed photos of hot-air balloons. As if the brightly colored orbs could clear the air of emotional wreckage, lifting the cumbersome weight up, up, and away.

  Miriam wanted to choke the designer. This wasn’t a nursery school.

  The three little ones were tucked beneath their father’s long arms, blond corkscrew curls and layered blond strands and bl
ond cowlicks looking like feathers. Four clear cups filled with water sat on the side table, barely touched, if at all.

  A box of tissues sat there, too. Dozens of used ones littered the floor and the couch cushions and Dr. Gardner’s lap. One was shredded and stuck to the lowest button on his shirt. His glasses sat askew on the bridge of his nose, one earpiece sticking out from his head like an antenna.

  Miriam was glad the room’s door was closed. Even imagining the sounds of their sorrow was making it hard to breathe. Her throat felt like she’d choked on a piece of bread. Spread with peanut butter. Balled into a wad of thick, white flour like Play-Doh.

  Kids.

  How did parents handle the responsibility? Worrying over doing the right thing, saying the right thing, getting their bundles of joy from diapers to diplomas in one piece? And it never stopped. She knew that from seeing her own parents fret over her siblings.

  Her mother was always atwitter about Erik’s child-support obligations leaving him next to nothing to sustain his bachelor life. And Esther . . . Esther’s life was a steaming pile of stink. The men she dated because she needed to feel pretty. The men she married because she needed to feel loved. The men she divorced because they would never earn enough to give her things as nice as her mother had. Her mother, their mother, who was happiest when, at sixty-nine, she was mistaken for their sister.

  That always made Miriam rethink her lack of a skin-care routine.

  Sometimes she wondered if she even had it in her to be a good sister and daughter. She knew she didn’t have it in her to be a parent. She’d decided that a long time ago. Getting herself from one day to the next was all she was capable of—though a whole lot of that had to do with her chosen profession.

  Why had she chosen it again?

  She shook her head, shedding the tightness gripping her skull as she made her way through the squad room to her cubicle, extra glad today to have the privacy walls instead of desks in some trendy, open format.

  Ballard’s cube abutted hers. They could talk through the fabric panels, or roll their chairs into the aisle between the rows for some face-to-face. They rarely needed to.

  But with a half-dozen detectives in training today, Ballard’s partner recovering from a torn ACL, and hers on vacation, they were stuck with each other.

  Miriam missed Melvin Stonebridge like she would an arm or an eye. He’d transferred into CID six months after her ex-partner exited stage left, just about the time the entire division had started taking bets on whether she’d end up flying solo.

  From day one, it had been a match made in heaven. And that was why she was counting the days until Melvin got back. He’d been in Hawaii long enough, though she couldn’t imagine Violet, his wife, agreeing.

  Talk about a couple who had the parenting thing down. Their kids gave her hope. On so many levels. In ways she wasn’t sure her nieces and nephews ever would—

  “Rome!”

  Crap. The bellow stopped her in her tracks, and she turned for the glass-walled offices on the building’s south side. “Yes, boss.”

  Deputy Chief Chris Judah stood in his open doorway. He wore a white shirt, navy pants, and a blue-patterned Jerry Garcia tie. Hands on his hips, he frowned at Miriam, his forehead furrowed beneath his military buzz, which was peppered with gray. “Do you want to explain what you’re wearing?”

  This from the man being choked by the Grateful Dead?

  She glanced briefly at the uniformed officer behind him—the man was trying so hard not to laugh—then looked back to Judah. “I got Dispatch’s text right after my yoga class. Coming here for the clothes in my locker or going home to change would’ve meant an hour’s delay. Seemed more important I get to the scene.”

  Judah’s gaze raked over her. “Next time I see you, you’d better look the part,” he said, turning away and slamming the door. He circled his desk, and the officer with him waited until he sat before doing the same.

  Miriam finally made it to her cubicle, which had her passing Ballard, cocked back in his chair. “Wonder what he wants you to look the part of? Lone Ranger? Wonder Woman?”

  She’d been called both while without a partner. She’d been called worse, too. Holster humper, for one, which didn’t make a lick of sense. Yeah, she’d slept with her ex-partner, but since she’d also been a cop . . .

  The badge will get you pussy, but the pussy will get your badge.

  She nodded toward the Gardner clan. “Is someone coming to get them?”

  Tugging at his collar, Ballard followed her gaze. “His brother’s on his way.”

  She tossed her crossbody and notebook to her desk, then leaned a shoulder against their shared cubicle wall. It was business time. “The kids. They’re all blond. The victim had dark hair. And her skin . . .” She reached back and flipped open her notebook, looking at the small family photo she’d taken from the entryway floor with Karen Sosa’s blessing. “She might be part Hispanic. Or Middle Eastern, maybe?”

  “And she was on the far side of fifty,” he said, looking at the picture Miriam handed him. “You ask the doc about that?”

  “He said the first kid was a late-in-life accident.”

  “And they just kept going?”

  She gave him a guess-so shrug, and returned the three-by-five to her notes, thinking about the children again, motherless now. Thinking about the victim losing out on the rest of their lives. Recitals, sporting events, birthdays—

  Shit. She needed to get out of here before there was nothing left of her niece’s party to attend. “Anything yet from the canvass? Neighbors with security cameras?”

  “Not yet. Family across the street has one on the garage, so it could have something. Vince is picking up the footage from the guardhouse at the neighborhood entrance, too.”

  “Good, good.” She nodded and rubbed at her forehead, thinking about her mother’s addiction to Botox. Then she stopped rubbing. “What are we thinking?”

  He swiveled side to side, shaking his head. “Random religious nut?”

  Random left them nowhere to look beyond witnesses. Trace evidence. Case files with similar markers. There’d be pavement to pound. Doors to knock on. Neighbors to talk to. Much of which the uniforms were doing even now.

  Man, she wished her job was as easy as cop-TV made it seem. “Religious nut, maybe. The random, I’m not so sure about. That tarp . . . did that belong to the doctor? Did we ask? Crap, why didn’t I ask?”

  She turned for her desk, grabbing her notebook and pen. What was wrong with her? How could she have missed something so obvious?

  “Relax, Rome,” Ballard said with a lot less attitude than he usually showed. “I asked him earlier. The tarp isn’t his.”

  “Good. Maybe the lab will find something there we can use,” she said, then added, “Thanks.” Ballard performed best when rewarded, and until Melvin got back from vacation, she needed Ballard at his best. “Okay, so how did he get the tarp inside? How did he get her on it? There weren’t any ligature marks, were there?”

  “None that were obvious, but we’ll have to wait for the postmortem.”

  She hated waiting. Hated it as much as not knowing. “Did he walk in, shove the knife in her face, or a gun, maybe, spread out the tarp, and cut her there on top of it?” The forensic investigator thought the edges of the wound looked clean, as if the knife blade had been straight. That is, if it was a knife, not a razor or a scalpel or a cleaver, which had Miriam shuddering. “Did he ring the bell? Did he wear gloves when he did? Did he knock?”

  “Some of those things we’ll never know,” Ballard said, then huffed. “Unless when we catch him, he spills his guts, thinking it’ll bring him all kinds of glory.”

  “He didn’t leave any obvious trace, which makes me think nothing about this is going to be easy.” She swept a hand beneath her ponytail and moved from forensic science to forensic psychology. It was where she did her best thinking. “The doctor said the victim grew up in foster care. How does that play with honoring her father an
d her mother?”

  Ballard laced his hands behind his head and continued to swivel. “Someone knew her in the past? Didn’t like how she treated her birth parents?”

  Not a bad theory, except . . . “According to her husband, she was taken away from them when she was five.” Miriam thought about her other nieces and nephews. Haven was five; Lissie, six. Both were capable of doing what they were told, but that was less about their parents’ wishes and more about the promised reward of iPad time or Mickey D’s.

  She wasn’t buying it. “I don’t think a five-year-old knows anything about honor. Obey, sure. Listen to, probably. Respect might even be a stretch.”

  Ballard held her gaze while his narrowed. “A social commentary on her parenting skills? Someone doesn’t like the way she and the doctor are raising those three?”

  She turned to look again at the foursome waiting in the interview room. Nothing she’d learned led her to believe the family was anything but what they appeared to be.

  The nice, clean suburban home and yard. The bikes and the cars. The dog. The mother’s involvement in the children’s school and extracurricular activities. The father’s indignation at the idea of children so young being bullied, when he was a pediatrician . . .

  She stopped right there. Union Park wasn’t utopia. He had to know better. He couldn’t possibly be that naive. “Those two options both assume this is not random and not a stranger.”

  “Then maybe a stranger had a rage issue to work out, and our victim was in the wrong place at the wrong time?”

  “Weirder things have happened,” she said, trying to blow away the tickle of suspicion. This wasn’t the wrong place or the wrong time. This wasn’t rage. This was methodical. This was planned. Meaning someone out there had a motive and a really sick way of making his point.

  Ballard ran both hands down his face, obviously not liking the train of thought he was traveling, either. “Problem is, nothing about this looks that kind of weird. And wrong place, wrong time plays hell with the tarp. That required planning.”