2
JAMORRIS “JAMBO” MONROE and Abby Foley wound up pairing off in Homicide because of softball. JaMorris played two years of varsity at Cal and, after finally reconciling himself to the fact that he wouldn’t get drafted to play pro ball, went to the Police Academy in San Francisco.
Last summer he turned thirty-five and felt the need to come back to an approximation of the game he loved. He joined the Hammerheads and played the whole season with eight other guys and one woman: the catcher (the catcher!), Abby. He’d been blown away not only to have a woman on the team—it wasn’t a coed league, strictly speaking—but also to find out that she was a great athlete, almost forty years old and a full inspector with the Homicide detail. After the season—they’d batted two and three in the lineup and had clicked as people—she’d lobbied to get him assigned there, too. Because of some department shake-ups (a former lieutenant who retired, an inspector who moved up), it had worked out.
Now, partnered for three months, they were sitting in the office of the new Homicide lieutenant, Devin Juhle, discussing an assignment that Abby wanted some clarity on. “I don’t know why this isn’t Missing Persons, Dev. She is simply missing, is she not?”
Juhle nodded equably. “She is.”
“You see my quandary?”
“Of course. In my earlier days, when I wondered about things, that might have been something I would have wondered about.”
“It’s just that—”
“I know.” Juhle stopped her. “If we don’t have a dead person, how can it be a homicide? Maybe it’s because it’s the wife of a sheriff’s deputy. Maybe somebody knows somebody at City Hall. Ours is not to reason why.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Abby said.
“And thinking is a good thing.” Juhle spread his hands on his desk. “We encourage thinking and the questions it raises. In this case, fortunately, we have an answer to the main question.”
“The husband,” JaMorris said.
Juhle nodded with approval at his newest inspector. “The husband. Hal. Missing Persons thinks he ought to be at least a person of interest. His alibi is squishy as hell.”
“What is it?” JaMorris asked. “The alibi.”
“He went to the airport to pick up his brother. But he says he left at seven-thirty for an eight-fifty flight. It’s a half-hour drive. Then the plane got delayed—that checks—so he pulled off and had a beer in South City, but he paid cash. Nobody remembers him where he says he stopped. So, all in all, squishy.”
“Anything else?” Abby asked.
“Well, the wife was seeing a marriage counselor—Hal admits this—about some issues between them.”
“Just the wife was seeing the counselor?” JaMorris asked. “Not him, too?”
“No. Just her. And another thing,” Juhle said. “Small but provocative. Blood in the kitchen.”
“Blood is good,” Abby said. “A lot?”
“Drops. Just enough for DNA. Hers. The point is, Missing Persons thinks it’s all coming back to Homicide eventually, so we might as well get in on the ground floor.”
“Anything else in the realm of physical evidence?” Abby asked.
“Not yet, no. But a couple of other things just the same. First, when Hal and his brother got home, the wife was gone, but the kids were still in their beds, asleep. I have a hard time seeing her walking out and leaving the kids behind. Better odds that something happened to her, right? Second, one of the neighbors heard some arguing—maybe fighting, maybe struggling—down on the street.”
Abby let out a small sigh. “And how long has it been?”
“Since Wednesday night.” Juhle put on a perky face. “So she’s officially missing since last night.” Absent signs of struggle or violence, because of the large number of random runaways, it took three days in San Francisco for a person who couldn’t be found to become a true missing person to the police.
“Yeah, on that subject again,” JaMorris said, “just one more time. Why are we taking on a missing person? Everybody in town who goes missing is going to have a relative who thinks it’s a murder and goes after Homicide for not doing their job.”
“I appreciate your concern, Jambo. But here’s the deal. They tell me. I tell you. And I’m telling you we’re on this one.”
Abby stepped in. “So, in reality, she’s been missing for four days.” Everyone knew that the window on solving a homicide closed down dramatically after two days, and after four, the evidence trail tended to be very cold. But Abby understood that there was no point in arguing further. It was going to be their assignment, taking time away from their other, possibly solvable homicides. “How do you want us to handle this?”
“Talk to the husband, of course,” Juhle said. “Start there.”
“Is he being cooperative?” JaMorris asked.
“He’s the very soul of cooperation.”
With a defeated sigh, Abby reached out and lifted the case file from the surface of Juhle’s desk. Opening it, she asked as she scanned, “Where are we off to?”
“That’s the easy part,” Juhle said. “Hal’s just next door. At the jail.”
“He’s already arrested?” JaMorris asked.
“No,” Juhle said. “He works there.”