“Oh God,” said Officer Gibson, who had stepped in behind the detective.
Wedmore’s hand was up in a “don’t move” gesture.
“Ask McBean what’s happening around back.”
Gibson touched the radio clipped by her shoulder. “Anything going on out there?”
There was a crackle of static. McBean said, “Nothin’.”
“Get him back here,” Wedmore said.
Gibson told him they needed him around front. Seconds later, he was in the foyer, and saw what the other two were looking at.
“Fucking hell,” he said.
“Secure the house,” Wedmore told them.
The two of them went through the place room by room, closet by closet, and returned to the foyer a minute later to find Wedmore standing over the body, just far enough back that her shoes were not touching blood.
“House is empty,” Officer Gibson said. “’Cept for him.”
“What’s that sticking out of his eye?” Officer McBean asked.
“Looks like a needle, for knitting,” Wedmore said. It wasn’t a pastime she’d ever pursued, but her late mother used to spend hours doing it. Then she saw a ball of yarn on the floor. “There ya go.”
“I think I’m going to be sick,” McBean said and excused himself.
Officer Gibson grimaced as her partner fled and said to Wedmore, “He’s not good with a lot of blood.”
“Call this in. Get everyone out here,” Wedmore said. “This scene is fresh.”
Gibson went outside to make the calls.
Wedmore did a slow circle around the room, studying everything, looking for anything. She went into the kitchen and saw the pot of tea that was still warm to the touch, and the single mug that had been waiting to be filled.
“This was looking pretty simple up until about five minutes ago,” Wedmore said to herself. The Ellie Garfield case had appeared to be a totally domestic affair. Daughter kills mother, father covers it up. Everyone—victim, perpetrator, accomplice after the fact—related. A family tragedy from beginning to end.
But this, well, this had the potential to change everything. Garfield’s death broadened the circle. Melissa couldn’t have done this, because she’d been in police custody the last couple of hours. Wedmore didn’t need a forensic examiner to tell her this murder was less than two hours old. And Garfield—or at least someone claiming to be him—had phoned the station little more than an hour ago, asking for a progress report in the search for his wife.
A shrewd move, Wedmore thought. A nice way to deflect suspicion. Not that his cleverness made much difference now.
She came back to the living room, stood once again over Garfield’s body. A woman’s bathrobe was tossed onto the couch, but the matching sash was on the carpet, just beyond the pooling blood.
Interesting.
Then, studying the body again, looking at the blood that had saturated the man’s shirt, something else caught Wedmore’s eye.
“Hello?” she said under her breath. “What’s this?”
Nineteen
Kirk Nicholson was on the couch, feet up on the coffee table, having breakfast. Or an early lunch. Brunch maybe. Whatever meal it was, it consisted of a bottle of Budweiser and a cream-filled Twinkie sponge cake. He had the TV tuned in to Family Feud, where a family of fucking inbreds, in Kirk’s estimation, was trying to guess how one hundred people had responded to the question: “What part of your body do you sometimes forget to wash when you have a bath?”
Kirk shouted: “Behind the ears!”
He was pretty good at Family Feud. It was his favorite game show because, unlike, say, Jeopardy! or Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, you didn’t actually have
to know anything, you just had to be able to guess what people thought the answer was. That meant Kirk often shouted out the correct response, which made him feel very good about himself.
He needed to feel better about himself these days.
Often, his gaze would move from the television to the shelf he’d set up on the adjoining wall to display the mag wheels he was going to put on his truck when the snow melted. These were 20-inch Mamba wheels, the M3 model, with eight spokes, finished in machine black. Normally, a set of four cost as much as two grand, but he’d managed to get these for three hundred off.
As much as these wheels were a sight to behold now, they were going to look awesome once they were installed. It turned out to be a blessing Keisha didn’t have a garage with this pipsqueak little house of hers. If she had, he wouldn’t be able to admire them every single day, and he didn’t have to worry about someone breaking into a garage and stealing them. What he did have to worry about was that li’l fucker, as he now thought of Matthew, going over and touching them, getting his greasy little fingerprints on them, maybe even knocking them off the shelf and breaking the little bastard’s foot.