I felt a little sorry for Joe. His expression turned to one of disappointment as she mentioned leaving, but he perked up again when she brushed her breast against his arm and batted long eyelashes at him.
“Why don’t you come buy me a hamburger before you get bogged down in all your police work. I watch TV. It could be days before you get to see me again. All this talk of memory lane has made me…curious.” She pouted prettily, and I knew we wouldn’t be seeing any of Joe for the rest of the night.
Joe cleared his throat again and put on his straw hat. “Sure, I guess I could buy you a burger. It’s been a long day. Unless you need me for something?” he asked, remembering we were there and doing his job for him.
“No, we’re going to be here a while,” Jack said. “Though if you’ve got copies of all the statements you took this afternoon that would be helpful. I can start going through them with fresh eyes. We can follow up with whomever we need to tomorrow.”
“Sure,” Joe said, nodding. “Though you’d best make it an early day tomorrow. Rain will be coming in by mid-afternoon. You’re going to want to be holed up in your cabana by then.”
Joe gave one more look at Leon laid out on the table, shrugged his shoulders at us with a sheepish smile, and then followed the sway of Camille’s hips right out the door.
“Twenty bucks says they do it in the car before they make it to memory lane,” Jack said.
“That’s a sucker’s bet. We could be doing that if we weren’t stuck here with this body.”
Jack sighed and looked down at Leon Stein. “Then lets get it done. My patience for being helpful is about at its end. We didn’t come here to do all their work for them. And they don’t seem too in a hurry to find out who did it.”
“Maybe no one liked Leon as much as Father Fernando said. Though it seems like someone would’ve killed him a long time ago instead of waiting until the week before he turned a hundred.”
“So we’ll keep looking for answers. At least for a little while. But twenty-four hours is probably going to be our limit on this. If we don’t find the killer by then we’re going to enjoy the rest of our honeymoon and say to hell with it. I want to visit memory lane too.”
Chapter Six
“Victim is identified as Leon Stein. Male. Age 99. Height is five feet, eleven inches. Weight is one hundred and sixty-two pounds. No birthmarks or tattoos. There’s a large incision scar down the sternum, indicative of open-heart surgery. And more incision marks near the pelvis, indicative of hip double hip replacement surgery.”
I turned off the recorder and looked at Jack. “See, that’s what sucks about getting old. You start to fall apart and end up like a patchwork quilt of other people’s organs and body parts.”
“Maybe by the time we’re that old everything will be robotic and we’ll be like the Bionic Man.”
“I’m telling you, the minute things start falling apart on me you should just put me down like a dog.”
“Technically I could do that now. You know how your knees creak every time you walk up the stairs.”
“It’s not nice to bring that up. I saw you squinting at your computer screen the other day. Don’t worry. I don’t mind putting you out of your misery too. I wouldn’t want you to be old and falling apart all by yourself.”
“That’s very thoughtful of you.”
“I’m a giver,” I agreed.
I took Leon’s fingerprints and transferred them to the cards so Jack could scan them into the computer to see if we could get a hit on prints. A man that had lived to be almost a hundred had to have an interesting past. I was curious to know where he’d come from and what had brought him here.
“I’m going to give Ben a call and see if he can run things on that end so we can get some answers before our flight leaves next week. Camille wasn’t kidding. This connection is slow.”
I’d already documented all the marks on the body and checked for head wounds or any other injuries that might have been related to time of death. But Leon was clean except for the stab wound to the heart and the scrapes he’d received when he’d fallen to the ground.
Though seeing the lateral incision on his chest made it clear as to why the dagger had entered through the breastplate so easily. Between the brittle bones of age and the fact that he’d already been opened up before, the killing blow wouldn’t have needed near as much strength behind it as we’d originally thought.
“You think the killer knew he’d had the surgery?” I asked.