Lisa Black: Takeover

Frank reappeared at the end of the hallway, where the rising sun flooded the kitchen with light.

“Can I come in now?” she asked.

“Sure. There’s no one here. No sign of any murder either.”

“Can the patrol officer stay with Mr. Ludlow out here? I don’t want some passerby wandering up to our body.”

The young man stood guard over the corpse while Theresa photographed the neat suburban home. Two things quickly became clear: There were no indications of a bloody assault, and Mr. Ludlow did not live alone. He had a wife and a very young son, and there was no sign of what had happened to them.

Forty minutes later Theresa knelt on the kitchen floor, her head held at an angle to the surface, as Paul spoke from the doorway.

“This must be her.” He held up a framed photo of the deceased man with a young blond woman. A towheaded toddler sat between them, the boy’s cherubic face turned toward his mother.

“Yeah, I saw the picture. If that man died in this house, I have yet to find any evidence of it. There are no signs of cleaning up, no wet spots on the carpeting. There’s a mop up against the stationary tub downstairs that’s damp but not soaking. She cleans with bleach, which kills DNA, but so do I. This floor has a layer of grit on it, so it’s not a freshly cleaned surface. Maybe he was attacked outside. I’d just feel better if I had more blood on that sidewalk.” One of her knees let out a protesting creak as she got to her feet. “And a weapon would be nice, too. I did find this.”

He joined her at the sink, peering at three specks of dark red that traveled in a line up the tan ceramic tile behind the counter next to the sink. “It’s blood.”

“Not much of it.”

“Exactly. It could be the only three spots left after a superb cleanup job, or it could be an artifact from last night’s steak dinner. I’ll take a swab, of course.”

“Any scraps in the garbage?”

“No, the bin is clean except for a few paper towels and a tea bag.”

After swabbing the blood, she and Paul canvassed the home once more. Toys spotted the living room, along with a TV Guide and a half-finished crewel project in colorful yarn. Areas of the master bedroom indicated his and hers; his tastes ran to career-development books and vitamins, hers to paperback romances and matching organizer trays. The baby’s room held yet more toys, clean clothes, and a prodigious supply of diapers. If the family had a dark side-a drug or alcohol addiction, abuse, sex parties-all traces of it had been removed.

The third bedroom served as an office. With a twinge of envy, Theresa examined the heavy rolltop desk. “What is this, mahogany?”

“You’re asking me?” Paul said. “My taste runs toward Formica.”

“Not true-you bought me that walnut bench last month.”

“Rachael picked that out.”

The idea of her daughter perusing tasteful furniture made her feel proud and old at the same time. The cache of papers in the rolltop came as a welcome distraction. “This seems to be a loan form. Maybe they have money troubles, if they’re applying for a loan?”

Paul picked up a stack of business cards and held them toward her. “I don’t think so.”

She glanced at the cards. The words “Federal Reserve Bank of the United States of America” framed the upper edge. “He’s a bank examiner. I see-Ludlow doesn’t apply for loans-”

“He approves them.”

Frank leaned in the doorway behind them, fingering a cigarette. “That’s all I need. The murder of a freakin’ employee of the federal government.”

Paul explained his partner’s mood to Theresa. “The oral boards for the sergeant’s position are up this week. Frank might be the boss of the whole Homicide unit by the end of the month.”

“And you’ll have to break in a new partner.”

Frank snorted. “ ‘Gee, good luck, Frank, I’m really rooting for you, seeing as you’re my flesh and blood and all.’ No, the only thing she cares about is poor Paul having to work with a rookie.”

Her older cousin had always been cynical, but now his voice held a bitterness that surprised her. He must be edgier over the promotion than she would have thought possible. “I’m sorry-congratu-lations, really.”

“Forget it.”

“I know you’ll get it. No one else has more time in Homicide than you do, do they?”

He stared at his feet for so long that she thought he wouldn’t answer. “McKissack got there a year and a half before I did. He’s a moron, too, but that’s neither here nor there in the political world. Anyway, forget it. Find anything else in that desk?”

Paul would not be deflected. “Maybe this is exactly what you need to get the inside track away from McKissack. A nice high-profile fed case-provided we wrap it up before your interview, of course.”

“Sure.” A smile flickered on Frank’s lips, gone before it could settle. “That gives us, let’s see, thirty-four hours to find out who killed Mr. Bank Examiner.”

Theresa felt a sudden chill of worry. “He works at a bank-”

Paul followed her thoughts. “And now the wife and kid are missing. But that makes no sense. If they were kidnapped to pressure him into robbing his own bank, then why kill him?”

Frank supposed, “Maybe it’s got nothing to do with the bank, and she killed him. Then she panicked, fled with the kid.”

“That might be preferable,” Theresa said. “Because if Theory A is correct, then with the bank executive dead we’ve got a kidnapper out there who has no reason for keeping Mom and baby around-”

“And every reason to get rid of them,” Paul finished.

Theresa’s boss, Leo, peered at the dead man on the gurney as if he were something Theresa had picked up at a garage sale on her way to work, using Leo’s lunch money for the purchase. “What is this ?”

“Mark Ludlow. Murdered on his own front stoop.” She held a small but brilliant flashlight up to the gashes in the dead man’s scalp, prodding gently with her other hand. She didn’t want to disrupt the wound pattern or disturb any traces the weapon could have left behind before the pathologist had a chance to examine him, but she might not have another chance before the body was cleaned just prior to the autopsy. The man had died quickly, since his hair was matted but not saturated with blood; his heart had stopped beating early on, stopped pushing the liquid out of the broken capillaries. This told her that he had not bled to death but that the compressions to his skull had halted his brain from directing even involuntary muscle movement, like breathing.

The trace evidence department supervisor took a morose sip of coffee, surrounded by ten other gurneys, each bearing a grim burden. The morning meeting, or “viewing,” would shortly commence, as the department supervisors and all the pathologists gathered for a briefing on the day’s cases and to decide which doctor would autopsy which victim. “As if we don’t have enough to do.”

“You say that like it’s my fault.”

“If I’m not mistaken, you still have three sets of clothing to examine, from yesterday’s suicides and that crib death. And we’ve got the National Transportation Safety Board coming in to see the harnesses from that helicopter crash last week. Not to mention that everyone is going to be late because traffic is backed up now that the freakin’ secretary of state is going to grace Cleveland with her presence.” But he said all this absently, without any real concern. Their field of work was, by definition, reactive. Without a way to investigate crimes before they occurred, they were always behind. As long as Theresa kept sufficiently current with the caseload so that Leo didn’t have to do any of it, all was right in his world.