Stuart Woods - Hothouse Orchid

He looked through the back door into the kitchen and saw a night-light glowing, probably in the house’s central hallway. He used a strip of flexible plastic to pop the cheap lock on the kitchen door, then, very slowly, he opened it and let himself into the house, leaving the door ajar.

As he expected, there was no security system in the old ranch house, and he stood still in the kitchen for two minutes, listening for any sound. Finally, he walked into the hallway, found the night-light and unplugged it, then he stood still for another two minutes to allow his eyes to become accustomed to the darkness.

There was just enough light coming into the house from a streetlamp out front to allow him to move around with confidence, and he made his way to the rear, where he thought the master bedroom would be. He stopped again to listen and heard a gentle, regular snoring coming from the rear room. He walked to the door and stepped inside.

James Bruno lay on his back, soundly asleep, snoring. Teddy walked toward him and stopped, perhaps four feet away, to get a better look at him. Then he saw the gun.

It was a 9-mm Glock, and it lay on the bedside table in its holster. This was an unexpected benefit; he wouldn’t need the.22. Teddy lifted the holster and gun slowly from the table, tucked the holster under his arm and, very slowly, pulled the Glock free. He replaced the holster on the bedside table next to a half-empty bottle of Famous Grouse Scotch whiskey and an empty glass.

Gently, he eased the pistol’s slide back far enough to ascertain the presence of a cartridge in the chamber, then he eased it closed. He took a step closer to Bruno, and a board squeaked under his foot. Bruno stopped snoring and made a noise. Teddy waited patiently for him to fall fully asleep again.

Soon Bruno resumed snoring. Teddy held the pistol in his left, gloved hand and eased it slowly into position a fraction of an inch from Bruno’s open mouth. He aimed carefully, not wishing to strike a tooth or a lip, then fired a single shot.

Bruno made a jerking movement and then relaxed. The shot had passed through his mouth, then severed the spine at the neck before passing into the pillow beneath his head.

Teddy held his position for just a moment, then he lifted Bruno’s right hand, rubbed the pistol on his hand and forearm to deposit gunshot residue there, then dropped the weapon. It landed on Bruno’s upper chest and slid off his body to the floor beside the bed.

Now Teddy switched on a small flashlight and had a look around the room, not seeing what he was looking for. He left the room and walked quickly down the hall, finding a small den with a desk. The center drawer yielded what Teddy was seeking: a medical insurance card that bore a sample of Bruno’s signature and a stack of printed letterheads.

He took a sheet of stationery from the desk drawer, closed the drawer and then fed the paper into a portable typewriter on the desktop. He held the flashlight in his mouth, thought for a moment, then typed:

To whom it may concern:

I can’t do this anymore. It is enough. The women were all innocent; that’s what attracted me to them. I’ve punished enough, and now I will end this once and for all.

Teddy typed the date at the bottom, then took the paper from the typewriter and looked closely at the signature on the card. He was a good forger, and he didn’t even need to practice. He signed the letter with a pen from the desk drawer and left it on the desk.

He visited the bedroom once more to be sure everything was in order, then he went back to the kitchen and left the house, first locking and closing the door.

At the hedge, he shucked off the paper socks, hairnet and latex gloves; put them into the paper bag; picked up his own small bag and returned to the car. Halfway across town he came to a construction Dumpster and deposited the paper bag there.

He was at home and in bed with Lauren slightly less than an hour after he left.

They both woke early, as usual. “Did you sleep well?” he asked. “Like a baby,” she said.

“So did I,” he replied.

Detective Jimmy Weathers was at his desk early, as usual. He had been there only a moment when his phone rang.

“Detective Weathers.”

“Jimmy, it’s Lauren Cade.”

“Good morning, Lauren.”

“We have another one.”

“Where?”

“On the Orchid Island golf course, north of Vero Beach, specifically, in a sand bunker beside the fourth fairway.”

“I’m on my way,” Jimmy said. He got his coat on and walked toward the back door, passing the desk of Chief Bruno’s secretary. “When the chief comes in, will you tell him that we’ve had another woman murdered, and I’m at the crime scene? I’ll call him when I’m done there and let him know the details.”

“Oh, God, not another one,” the woman replied. “I’ll tell him. He has an interview here at nine with a candidate for the deputy chief’s job.”

Jimmy got into his car and drove out to the Orchid Island Club, a beautiful gated community out past the Disney Resort. He showed his badge at the gate and was waved through. He had played golf here once with Bruno, who was a nonresident member, and he remembered that he could drive nearly all the way to the fourth tee without getting on the grass. He parked near the tee and walked the rest of the way toward a group standing around a bunker on the left-hand side of the fairway.

“Good morning,” he said as he walked up to Lauren.

“Not so good,” she said, nodding toward the naked corpse, posed in a kneeling position in the sand.

Jimmy held his position, not wanting to interfere with the forensics people and the ME, who were already in the bunker. “Looks a lot like the last one, only without the car.”

“Yeah, and we haven’t found her car yet. They’ve mostly been left in or near their cars. I can’t figure out how he got the body onto the golf course. He would have had to drive through the main gate, wouldn’t he?”

“No, there’s a second gate off Route five ten that members can enter with a pass card.” He paused for a moment. “Bruno is a member here.”

“Ahh,” she said.

There was a stand of tall evergreen trees behind the bunker, and a car could be seen passing behind them. “But that’s not how he got the body here,” Jimmy said, pointing. “There’s a road behind the trees there that runs alongside the golf course of the Windsor development, which is right next door. There’s a fence, but I guess he could get over that.”

“That would account for some cuts and scrapes on the body,” Lauren said.

“I guess it would,” Jimmy replied.

The ME stood up from his work and came over to where they stood. “Death by strangulation, probably around midnight last night. Raped anally and vaginally, like the others. I’m supposing she was doped first, like the others.”

Lauren nodded. “You find anything that might help us?” she asked one of the crime lab people.

“Not a thing,” the man said. He pointed to a rake. “There’s a rake in every bunker he could use to smooth over the whole area around the body and, of course, his tracks as he left.”

“Shit,” Lauren said.

Jimmy spent an hour with Lauren, walking the area around the bunker and checking along the fence behind the trees, but they found nothing else.

Jimmy was walking with Lauren back to where the cars were parked when his cell phone vibrated. “Hello?”

It was Bruno’s secretary. “Jimmy, the chief hasn’t shown up for his interview, and he’s an hour late. That’s unlike him, and he’s not answering either his home phone or his cell phone, and he always has that cell phone with him. I’m worried that he might have had a heart attack or something. Would you swing by his house and see if he’s there?”