Julia Spencer-Fleming - All Mortal Flesh

The rest of the contents of the drawer were intact, a fact he could have told without further search. No one after easily shopped swag would have passed up those rings. He paused for a moment, trying to exorcise the ghost sitting at the vanity, examining her skin, dipping her fingers into the expensive little pots littering the mahogany surface. What else would thieves possibly take?

His gun safe was usually in his closet, but he had taken it to his mother’s when he left. Linda’s passport? No, it was still in her bedside drawer-always within reach for a quick getaway, she used to joke.

Lyle came out of the connecting bathroom. “It doesn’t look like anything’s been touched in here,” he said. “Did she have any prescriptions that might have tempted somebody?”

“Not unless estrogen’s suddenly become a black-market commodity.”

Lyle’s mouth quirked upward, and Russ found himself half-smiling, thinking of Linda cracking jokes about hot flashes, and in the next instant his eyes filled with a rush of tears and he had to turn away, fumbling for the doorknob. “Better get to the rest of the house,” he said, when he could make his throat work again.

He knew before they went downstairs that nothing would be missing, and he was right. The stereo, the DVD player, the silver collection she had amassed over the years-all of it was there. He and Lyle were headed for the small office off the parlor, where Linda paid the bills and managed her paperwork, when Kevin Flynn poked his head in from the living room. “Chief?” he said tentatively. “I’m sorry to disturb you…”

“What is it, Kevin?”

“It’s just-where did Mrs. Van Alstyne keep her purse?”

“Her purse?”

“I was going over the barn, and looking into her station wagon, and it made me think about my mom, who likes to keep her keys in the ignition in her car, so when I came back into the house I was sort of looking to see if you had some of those hooks for keys like folks sometimes have, you know, in the kitchen or the mudroom, except you don’t, so then I got to thinking where do ladies keep their keys if they aren’t in the car or on a hook and I figured their purses. Right?”

Russ didn’t want to contemplate the amount of lung power it took for Flynn to get that sentence out. One of the advantages of being twenty-three. “Mrs. Van Alstyne hangs her purse on one of the coat hooks on the mudroom wall, Kevin. It probably has a coat tossed over it.”

“No, sir, I thought of that. There aren’t any purses on those hooks. I checked.”

Russ was through the living room, across the kitchen, and in the mudroom before he remembered to be afraid of the room in which Linda had died. He tossed the barn coats and parkas and rain slickers on the floor, one after another, until they blocked the door to the summer kitchen and the old-fashioned iron hooks gleamed dully in the morning sun streaming through the diamond-shaped window in the mudroom door.

There was no purse.

He swung toward Lyle. “AllBanc,” he said.

“I’m on it,” Lyle said, fishing in his jacket for his cell phone.

Russ headed back through the kitchen, all his dread evaporated in the heat of a possible lead. “I’ll get you the account numbers,” he shouted over his shoulder.

“You think the perp might have taken her bag?”

Kevin’s voice surprised him. He hadn’t noticed the kid tagging along in his wake.

“Yeah,” he said. He wanted to scream, Why didn’t you notice this last night, you idiots?! but he knew recriminations wouldn’t get him results. He opened the door leading from the kitchen into Linda’s office. Two file towers flanked her desk, one for home and one for her business. He yanked open the top drawer of the home file. He might as well use this as a lesson for Flynn. “The perp leaves behind fenceables but takes the purse. What does that tell you?”

“He’s an amateur,” Kevin said promptly. “An opportunist. He doesn’t know anyone he can palm stolen goods off on, but he can use debit and credit cards.”

“Good.” Russ opened a folder marked BANK STATEMENTS/CHECKS. It was empty. He bit back a curse. She was so organized, she had already moved last year’s statements to the next drawer down. He slid it open. And there they were, along with folders marked VISA and MASTERCARD and oh, shit, he had to look in her business drawers, too, because she had a corporate American Express and MasterCard and checking account.

“Here, hold these,” he said, thrusting the folders into Flynn’s hands. He tore open the other drawers, rifling through tabs marked OROCO FABRICS and SOCIAL SECURITY and ACCOUNTS PAYABLE-SEAMSTRESSES until he found the financial materials, which he pulled without examining and laid in Kevin’s arms. He was consumed with a sense of urgency. Linda’s murderer had already had nearly twenty-four hours. What if he had already emptied their accounts and vanished?

“Take those to Lyle,” he said.

Kevin sprinted out of the tiny office, leaving Russ alone with the paper trails of his life together with Linda: mortgage payments and electrical bills, credit card statements and snowplowing receipts. It struck him how oddly impersonal their house was without her actual presence, the office organized but not personalized, the rooms decorated but not inhabited. His mind flashed on the St. Alban’s rectory on Elm Street-tabletops cluttered with photographs, books, and mementos spilling off the shelves to sit heaped by squishy armchairs. A note of longing hummed through him, the urge to go to that house and drop into one of those chairs and lay his sorrow before the woman who lived there…

He jerked upright. God, what sort of a monster was he? His wife was on the medical examiner’s slab, and he was comparing her to another woman? He scrubbed at his face as if he could wash his guilt away, knocking his glasses askew. He steadied them, looking more intently at the files. He pulled open the desk drawers. There must be something personal here. Something connecting him to his wife and the two of them to the world at large.

Her computer. He pushed the on button, riffling through more files while it booted up. He never used the thing-he preferred taking phone calls at the station and being left alone at home-but Linda e-mailed friends, her sister, everybody.

The screen, which used to feature a slide show of fabric designs, now came up with a mostly naked guy who had more than the usual number of muscles. O-kay. Maybe that was part of the process her therapist wanted her to go through. Getting in touch with who she was in addition to being a wife. His mouth twitched upward. He’d wanted to find something personal. Well, here it was.

He sat in the rolling desk chair and clicked on the e-mail icon. A sign beneath the window informed him he was downloading mail, and a pulsing bar flashed on and off for almost a minute. When it finished, multiple windows popped up, one laid over the other. One said DEBBIE-her sister. One said SEAM-STRESSES, one IN, one MEG, one eSBW-he clicked on that; it seemed to be a mailing list for the Small Business Women’s Association she belonged to.

Suddenly, he understood. Organized in cyberspace as well as in the real world, Linda had her e-mail filtering into multiple mailboxes. He clicked on DEBBIE. It looked as if she and Linda had been e-mailing several times a day since November. The most recent one-the one she would never read-was titled “You go, girl!”

There were a number of e-mails going back and forth that he guessed concerned him; they had subject lines like “That dickweed!!!” and “Men are bastards.” He sagged against the back of the chair. What the hell did he think he was going to find in here? He had told his wife of twenty-five years that he was in love with another woman. What did he think she would be saying to her sister and girlfriends? What a swell guy he was?