Patterson, James - Womans Murder Club 5 - The 5th Horseman

“Let me be the first to say,” Jacobi said, scanning the devastation with hooded eyes, “whatever happened here wasn’t the work of a pro.”

My mouth went dry as I took it all in.

Arterial spray was splashed across the pale plaster walls and had dripped down to the baseboards. Constellations of blood spattered the ceiling. A large red-brown stain soaked into the carpet in front of the sofa. Bloody footprints crisscrossed the floor, and handprints smeared the fireplace mantel.

Bile climbed into my throat as I imagined the fury and the terror that had filled this room only a short time ago. Who was involved?

I was locked in a vacant stare until Jacobi broke the spell for me.

“Boxer. Let’s do it,” he said.

We swept the downstairs rooms, covering each other. Blood smears on the dining-room walls led us to the kitchen sink, where an eight-inch Chicago Cutlery meat knife rested in the watery blood rimming the drain.

We climbed the stairs to the second and third floors, clearing the rooms, throwing open the closets and shower-stall doors, checking under the beds.

“Nobody. Nothing.” Jacobi grunted.

The master bedroom was furnished in heavy mahogany furniture, navy-blue carpet and curtains, pale-blue sheets. But the blankets had been stripped off the bed and removed from the room.

We holstered our guns and headed back downstairs to the living room.

That’s when I saw the heavy crystal vase lying on its side in the niche of the fireplace.

“Jacobi. Come here and look at this.”

He stepped heavily across the room, put his hands on his knees, then bent down and examined the vase.

“It wouldn’t take much to clobber someone with that thing. Take a nice chunk out of their skull,” Jacobi said.

“Look here,” I said, feeling a chill as I pointed to the hairs sticking to the bloody, sawtoothed lip of the vase. The strands were black, about five inches in length. It would take days of lab work to confirm what I already knew.

“Jacobi — this is Dennis Garza’s hair.”

Womans Murder Club 5 - The 5th Horseman

Chapter 126

SIRENS SCREAMED UP Leavenworth, the swooping wail getting louder as the line of patrol cars turned onto Filbert.

“I’ll be outside,” Jacobi told me.

We’d only been in the house for a few minutes, but I felt time whizzing past. I took up a position in the foyer that gave me a full view of the living room. I ran the scene through my mind again, trying to make sense of evidence that didn’t want to make any sense.

It didn’t look like a robbery gone bad. The doors were all locked, and the only sign of forced entry was what Jacobi had done to the front door.

I imagined someone ringing the doorbell as we had done, Garza letting in a person he knew. But who was it?

The overturned club chair, the broken lamp, the whatnots scattered on the floor made me think that an argument had turned physical, had spun completely out of control.

I imagined this unknown assailant conking Garza on the head with that vase, Garza’s skull splitting, the wound spewing blood as only a head wound can do.

I could see Garza falling by the fireplace, pulling himself up using the ornate wood carvings as a handhold. The attacker must’ve panicked that Garza was badly injured but still alive, going from a terrified “Oh, shit, I didn’t mean to go this far” to a determined “This prick’s got to die.”

There were bloody handprints on the door frame leading to the kitchen, where the killer had gotten the knife.

The castoff blood on the ceiling could only mean that Garza had been stabbed repeatedly while he was alive.

Then the attacker had taken Garza from behind and slashed his throat. That would explain the arterial spray across the walls.

The trail of blood seeping into the carpet made me think that Garza hadn’t stayed down. He had tried to reach the front door, his will to survive propelling him forward, his mortal wounds slowing him down. He’d finally collapsed in front of the sofa, where he’d bled out and died.

Someone hated Garza enough to attack with such incredible violence. Someone he’d trusted enough to let inside the house. The same person who’d then removed Garza’s body and locked the door.

Who?

Sirens cut out as the squad cars pulled up on the lawn. I walked out to the front steps and was calling the DA’s office for a Mincy warrant to secure the scene, when Charlie Clapper came up the walkway.

He greeted me with a “Hey, Lindsay” and a flip of his hand. A second later, I heard him say “bloody hell” as Jacobi came out of the garage and crossed the lawn toward me.

“Garza has two cars,” Jacobi said. “His SUV is in the garage, but his Mercedes is missing. There’s another car parked next to the SUV. It’s a black BMW sedan, with vanity plates. Spells out redhead.”

Womans Murder Club 5 - The 5th Horseman

Chapter 127

A DOZEN MOBILE UNITS and the crime scene van had walled off Garza’s house from the main road. Yellow tape flapped in the breeze and was tangled on the railing going up the front stairs.

I stood under glaring sunlight, blinking at Jacobi as my hypothetical reconstruction of the homicide totally blew apart. Why was O’Mara’s car at Garza’s house?

Had she killed Garza? Could she have maneuvered his body into that Mercedes Roadster? Or was it the other way around?

Had O’Mara clipped Garza with that crystal vase, and he’d retaliated with killing force?

Either way, we had no body, a missing car, O’Mara’s car in the garage, and one of the bloodiest crime scenes I’d ever seen.

“Okay,” I said to Jacobi. “So where is O’Mara? Where is Redhead?”

While inspectors and uniforms canvassed Garza’s neighbors, Jacobi and I used our squad car as an office. He got out a BOLO on Garza’s Mercedes while I called O’Mara’s office and got her assistant, Kathy, on the line.

I imagined her sharp blade of a face, her big hair, as O’Mara’s assistant talked and ate her lunch in my ear.

“Maureen’s taking a week off. She needed a vacation,” Kathy said. “She’s earned it.”

“I’m sure. Where’d she go?” I asked, hearing the edge in my voice. Repressed panic.

“What’s the problem, Lieutenant?”

“It’s police business, Kathy.”

“Maureen didn’t say where she was going, but I can give you all her numbers.”

“That would be a big help.”

I dialed O’Mara’s cell phone, got her mailbox. I left my number on her pager. Called her house and got a busy signal, again and again.

Jacobi punched out O’Mara’s name on the console computer, and got data from the DMV.

He read it out loud. “Maureen Siobhan O’Mara; Caucasian; single; date of birth eight, fifteen, seventy-three; height five nine; weight one fifty-two. She’s a big girl,” Jacobi mused.

He turned the screen so I could see O’Mara’s photo and her address.

“We can be there in fifteen minutes,” he said.

“Let’s try for ten.”

Jacobi backed the car away from the curb and, with tires scraping the concrete, cut around the scene-mobile and into the traffic lane.

I flipped on the grille lights and the siren as we shot up Leavenworth toward O’Mara’s house in the tony enclave of Sea Cliff.

Womans Murder Club 5 - The 5th Horseman

Chapter 128

NUMBER 68 SEAVIEW TERRACE was a mango-colored Mediterranean-style villa with an unobstructed view of the bay, the bridge, Sausalito, and maybe Honolulu for all I knew.

Birds chirped in the shrubbery.

Jacobi and I mounted the porch, my mind seething with vivid images of the carnage at Garza’s house and the cyclone of questions whirling in my mind.