Лиза Гарднер - Never Tell - A Novel (A D.D. Warren and Flora Dane Novel)

So they’d all sat feet from the body, the spattered cabinets, the smeared refrigerator.

The mom had stayed in the front room. An actual parlor, which D.D. had found strangely mesmerizing. She’d heard of such things, but to actually see one … The Hopkinses lived in a beautiful historic Colonial in Cambridge, as befitting the father’s position as a Harvard professor. Perfectly tended, everything in its place. Except, of course, for the crime scene in the kitchen.

Had it biased D.D. at the time? The upper-class home? The well-groomed mom? The obviously shell-shocked sixteen-year-old suspect, her thin shoulders shaking?

The mom, interviewed separately in the front parlor, had corroborated everything her daughter had reported. The shotgun had been a recent purchase given a rash of break-ins in the area. The father had been showing it to his daughter. She’d picked it up, was trying to figure out how to clear the chamber, when the gun had gone off, blasting her father in the chest from mere inches away. A tragic accident. Follow-up interviews revealed no reports of any ongoing rancor between the father and daughter. In fact, the entire family was described as good people, great neighbors. The daughter a gifted pianist. The wife active with literacy causes and aid for battered women. As cases went, it wasn’t even one D.D. had wondered about in all the years since.

Now this.

Yellow crime scene tape roped off the front yard. Several open parking spaces had been secured, probably for the detectives who’d worked most of the night before finally taking off for home in the hours since. Only two official vehicles remained.

All in all, the house appeared quiet. No neighbors lurking outside. No crime scene techs bustling about or uniformed officers working the street. As Phil had said, a straightforward case. A man had been shot and killed. His wife was now sitting in county jail.

D.D. got out of her vehicle. She approached the front door, noting the splintered frame and skewed Christmas wreath. The police had had to force their way in. Interesting.

She entered. Like a lot of the homes hastily constructed postwar to accommodate the boom in young families, the house had a simple layout. Narrow staircase leading straight up against the wall to the left. Front-facing family room to the right. Tight hallway leading to a modest eat-in kitchen. Downstairs bath to the right. Mudroom area and garage access off the kitchen to the left.

The kitchen showed signs of recent updating. Fresh-painted pale-gray cabinets. New, solid-surface dark-flecked countertops. Stainless steel appliances. The hallway, on the other hand, with its ripped yellow wallpaper and scuffed wooden floors, was deeply in need of care.

Clearly a fixer-upper, though given modern tastes for open-area living, a tough one at that. Had the Carters been doing the work themselves?

Had they already started in on the nursery?

D.D. found herself with her hand resting on her belly. Hastily, she dropped it. Lately, she’d been thinking too much about the days she’d been pregnant with Jack. A child she’d never expected to have. Her greatest miracle and deepest love. Usually …

“Hey, there you are.”

D.D. turned to find Detective Carol Manley standing in the hallway behind her. The petite investigator, just over five feet tall and barely a hundred pounds soaking wet, had taken D.D.’s place on her squad after D.D.’s injury. Manley was a perfectly good detective. Both Phil and Neil seemed to like her and accept her as part of their three-person team. D.D., on the other hand, still didn’t trust any cop named Carol.

Completely unreasonable, but there it was.

Now D.D. carefully schooled her features and reminded herself that part of her job was to play well with others. It was the part of her job she was worst at, but hey.

“Body was found upstairs,” Carol was saying now. “Looks like she shot him sitting at his desk. Then shot up his laptop as well.”

“Do we know motive?” D.D. fell in step behind Carol as the woman headed for the stairs.

“Wife isn’t talking. Phil said you knew her.”

“I questioned her regarding another shooting sixteen years ago. That one was ruled accidental. Though now I wonder.”

“Watch the bannister,” Carol commented as she headed up. “It’s pretty loose. One of those things they must not have gotten around to fixing yet.”

D.D. gave the wooden bannister an experimental shake; yep, it was definitely less than stable. “Don’t suppose murder weapon was a shotgun?” D.D. asked.

“Nah. Sig Sauer P-two-two-six, registered to the vic, Conrad Carter. Looks like he kept the nine-mil in the top drawer of his nightstand.”

“Where anyone could grab it.”

“Ah, but the ammo was in a shoebox in the closet.”

“Because clearly that provides security. Love ‘smart’ gun owners.”

“And yet where would our job be without them?”

D.D. conceded the point. They arrived at the top. The landing was tiny. Only three doors to pick from. Two bedrooms and a bath, most likely. But D.D. didn’t need to inspect all three to find the scene of the crime. Smell directed her enough.

Conrad had converted the smaller bedroom into a personal office. Massive executive-style black leather chair, the back now smeared with dark splotches of gore. A wall of waist-high laminate filing cabinets, covered in piles of paperwork and stacks of what appeared to be catalogues. Across from the filing cabinets, the room held a massive oak desk, currently riddled with enough bullet holes and metallic rubble to qualify it as a war vet.

Small space, D.D. thought, huge carnage. Clearly, the wife hadn’t been messing around.

“The remains of the laptop?” D.D. asked, gesturing to the debris-strewn desk.

“Yep. Techs have it. Woman closed it up, then emptied her clip into it. Not a huge target, meaning our gal knew what she was doing.”

“What do the techs think?”

“They need time to take the laptop apart and inspect the damage. There’s a lot going on inside a laptop—battery, RAM, motherboard, Wi-Fi card, hard drive, thin hard drive, et cetera. So lots of things to hit, but in theory, also some things that could’ve been missed. Unfortunately, a dozen forty-caliber rounds to a target that small …”

D.D. arched a brow. “How many bullets to the husband?”

“Three.”

The Sig P226 held fifteen rounds. Meaning: “Three to the husband, twelve into the computer? If we view the laptop as a second victim, certainly seems she hated the computer more.”

“Or was a woman with something to hide.”

“Trying to eradicate something on the laptop,” D.D. followed. “Do we know if it was strictly the husband’s computer, or did both of them share it?”

“Don’t know.”

“And she didn’t say anything to the police when they arrived? No ‘I had to do it,’ ‘he started it,’ ‘the voices in my head … ’ Anything?”

“She wanted to know if she could plan her husband’s funeral.”

D.D. shook her head. “What about her demeanor? Did the arresting officer describe her as appearing shocky, grief-stricken, relieved?”

“Calm and cooperative. Allowed herself to be cuffed and led to the patrol car. Was taken to the station and charged without incident.”

D.D. frowned, still not sure what to think. She studied the blood-smeared chair, the spatter across the far wall. “What did the husband do?”

“Sales. Worked for one of those custom window companies.” Carol pointed to the pile of catalogues on the filing cabinets. “According to the neighbors, he was on the road a fair amount, spec’cing out jobs, that sort of thing. But when he wasn’t traveling, he worked out of this office.”

“The contents of the filing cabinets?”