Elvis meowed loudly. I couldn’t see him, but from the sound he was in the vicinity of the kitchen.
“I’ll go,” Mac said.
I shook my head and stuffed the keys back in my pocket. “It’s okay. I’ll go.”
The cat gave another insistent meow. “I’m coming,” I called. I made my way in the direction of the kitchen. There was a path through the boxes, although it was a bit like being in a tunnel made of cardboard.
“I’ll get the shovel and a couple of garbage bags,” Mac said.
The path widened at the kitchen doorway. Elvis had somehow climbed up onto a stack of cartons about shoulder height. He was looking down at the floor, but he turned his head and his focus to me as I reached the doorway.
“Mac, forget about the shovel,” I said, raising my voice so he’d be sure to hear me.
“What do you need?” he asked.
I hesitated and after a moment he appeared behind me.
“What do you need?” he asked again.
I moved sideways so he could see that the body lying on the kitchen floor didn’t belong to a mouse or a raccoon.
“I think we need nine-one-one,” I said.
Chapter 2
I reached for Elvis. I didn’t need to get any closer to tell that the man lying on his side on the brown-and-gold-cushion flooring was dead. There was a dark stain on the collar of his jacket and what looked to be dried blood matted on the back of his head. I was guessing he’d been dead for hours, certainly not as long as a day. He looked to be in his early forties, dressed in a dark wool jacket and good-quality black trousers. There was a wide smudge of white on one leg of the pants and bits of black asphalt stuck to the soles of his leather shoes. A wine bottle lay on its side about a foot from the body.
Mac and I backtracked to the living room, being careful not to touch anything.
A half wall to the left, just inside the front door, made a bit of an entryway. Rose was waiting there, her face pale. “It’s not Stella, is it?” she asked.
I shook my head and a bit of the color came back to her face. “It’s a man,” I said. “I’ve never seen him before.”
“Maybe someone who was homeless,” she said. “Maybe he came in looking for somewhere to sleep.”
“Maybe,” I said.
Mac and I exchanged glances. The dead man was wearing what looked to me to be nice clothes and expensive shoes. I doubted he was homeless.
We went back outside. I handed Elvis to Rose. “Would you put him in the car, please?”
“Of course,” she said.
Mac had taken a couple of steps away from us and pulled out his phone, calling 911, I guessed. Now he came back to stand beside me. “Police are on their way.”
I sighed and rubbed one shoulder with the other hand. “Have you ever seen that man before?” I asked.
He shook his head and put the phone back in his pocket. “Never.”
I glanced over at the SUV. Rose and Elvis were in the back and she was feeding the cat something, probably something it would be better I didn’t know about.
“He wasn’t homeless,” Mac said. “Those shoes he was wearing? They set him back more than a thousand dollars.”
I didn’t ask how he knew. Instead I asked the next most obvious question. “What’s a man in thousand-dollar shoes doing in Edison Hall’s kitchen?”
He didn’t say anything at first. “It wasn’t an accident, Sarah,” he said finally, looking over his shoulder at the house.
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, thinking about the dried blood in the dead man’s hair. Mac was right. However the man had died, it wasn’t accidental.
A patrol car, the ambulance and a dark blue car all arrived a few minutes later. I walked across the grass toward the car.
The driver got out and gave me a half smile across the roof of the car. “Hi, Sarah, what’s going on?” she asked.
Detective Michelle Andrews was tall and slender in jeans, a shirt the color of chocolate pudding and a tan jacket. As usual, her red hair was pulled back in a sleek ponytail.
The patrol officer was already going up the front steps.
“Edison Hall’s sister, Stella, hired us to clean the place out,” I said as Michelle came around the car to stand next to me. “This morning was our first day.” I stopped to clear my throat. “I could . . . uh, smell something as soon as I unlocked the door. I thought it was a mouse. It was a man, dead on the kitchen floor.”
Michelle’s green eyes narrowed, but other than that, nothing changed in her expression. “Do you recognize him?”
“No,” I said. “He’s not from around here, at least as far as I know.”
Mac was still standing at the edge of the driveway.
“Anyone else here with you besides Mac?” Michelle asked.
“Rose and Elvis,” I said. “They’re in the car.”
“I’m going to have a look inside the house.” She fished a pair of plastic gloves from one of her jacket’s pockets. She looked at me for a long moment without speaking. “You know how this works,” she finally said.
I nodded. “We’ll stay right here.”
Michelle started across the grass and I walked back to Mac. “We can’t go anywhere, not for a while at least,” I said.
He shrugged. “It’s not cold and it’s not raining.” He looked over his shoulder at the small white bungalow, then turned back to me. “There are worse places to be.” His gaze slid past me. “Sarah, Nick’s here,” he said quietly.
Out on the street a black SUV had pulled over to the curb at the end of the line of police vehicles. Nick Elliot got out, carrying a boxy silver case, which I knew held all the gear he needed to do his job. He’d been working for the medical examiner for months now. He started toward us in his usual uniform of navy windbreaker and black pants.
“I’ll be right back,” I said to Mac.
I cut across the lawn and met Nick at the curb. “Hi,” he said. “What’s going on?”
“We found a body in the kitchen.”
“Anyone you recognize?”
I shook my head. “No one I know.”
Nick made a face. “I know there’ve been problems with drifters breaking into some of the summer places.”
“I don’t think this was a drifter,” I said.
I looked up at him. He was just over six feet tall with broad shoulders and sandy hair he wore much shorter than when we were young. He was even more handsome and charming and funny than he’d been at fifteen, but sometimes when I looked at him, all I saw was the boy I’d had a crush on when we were teenagers and not the man he was now. And sometimes I caught myself falling into the teasing relationship we’d had back then in which we didn’t talk about anything directly.
“What do you mean you don’t think this is a drifter?” he asked.
I cleared my throat, wishing I hadn’t said anything, but it was a little late now. “You should see for yourself, but the man doesn’t look like a drifter. He’s wearing what looks to be very expensive shoes and a nice jacket.”
Nick had explained to me once that it was his job to figure out what had happened at a potential crime scene; had a crime actually been committed or not? It was up to the police to work out the who, how and why.
“Was the door locked when you got here?”
“The front was,” I said. “I don’t know about the back.”
Nick patted one of his jacket pockets. Checking for gloves? I wondered. Or his phone? “Did you notice if anything was disturbed in the house?”
I rolled my eyes. “You’ve been inside that house, Nick. You can’t exactly tell if a box is out of place.”
He nodded and grimaced. “Yeah, good point.” Then he looked over at the house. “Is Michelle inside?”