“I don’t want to make anybody look bad,” she says. “And if I just drop all this and walk away…? If Win and I do?”
“Don’t make excuses for him. He can answer for himself. If we ever see him again. And it’s his case, Sykes. His department put him on it.”
It may be his case, but that’s not how it’s feeling. Seems to her she’s doing all the work.
“And the KPD isn’t going to look bad. That was a long time ago, Sykes. Law enforcement has changed dramatically in the past twenty years. Back then all they had was ID techs, nothing like this.” He looks around at his students.
“Well, I don’t think I can turn my back on it and walk away,” she says.
“Our Academy students don’t turn their backs and walk away from anything,” Tom says, almost kindly. “Tell you what. Tomorrow’s gunshot wounds, we’ll be working with a couple ballistic gelatin dummies.”
“Well, hell.” She likes shooting up jelly men, as she calls them, even more than the ugly bastard targets.
“Not as crucial as some other things, I can let it slide, find some time later to get you back out on the range. But all next week is bloodstain-pattern analysis. That you can’t miss.”
She takes off her dark blue cap, wipes the sweat off her brow, watches the other students walking off toward the field house, toward the trucks, toward their futures.
“I’ll give you until Monday,” he says.
“Nothing,” Win announces as he creaks down the creaking wooden stairs, remembering how loud they sounded only a few early mornings ago, when his entire life changed.
“I told you. We really did play detective and look around after the fact,” Sammy says from a wing chair near a fireplace covered with a stained-glass screen. “No other areas of the house were involved. It fits with what she said. He came in behind her, forced her up to the bedroom, and that was it, thanks to you.”
“That wasn’t it, unfortunately.” Win looks around.
Lamont’s glass fetish doesn’t end in her office. Win has never seen anything quite like it. Every light fixture is the same kind he shattered in her bedroom, an exotic half moon suspended from a hammered iron chain, hand-painted in vivid colors, signed Ulla Darni, expensive as hell. Her dining-room table is glass, and there are crystal bowls and figurines, art glass mirrors and vases everywhere.
“You know what I’m saying.” Sammy gets up slowly, sighs, as if he’s too tired to move. “Man oh man. I need a new back. You satisfied? Can we go now?”
“She’s got a garage,” Win reminds him.
“Already been in there. Nothing.”
“I haven’t been in there.”
“Whatever you want,” Sammy says, shrugging, and out the door they go.
In the late eighteen-hundreds, it was a carriage house, brick, a slate roof, now a bit tired and half hidden by the low branches of an old oak tree. Sammy finds the key to the side door, realizes the lock is broken, has been pried open.
“It wasn’t like this when I was here….” Sammy slides out his gun. Win’s already got his out.
Sammy shoves the door open and it bangs against the inside wall, and he lowers his pistol, returns it to its holster. Win lowers his .357, stands just inside the door, looking around, noticing oil stains on concrete, noticing dirty tire tracks, what he would expect inside a garage. Hanging from Peg-Boards are the usual yard and garden tools, and in a corner is a lawn mower, a wheelbarrow, and a plastic gallon gas can, half full.
“Doesn’t look like the gas can came from in here,” Sammy remarks.
“Never thought it did,” Win replies. “You plan on torching a place, usually you bring your own accelerants.”
“Unless it’s an inside job, like a domestic situation. Seen my share of those.”
“That’s not what this is. Roger Baptista sure as hell wasn’t a domestic situation,” Win says, looking at a rope hanging from the exposed beam ceiling, a pull-down ladder.
“You already check?” Win asks.
Sammy looks up where Win is looking and says, “No.”
The windows of the imposing Tudor home glint in the sun, the Tennessee River bright blue and gracefully bending in either direction as far as Sykes can see. She climbs out of her old VW Rabbit, figures she looks like a harmless, middle-aged Realtor in a denim pants suit.
The businessman who owns the house where Vivian Finlay was murdered isn’t in, Sykes checked, wonders if anyone has bothered to tell him that twenty years ago a seventy-three-year-old woman was beaten to death inside his ritzy house. If he was told, he must not care. That’s something. Sykes wouldn’t live in a place where someone was murdered, not even if it was given to her. She starts walking around, wondering how Mrs. Finlay’s killer got in.
There’s the front door, and on both sides of the house plenty of windows, but they’re small, and it’s hard for her to imagine someone climbing through a window in the middle of this neighborhood in the middle of the day. Another door closer to the back of the house appears to lead into the basement, then facing the river is one more door, and through windows on either side of it is a handsome modern kitchen with stainless-steel appliances and lots of tiles and granite.
Sykes stands in the backyard, taking in the flowers and lush trees, the low wall built of river rock, then the dock and the water. She watches a motorboat roaring past, pulling a hotdog skier, calls a number she stored in her cell phone as she was driving over here after an Academy class that might be the last one she ever attends.
“Sequoyah Hills Country Club,” a polite voice answers.
“The business office, please,” Sykes says, and the call is transferred, then, “Missy? Hi. Special Agent Delma Sykes again.”
“Well, I can tell you this much,” Missy says. “Vivian Finlay was a member from April 1972 until October 1985…”
“October? She died in August,” Sykes interrupts.
“October was probably when her family got around to canceling her membership. These things can take awhile, you know, people don’t even think about it.”
Sykes feels stupid. What does she know about country clubs or memberships of any type?
“Had a full membership,” Missy is explaining, “meaning it included tennis and golf.”
“What else you got in that file?” Sykes asks, sitting on the wall, wishing she could look at water without trespassing or going on vacation. Must be something to have so much money you can help yourself to a river.
“I’m sorry?”
“I mean, old itemized bills that might give some details as to what she bought and did, maybe? For instance, if she ever bought tennis clothes in the pro shop?”
“We don’t throw away business files, but they wouldn’t be here in the office. We have a storage facility….”
“I need her old bills, all of them for ’eighty-five.”
“My word, twenty years’ worth to dig through. That could take…” Dismay, an audible sigh.
“I’ll help you look,” Sykes says.
The upper story of Lamont’s garage has been converted into a guest room that doesn’t appear to have been used except for the indentations and a little dirt left by feet walking around the dark brown carpet. Fairly big feet, Win notes. Two different tread patterns.
The walls are painted beige and hung with several signed prints — sailboats, seascapes. There is a single bed covered with a brown spread, a bedside table, a small dresser, a swivel chair, and a desk that has nothing on it except an ink blotter, a green glass lamp, and a brass letter opener that looks like a dagger. The furniture is inexpensive maple. A small bathroom with a stacked washer-dryer, very neat and clean, looks unlived-in, except, of course, for the footwear indentations all over the carpet.