The next morning Lauren Cade was fifteen minutes late for work, having spent longer in bed with Jack Smithson than she’d meant to. Hurd Wallace called to her as she passed his door.
“Lauren?”
“Yes, Hurd. Sorry I’m late.”
“You’re just in time. The Vero department called two minutes ago. They’ve had a call about a dead woman in a car, and they’re en route now.”
“Is it another one, do you think?”
“I think,” Hurd said. “Do you know the fairgrounds west of town?”
“Yes.”
“That’s where they found her. You ready to go?”
“Sure.”
“We’ll take your car,” he said, grabbing his jacket.
The fairgrounds were located on a grid of roads just west of Vero Beach, a place that Lauren passed when she was driving from her house to the Indian River Mall. There was a police car blocking the entrance, but Lauren identified herself and was allowed in.
She drove into the grounds, and it was immediately obvious where the crime scene was. Two Vero cars and a van were in the middle of the large, grassy field that served as a parking lot when there was an event at the grounds. She cut across the field toward them.
She stopped, and she and Hurd got out of their car and identified themselves to the detective in charge.
“I’m Ed Rankin,” the detective said. “I’ve heard about you folks. You going to take this one away from us?”
“We don’t want to do that,” Hurd replied. “We just want to help.”
“Well, I hope you don’t help like the FBI helps,” Rankin replied. The Bureau had a reputation among cops for letting them do the work, then taking the credit.
“Nothing like that,” Hurd said. “This is probably one more in a series we’ve had. You know about that.”
“Sure, I do, and I think you’re right,” Rankin said.
The medical examiner’s truck pulled up next to them, and the ME got out. “What we got here?” he asked.
“Let’s look together,” Hurd said, leading the way around the victim’s car.
The driver’s door was open, and a naked woman was on her knees in the driver’s seat, her head toward the passenger door. There was blood on her buttocks and thighs and on the back of her head.
Lauren winced when she saw the position, and she was immediately struck by the difference between what she and Jack had been doing an hour ago and what this woman had experienced.
The ME conducted his on-site examination, then stood back.
“Tell me what you think,” Hurd said.
“I think she was forced to strip and kneel on the driver’s seat, then was raped vaginally and anally from behind, then shot once in the back of the head, probably with a twenty-two pistol, eight to ten hours ago.”
“I concur,” Hurd said, looking at Lauren.
“So do I,” she said.
“Can I take the body?” the ME asked.
Hurd turned to Rankin. “Ed?”
“Sure. We can look at the interior of the car better with her gone.”
The ME and his assistant removed the body from the car, loaded it on a gurney and put it into his truck. Shortly, they were gone.
“We got a handbag,” Rankin said, holding it up by a strap. It was on the seat under the body. He walked to the front of the car and emptied the bag onto the hood. “We got a wallet,” he said, opening it, “and a driver’s license.” Rankin took the license from the wallet and peered at it. “Oh, shit,” he said.
“What?” Lauren asked.
“I know her. Jeanine Clark. She sells tickets at the mall movie theater. My oldest boy went to high school with her. The family lived a couple of blocks from us.”
“How late would she work at the movie theater?” Hurd asked.
“I think they have shows as late as midnight,” Rankin replied. “I’ll check out there and see what time she left last night; that’ll probably give us a time of death, and I’ll bet it agrees with the ME’s estimate.”
Lauren stepped away from the car and made a phone call.
“Detective Weathers,” Jimmy said.
“It’s Lauren. We’ve got another one.”
“Where?”
“In the Vero jurisdiction, out at the fairgrounds.”
“He’s moving around, then.”
“Yes. I want to know where Bruno was last night. Can you find out without alerting him that he’s a suspect?”
“I already know,” Jimmy said. “I left here a little after midnight, and he had just arrived, said he was going to be working all night on personnel files. He’s gone, now; probably at home asleep.”
“That’s interesting,” Lauren said. “Was anybody else in the station last night?”
“Just the switchboard operator; everybody else would have been on patrol until the shift change, at eight a.m.”
“Would the operator have seen Bruno there?”
“Probably not; she’s in her own space, with the door closed. She has to stay by the switchboard in case of a nine-one-one call, and she has her own john back there.”
“What does Bruno drive?”
“An unmarked Crown Vic cruiser, dark blue. I noticed when I left last night that the keys were in it. I suppose you could make a case that somebody took the car and returned it later, but that’s kind of far-fetched, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is.”
“You need me out there?”
“No, I’ll ask the DIC, Ed Rankin, to fax you a copy of his report. The ME just left; you can get his report later today, probably. I’ll talk to you later, Jimmy.” Lauren closed her phone and noticed that Hurd Wallace was standing a few yards away, looking down. She walked over to him. “Got something?”
“Maybe we got lucky,” Hurd said, pointing down. “There was some rain last evening, and there’s a bare spot in the grass right here. Look at that tire print.”
Lauren looked down. “Nice and clear,” she said, “and it looks like there’s a cut in the tire.” She moved along a few feet. “Here it is again, from when the tire turned. It’s a right tire.”
“Let’s get a cast of that track,” Hurd said.
33
Teddy was working in the kitchen when the chime went off, signaling a car entering the driveway. That would be Lauren, he guessed, but he still went to the door and looked outside to be sure. She was spending more and more time at his house; some of her clothes were in his closet and chest of drawers. He liked that.
Lauren came in the door and gave him a wet kiss. “Whatever that is smells good,” she said.
“It’s only meat loaf.”
“My favorite!”
“Then you came to the right place.”
“I know I did.”
“How was your day?”
“Another murder,” she said. “Out at the fairgrounds, west of town. A young woman who worked as a ticket seller at the Indian River Mall cineplex.”
“Any new clues?”
“We may have gotten a break,” she said. “We know that Bruno said he was working all night at the police station, and there was nobody there who could give him an alibi. We also found a tire track with a cut in the tread.”
“Is that tire on Bruno’s car?”
“We don’t know,” she said. “Hurd and I drove past his house, and his car was parked in the driveway, so we had a look at the tires. We couldn’t see a cut, but it could have been on the ground, and we couldn’t move the car without a warrant. Of course, we don’t have enough evidence to get a warrant.”
“And while you’re waiting for enough evidence, he could kill a few more women.”
“Please don’t say that,” she said. “That’s my worst nightmare.”
Teddy fixed them a drink and handed her one. She took a stool at the kitchen counter. “I’m getting tired of looking at corpses,” Lauren said. “This one was posed in the driver’s seat, kneeling.”
“I think I get that picture,” Teddy said. “No more details, please.”