The inspector extended a hand. “With a lot of things, yeah.”
Vail took it. His grip was soft and quick. “A sense of humor. A bad one, but a sense of humor. That’s good.”
“My kids give me shit too.”
“About the weak handshake or your bad jokes?”
Burden drew back. “Man, you’re a fiery one. Give me a few minutes to adjust to that, okay?”
“Only a few minutes? You’re in danger of impressing me, Inspector.”
He eyed her cautiously. “Maybe a few days.”
Vail broke a smile. “That’s more like it. But if it helps, I’m told I grow on you once you get to know me.”
“I wanted Mark Safarik.”
Vail nodded. Hey, if it was me, I’d want Safarik, too. But she kept that to herself. “He’s not available. You get me.”
Burden pulled his leather jacket tighter as the wind whipping off the Bay blew through his thin shirt.
Vail shivered. “What’s up with your weather? It’s July. If I’d known it was gonna be this goddamn cold, I’d have packed a jacket and gloves.”
Burden pulled a key from his pocket and unlocked the door to the house. “Don’t you know the famous quote?”
Vail frowned. “I know a lot of famous quotes, Inspector. You have a particular one in mind?”
“‘The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.’ Mark Twain. Well, some think Twain said it.”
“Never heard it.”
Burden moved inside the house. “The city’s weather is kind of like Australia, all messed up calendar-wise.”
Vail eyed him. “Okay. Right. San Francisco is Australia. Got it.” She followed him in through the door and up the stairs.
“Any security other than locks on the doors?”
“Nope.” Burden led her inside, to the mouth of the living room. “That bedroom there,” he said, gesturing down the hall with a nod of his chin. “That’s where the body was found.”
“Got another piece of gum?” Vail asked.
“It’s Nicorette.”
She lifted her eyebrows. “In that case, I’ll pass.”
“By the way. You can drop the Inspector crap. Guys in the unit call me Birdie.”
Vail eyed him. “Birdie.”
Burden shrugged a shoulder. “Yeah, I didn’t like it either at first. But after twenty years, I’ve kind of embraced it. Burden works, too. Don’t really care for Lance. No one calls me by my first name. Except my mother.”
“What about your wife?”
“She calls me jackass.” He apparently noted Vail’s confusion. “We’re divorced.”
Burden led the way to the bedroom. “What do people call you?”
“Depends who you ask. Asshole. Bitch. But those are just my friends.” Vail grinned. “Karen’s fine.”
Burden nodded. “Why don’t we start with Karen, and as I get to know you we can graduate to Bitch?”
“I think I’m going to enjoy working with you, Burden.”
“Hey, I was born in New York. I understand sarcasm.”
“Good. You’re likely to get a good dose of it.” Vail indicated the bedroom. “Shall we?”
“I was trying to avoid it.”
“I can tell.” She pushed open the solid-core wood door and stepped in. A queen bed sat in the middle of the room. Unremarkable furniture lined the wall to her right, below a large bay window that gave her a third-floor view of the top portion of a fog-obscured Golden Gate Bridge tower peeking out between the crests of nearby low-cut trees.
Dried bloodstains soiled the left side of the mattress.
“Vic was eighty-two. Maureen Anderson. Married, haven’t been able to reach the husband. William. Last seen yesterday morning.”
“Who called it in?”
“Neighbor came by for dessert and coffee. She didn’t answer the door. Maureen was apparently very reliable, so an hour later, when she still wasn’t answering, the woman got concerned and dispatch sent out a well-check.”
“Any evidence her husband left on a trip?”
“Nothing we’ve been able to determine. Still following up with airlines, family, credit card records. The usual. Put out an APB as soon as we found the body. He’s the obvious prime suspect.”
Vail winced. “Not so fast. And not so obvious. What do we know about him? About their relationship?”
“Good, according to the neighbors. The usual bickering, but from what we’ve been told, looks like they genuinely loved each other.”
“What was his occupation?” Vail asked. “What level of education?”
“He retired about five years ago. He was a lawyer with a firm here in the city. Last five or so years, he was ‘of counsel,’ picking the cases he wanted to work on.”
“What kind of cases?”
Burden scratched at his forehead. “White-collar defense.”
“What about the place. Ransacked? Anything missing?”
“Nothing, far as we can tell. Money, jewelry, valuables. All here.”
Vail glanced around. “It’s harder to notice something missing than something added. But there’s a fair amount of dust. Did you-”
“Check all the flat surfaces where the dust is missing, like if an object’s been removed? Yeah, we know what we’re doing, Karen. We thought of that. Like I said, nothing appears to be missing.”
“Forensics? I see some blood spatter on the wall-”
“Castoff, from a shoe, most likely. He kicked her. Looked to me like he kicked her while she was on the floor, then got her up on the bed for the second act of his horror show.” Burden shook his head in disbelief, then continued. “Forensics are still being processed. But from what I’m told, he didn’t leave a whole lot. We came up with fibers, hair, that kind of stuff, but whether any of that belongs to the offender remains to be seen.”
“And this blood. Here,” she said, pointing at the pooled stain on the bed. “If she was lying with her head in the usual spot, this bloodstain would be about where her vagina would be. I know she was raped, but-”
“The scumbag sodomized her, too. With an umbrella. It was brutal. That’s what got me thinking that we were looking at something far more complex than what we’re used to dealing with. That’s why I asked for Safarik.”
“Understood. Not likely a white-collar criminal would be good for this. Unless there was a really bad thing done to him and he snapped and crossed the line. Even then, the anger and ability to become violent would be in his repertoire of behaviors. It’d be there, even if it hadn’t yet manifested in a way we’d have seen publicly.”
“So not our first choice for a theory.”
“Definitely not,” Vail said. She knelt down and examined the area underneath the bed. “Any semen?
“Looks like he used a condom. ME found spermicide.”
“Tell me more. Cause of death? She didn’t die of rape.”
Burden bit his lower lip. “ME thinks she was tortured before she was killed.”
“Tortured how?”
Burden turned away. “Electric shocks.”
“Like a stun gun or a Taser-type device?”
“ME said no. More irregular, like nothing she’d ever seen before. She said she’d read about a case in a rural town in the Midwest where some guy had taken an electrical cord and snipped off the end, then splayed apart the exposed wires. He shoved the plug into a wall outlet and then shocked the vic. And those burn patterns matched the burn marks on Mrs. Anderson’s body. Electrical burn marks.”
“I’ll want to see the body.”
“Figured you might. But I thought you should see the crime scene first, so I told the ME we’d be by around eleven.”
Vail pointed at the bed. “This is where you found her? Facing the doorway?”
“Yeah. Like she was peacefully at rest. Even though, well, she wasn’t.” He shook his head. “Legs were spread. Like I said, he used an umbrella. Lots of vaginal and anal tearing, all the way up into the abdominal cavity.”