“Any estimate of the time this happened?”
“The blood is still tacky in a few spots, so I’m guessing sometime this morning?”
“What are you focused on right now?”
“I just sent two of our patrol guys around the neighborhood to find out if anyone noticed anyone coming or going around this house. And I issued an APB on Peale’s Lexus. What’s next, I’m not sure.” He lowered his voice. “DA Stryker has taken over the scene. She tells us to do one thing, then another thing. I don’t know if she knows what she’s doing herself.”
On cue, Stryker appeared inside the open back door and summoned Gurney over with a peremptory wave of her hand.
“Take a look in here. I want your interpretation of this.” Her voice had the rigid edge that often comes with an effort to project self-confidence.
When Gurney reached the taped corridor leading out from the back door, he noted the reddish-brown drag marks on the patio. He stepped gingerly around them and followed Stryker into the rear hall of the house. As he passed the door, he saw that the glass panel nearest the knob had been broken. Some of the glass pieces were on the hall floor and some were outside the doorway on the patio, seemingly where they had been dragged. Those had the same brownish-red traces on them as the hall floor and the patio stones.
Stryker pointed along the hallway. “Actual crime scene is in the kitchen.”
There was blood all over the floor, mainly, but also on the kitchen tabletop and chair back, where a handprint, perhaps of the staggering victim, had smeared it. There were scuff marks on the floor, a spoon, and the pieces of a broken bowl. There was an open oatmeal container and a measuring cup on a countertop next to the stove. The blackened, warped remnant of a pot sat on one of the burners. The tile wall behind the stove and the exhaust fan above it were covered with soot.
Gurney looked more closely at the central bloodstain on the floor. It appeared that a body or other substantial object had rested in it, then been dragged out of the kitchen, through the hall, and out the back door. He followed the smeared bloodstains out onto the patio and through the taped corridor onto the lawn, where they stopped. The portly photographer was taking multiple shots of that area, with Barstow and Slovak both directing him to places in the grass they wanted him to focus on.
Stryker had followed Gurney out of the house and was standing behind him.
“Well?”
Gurney ignored the question. He was estimating the distance from the last bloodstain in the grass to the indentations caused by a vehicle’s tires.
“Looks like this is where he dumped the body in the trunk,” said Slovak, stretching his thick neck from side to side.
Gurney noticed a plastic evidence bag in Barstow’s hand with something dark inside it. He asked what she’d found.
She held it up so he could see it more clearly. “Peale’s wallet. It was tossed on the grass over there.” She pointed to a spot a few feet from where they were standing. “Driver’s license, Lexus registration, credit cards were all missing, along with any cash he might have been carrying. Other items were still in it—golf club membership card, Mensa membership, hunting club membership, medical insurance cards.” A damp, gusty wind was blowing her hair sideways, but she seemed not to notice.
“Whoever did it just took the essentials,” added Slovak, unnecessarily.
“Well, Detective?” The edge in Stryker’s voice had become more insistent.
He turned to her. “Yes?”
“I’m waiting for your reaction.”
“So far, I have nothing to add to what’s obvious.”
“What would you say is obvious?”
“There’s a lot of blood in the kitchen. Some of it seems to have been dragged out here. And a vehicle of some sort was recently driven across the lawn.”
“That’s all your famous power of deduction tells you?”
“I’m afraid so.”
After staring at him for a moment in disbelief, she turned to Slovak. “How about you? How would you explain what we’re seeing here?”
He swallowed, in obvious between-a-rock-and-a-hard-place discomfort. “Well, ma’am . . . I guess . . . I mean . . . it seems that Dan Peale’s been murdered. By someone who broke in, struggled with him, and killed him. They probably used a knife . . . or scalpel . . . considering the amount of blood. Then they dragged his body out of the house, took his car keys, took the essential stuff out of his wallet, got his Lexus out of the garage, loaded his body in the trunk, and drove off.”
Stryker nodded encouragingly. “Anything else?”
“Peale was waiting for his oatmeal to cook when the killer broke in.”
“How do you know he wasn’t eating it?”
“The spoon and plate pieces we found on the floor are clean.”
She nodded again. “Very good. Any ideas about who the killer might be?”
After casting a nervous glance at Gurney, he cleared his throat. “Just one, but there’s no proof, it’s just an idea.”
“Ideas are exactly what we need at this point.”
He took a deep breath. “Dr. Ronald Fallow.”
Stryker blinked in surprise, then urged him to go on.
“Peale was suing him. He was telling everyone that since the false death pronouncement had destroyed his funeral business, he wanted Fallow’s medical license taken away, and he was suing him for, like, a hundred million dollars. And he kept bad-mouthing Fallow around town—like, nonstop. I figure Fallow got to the point where he just snapped.”
Stryker turned to Gurney, a glint of triumph in her eyes. “So, what do you think of that?”
“I’d have to give it some thought.”
“Good plan.” Her phone rang. She looked at the screen and, before stepping away to take the call, added pointedly, “Before you leave, I want to speak to you.”
Slovak looked at Gurney with a kind of questioning hopefulness. “I hope what I said was all right. She asked what I thought, and that was what I was thinking.”
Gurney smiled. “Ideas solve cases. Better to share them than keep them to yourself.”
Slovak seemed satisfied with that and headed for the house.
Barstow went back to conferring with the photographer over the tire tracks in the grass.
While Stryker was involved in her phone call, Gurney decided to take a walk around the exterior of Peale’s house. It appeared to be meticulously maintained, no doubt by hired gardeners. Peale didn’t strike him as the sort of man who’d want to muddy his knees weeding a flower bed.
He made a complete circuit of the place and found himself back at the yellow-tape entry point. The gray-haired cop with the clipboard gestured toward the house.
“Not bad for a caretaker’s cottage, eh?”
“Caretaker’s cottage?”
“Not now, of course, but that’s what it used to be. For the big Peale estate. Most of that got sold off years ago, when the current Mr. Peale was just a kid. All that’s left of it now is this ‘cottage’ and a few acres around it. Tell you what—I wouldn’t mind coming down in the world, if this was what I got to come down to. Everything’s relative, right?”
“Gurney!” Stryker was calling to him from a spot on the back lawn, away from the others working the scene.
He headed over, in no great rush, prepared for what he guessed would be her first question.
He was right.
“I’m curious about something. You told Slovak to find Peale. Why?”
“I wanted to speak to him—face-to-face, not on the phone.”
“Why?”
“A computer forensics tech found an anomaly in the security video of Tate’s resurrection in the mortuary. I wanted to question him about it.”