CHAPTER 25
Beth Penrose had her papers from the briefcase spread out on the table, and I now noticed a plateful of donuts. I gave her the stack of printouts, which she put to the side. I said, "Sorry I took so long. I had to play my phone messages. I got your message."
She replied, "I should have called from the car phone."
"That's all right. You had a standing invitation." I indicated the paper on the table and asked, "So, what do you have there?"
"Some notes. Reports. Do you want to hear this?"
"Sure." I poured us both coffee and sat.
Beth said, "Did you discover anything else in these printouts?"
"Just some increases in their phone, Visa, and Amex after their England trip."
She asked me, "Do you think the trip to England was anything other than business and vacation?"
"Could be."
"Do you think they met a foreign agent?"
"I don't think we'll ever know what they did in England." I was fairly certain, of course, they'd spent the week wading through three-hundred-year-old papers, making sure they signed in and out of the Public Records Office, and/or the British Museum, thereby establishing their bona fides as treasure seekers. However, I wasn't prepared to share that thought yet.
Beth made a short note in her book. Maybe some archivist would be interested in a late-twentieth-century homicide detective's notebook. I used to keep a notebook, but I can't read my own handwriting so it's sort of useless.
Beth said, "Okay, let me begin at the beginning. First, we still have not recovered the two bullets from the bay. It's an almost hopeless task, and they've given up on it."
"Good decision."
"All right, next. Fingerprints. Almost every print in the house is the Gordons'. We tracked down the cleaning lady, who had cleaned that very morning. We also found her prints."
"How about prints on that book of charts?"
"Only the Gordons' and yours." She added, "I examined every page of that book with a magnifying glass and an ultraviolet lamp, looking for marks, pinholes, secret writing-whatever. Nothing."
"I really thought that might yield something."
"No such luck." She glanced at her notes and said, "The autopsy shows what you'd expect. Death in both cases came as a result of massive brain trauma caused by an apparent gunshot wound to the decedents' respective heads, the bullets both entering from the frontal lobes, and so forth… Burned powder or propellant found, indicating close range, so we can probably discount a rifle from a distance. The ME won't commit, but he's saying the murder weapon was probably fired from five to ten feet away and that the caliber of the bullets was in the larger range-maybe a forty-four or forty-five."
I nodded. "That's what we figured."
"Right. The rest of the autopsy…" She glanced at the report. "… Toxicology-no drugs, legal or illegal, found. Stomach contents, almost none, maybe an early and light breakfast. No marks on either body, no infections, no discernible disease…" She went on for a minute or so, then looked up from the report and said, "The deceased female was about a month pregnant."
I nodded. What a nice way to celebrate sudden fame and wealth.
Neither of us spoke for a minute or so. There's something about an autopsy protocol that sort of ruins your mood. One of the more disagreeable tasks that a homicide detective has to perform is to be present at the autopsy. This has to do with the chain-of-evidence requirement and makes sense legally, but I don't like seeing bodies cut open, organs removed and weighed, and all that. I knew that Beth had been present when the Gordons were autopsied, and I wondered if I could have handled seeing people I knew having their guts and brains plucked out.
Beth shuffled some papers and said, "The red earth found in their running shoes is mostly clay, iron, and sand. There's so much of it around here, it's not even worth trying to match it to a specific site."
I nodded and asked, "Did their hands show any signs that they'd been doing something manual?"
"Actually, yes. Tom had a blister on the heel of his right hand. Both of them had been handling soil, which was embedded in their hands and under their nails, despite attempts to wash with saltwater. Their clothes, too, showed smudges of the same soil."
I nodded again.
Beth asked me, "What do you think they were doing?"
"Digging."
"For what?"
"Buried treasure."
She took this as another example of my smart-ass attitude and ignored me, which I knew she'd do. She went through some other points in the forensic report, but I didn't hear anything significant.
Beth continued, "The search of their house, top to bottom, didn't turn up too much of interest. They didn't save much on the computer, except financial and tax records."
I asked her, "What's the difference between a woman and a computer?"
"Tell me."
"A computer will accept a three-and-a-half-inch floppy." She closed her eyes for a second, rubbed her temples, took a deep breath, then continued, "They had a file cabinet, and there is some correspondence, legal stuff, personal, and so forth. We're reading and analyzing it all. This may be interesting, but so far, nothing."
"Whatever was relevant or incriminating was probably stolen." She nodded and continued, "The Gordons owned expensive clothing, even the casual clothes, no pornography, no sexual aids, a wine cellar with seventeen bottles, four photo albums-you're in a few pictures-no audiotapes, a Rolodex which we're comparing to the one in their office, nothing unusual in the medicine cabinet, nothing in any of the pockets of their summer clothes or their stored winter clothes, no keys that don't belong, and one that seemed to be missing-the Murphys' key, if you believe what Mr. Murphy said about giving the house key to the Gordons…". She turned a page and kept reading. This is the kind of stuff that gets my undivided attention, though so far, there was nothing out of the ordinary.
She went on, "We found the deed to the Wiley land, by the way. All in order. Also, we can't find any evidence of a safe deposit box. Or other bank accounts. We found two life insurance policies in the amount of $250,000, one on each of them naming the other as beneficiary with secondary beneficiaries of parents and siblings. Same with their government life insurance. There is also a will, very simple, again naming each other, parents and siblings and so forth."
I nodded. "Good detail work."
"Right. Okay… nothing interesting on the walls… family photos, reproduction art, diplomas."
"How about an attorney?"
"On the wall?"
"No, Beth-an attorney… who is their attorney?"
She smiled at me and said, "You don't like it when people are smart-ass with you, do you? But you-"
"Please continue. Attorney."
She shrugged and said, "Yes, we found the name of an attorney in Bloomington, Indiana, so we'll contact him." She added, "I spoke to both sets of parents on the phone… This is the part of the job I don't like."
"Me neither."
"I talked them out of coming here. I explained that as soon as the medical examiner finished, we'd send the remains to whatever funeral home they wanted. I'll let Max tell them we may need to keep a lot of personal stuff until we, hopefully, wrap it up, go to trial, and all that." She added, "It's all so rough, you know, when you have a murder… death is bad enough. Murder is… well, hard on everyone."
"I know."
She pulled another sheet of paper toward her and said, "I made inquiries about the Spirochete with the DEA, Coast Guard, and even Customs. Interesting that they all knew this boat-they pay attention to these Formulas. Anyway, as far as everyone was concerned, the Gordons were clean. The Spirochete was never spotted in the open Atlantic as far as anyone recalls, and there was never any suspicion that the boat was engaged in smuggling; drug running, or any other illegal activity."