“Was anything taken?” asked Chase.
“No idea. You’ll have to ask her. She’s still over at the house, waiting for you.”
“Well,” said Uncle Alec with an impatient gesture of his hand. “Don’t keep the woman waiting. Off you go. Chop, chop.”
And like the good little detectives that we were, off we went.
21
We were back at Neda’s house, though this time at least no lethal consequences had resulted from this most recent breakin.
Cher Shorn, Neda’s loyal secretary, opened the door even as Chase parked in front of the house, and looked both rattled and shaken. And of course I could see why that would be. First her employer was murdered in her own house, and next some unknown and unseen force of evil barged in to abscond with who knows what. It would rattle a lesser person to the core to find themselves alone in such a place, with no way of knowing if this same person isn’t still lurking upstairs, hiding in some cupboard or under the bed.
“What happened?” asked Chase the moment we set paw inside the house.
Cher took a deep breath and launched into her tale.“I got here at nine o’clock to return some of Neda’s stuff, and to prepare for my interview with her sister, when I discovered that the backdoor had been forced open.”
“You’re meeting Titta?” asked Odelia.
“Yes, she called me this morning out of the blue, said she was in town and could we please meet.” She shook her head. “I didn’t even know Neda had a sister, to be honest.”
“Neda never mentioned her to you?” asked Odelia as they walked to the back of the house, and halted in front of the backdoor.
“No, never. Which is odd, considering I worked for her for so many years.”
The backdoor had indeed been the subject of a vicious attack: the window had been broken near the lock, and the door was ajar.
“We were out in front of the house last night,” I told Odelia from my vantage point on the floor. Someone had turned off the floor heating, and the stone floor had become stone cold, unfortunately. “In fact two neighborhood watches were parked outside, watching the house, and we didn’t see a thing.”
Though in all honesty the respective members of both neighborhood watches had been more interested in figuring out the limits of their turf than doing what they were supposed to be doing: keeping an eye out for any nefarious or burglarious activities.
Odelia nodded, to show me she’d understood what I said.
“The neighborhood watch was out in full force last night,” she told Chase, “but apparently this burglar managed to evade detection.”
“If whoever broke in here came in through this backdoor,” said Chase as he studied the vandalized door, “and the watch was watching the front, that stands to reason. You didn’t touch anything?” he asked the secretary, who quickly shook her head.
“The moment I saw what happened I called it in,” said Cher.
“I’ll get forensics out here,” Chase grunted, and excused himself for a moment to make the necessary phone calls.
“Did you check if anything was taken?” asked Odelia as we walked back to the living room, where we paused at the spot where Neda’s body had been found.
Cher inadvertently clutched a hand to her neck and visibly shivered.“No—not that I can tell at first glance. Though to be honest with you, the moment I saw that backdoor, I immediately called 911 and locked myself in the hallway, waiting for you to arrive.”
“So you haven’t checked the house?” asked Odelia, glancing in the direction of the staircase.
Cher shook her head nervously, as her eyes followed Odelia’s gaze. She suddenly lowered her voice. “Do you think whoever did this could still be in the house?”
“I doubt it,” said Odelia. Though she didn’t sound very sure of herself. “Nobody would be foolish enough to break in and then linger.”
But she still relayed Cher’s concern to Chase, who’d finished his phone call, and the cop immediately mounted the stairs to take a gander. Five tense minutes later he called down, “Nobody up here!”
Both Odelia and Cher visibly relaxed. And frankly so did I and Dooley!
“Maybe you can check the crime scene photos,” I suggested. “And compare them to how the place looks now. That way you can see at a glance if anything was taken or not.”
“Great idea, Max,” said Dooley.
Chase had returned, and announced that a team was arriving in ten minutes to go over the place again, this time in view of this second breakin. Odelia relayed my idea to him, and he nodded and she took her tablet from her shoulder bag and fired it up.
“Yesterday a specialized team took pictures of every available area of the house,” she told Neda’s secretary. “So if anything was taken, we might be able to see it by making a comparison.”
For a moment, the three of them studied the room, comparing the way it was now with how it had looked twenty-four hours before. Not unlike that much-loved game of‘Spot the Difference.’ And then, all of a sudden, Cher, who clearly boasted a good secretary’s eagle-eyed vision, let out a little cry of excitement. “I found it!” she said as she pointed to Odelia’s tablet.
They moved over to a tall bookcase behind the salon. It took up half the wall space, and was filled with an impressive collection of reading material, interspersed with the odd knickknack and plenty of decorative items: framed pictures and the like. Chase had put on plastic gloves and slipped a volume from a shelf located at eye level and opened it.
“Photo album,” he grunted as he leafed through the tome.
That entire row consisted of photo albums, and according to what I could determine from Cher’s outburst, one of those albums had mysteriously disappeared overnight.
“Can I have a look?” I asked, curious to know what this missing album looked like.
Odelia cast a surreptitious glance at Cher, but she was too busy following along with Chase, as he took down album after album, leafing through them for potential clues.
Odelia placed her tablet on the sofa, and I hopped up to have a look-see. And indeed Cher was right: there had been a dozen of those photo albums the day before, and now there was one less. A smaller one, which had been wedged among its larger brethren.
“Odd,” I commented.
“Could it be that one of the crime scene technicians took it?” Odelia asked Chase.
“No way,” the cop said with a quick shake of the head. “They know better than to remove things from a crime scene.” He glanced up at Cher, but the latter quickly denied having touched even a single thing in the house.
“Maybe it was Neda’s ghost,” Dooley suggested. “And she came back to collect some of her favorite things to take along to the afterlife.”
“Ghosts don’t break windows, Dooley,” I told him. “They float through the walls.”
“Yes, but maybe she doesn’t know that. She’s never been a ghost before, since she’s never been murdered before, and so she’s probably still getting the hang of things.”
“Even if ghosts existed, which they don’t, why would Neda take this particular album?”
“Maybe it’s full of her favorite pictures? Pictures of her dad, maybe?”
“Doubtful,” was my verdict, which caused Dooley’s shoulders to sag a little. I quickly added, “But still an interesting avenue to pursue, buddy.”
“Thanks, Max,” he said, perking up again. “I think we need to look at every possible explanation, and not rule out a single one, however implausible.”
I had the impression he got that from one of his Discovery Channel documentaries, but refrained from comment. The human contingent were still going over the room, picture by picture, but found that nothing else had been taken as far as they could tell.
Soon the crime scene technicians arrived—the people in the white coveralls and the blue booties—and we were all relegated to the backyard while they did their thing.