Decker checked his watch. “Which means we didn’t miss them by much. If we had come here first instead of the Richardses’ place?”
“Hindsight is absolutely perfect,” noted Lancaster.
“Decker?”
He turned to look down at the woman in blue scrubs and booties. She was one of the crime scene techs. She was in her midthirties, red-haired and lanky, with sprinkles of freckles over the bridge of her nose.
“Kelly Fairweather,” he said.
She smiled. “Hey, you remembered me.”
“That’s pretty much a given,” said Decker, without a trace of irony.
Fairweather looked over at the dead man. “Well, I remember him,” she said.
Lancaster joined them. “That’s right, you worked the Richards crime scene.”
“My first year doing this. Four homicides and two of them kids. It was quite an introduction to the job. So, what are you doing here, Decker?”
“Just trying to figure things out.”
“Good luck with that. But I always thought Hawkins should’ve gotten the needle for what he did. I know that doesn’t excuse what happened here.”
“No, it doesn’t,” said Lancaster firmly.
Fairweather took that as a not-so-subtle nudge to move on. “Well, good seeing you, Decker.”
As she moved away, Decker walked over to stand directly in front of the dead man, who still sat there like a statue. Lancaster and Jamison joined him.
Decker said, “So the shooter walks up to Hawkins, who’s sitting in this chair, presses the gun against his forehead, and pulls the trigger.” He looked around. “And no sign of a struggle?”
“Maybe he was asleep,” suggested Lancaster.
“After letting the person in, the guy sits down in a chair and dozes off?” said Jamison.
Decker said, “He told us he was taking drugs. Did you find any?”
Lancaster shook her head. “Nothing in here or the bathroom. No discarded wrappers or empty pill bottles. Just a small duffel of clothes, a few bucks in his wallet. The post will show if he had anything in his system.”
Decker looked around the room again, taking in every detail and imprinting it on his memory. He had already done this, but decided to do it again. His memory had been having a few hiccups of late and he didn’t want to take a chance that he had missed something. It was like printing out a second copy of a photo.
Hawkins’s yellowing skin had given way to a translucent paleness. Death did that to you, what with the stoppage of blood flow. At least the cancer was no longer a factor for the man. With death it had immediately stopped eating away at Hawkins’s innards. Decker figured a fast bullet was preferable to a slow, painful death. But it was still murder.
“So, motives and possible suspects?” said Lancaster.
“Not to state the obvious, but does Susan Richards still live in the area?” asked Decker.
“Yes, she does.”
“That would be my starting point,” said Decker.
Lancaster checked her watch. “I’ll have her picked up and taken to the station. We can interview her there.”
“So, you want us involved?” said a surprised Jamison.
“In for a dime,” replied Lancaster.
“The thing is, we have a day job,” said Jamison. “Which often extends into nights.”
“I can call Bogart,” said Decker. Ross Bogart was the veteran FBI agent who headed up the task force of which Decker and Jamison were members.
“So, you really want to stay and dive into this?” asked Jamison warily.
“Do I have a choice?” asked Decker.
“You always have a choice,” said Lancaster, gazing knowingly at Decker. “But I think I know what that choice will be.”
Jamison said, “Decker, have you really thought this through?”
He indicated the corpse and said forcefully, “This is significant. The guy comes to town saying he’s innocent and approaches me and Lancaster to prove him right. Now somebody just killed him.”
“Well, like you just suggested, it might be Susan Richards, the widow of the man Hawkins was convicted of murdering.”
“It might, and it might not.”
Decker turned and walked out.
Lancaster looked at Jamison. “Well, some things never change. Like him.”
“Tell me about it,” replied Jamison wearily.
Chapter 5
Ross Bogart said, “This is unacceptable, Decker. And I mean totally unacceptable.”
Decker was on his phone, heading to the Burlington police station.
“I understand how you could think that, Ross.”
“There’s no understanding anything. I let you go rogue once before with the Melvin Mars case. And then when you wanted to stay back in Baronville and work the case there because it was connected to Alex’s family. But I can’t let you go off willy-nilly whenever you feel like it.”
“This is different,” said Decker.
“You say that every time,” barked Bogart. “You’ve not only blown up the exception to the rule, you’ve blown up the rule. The bottom line is you work for the FBI.”
“I’m sorry, Ross. This is my hometown. I can’t turn my back on it.”
“You’ve made your choice, then?”
“Yes.”
“Then you force me to make mine.”
“This is all me. Alex has nothing to do with it.”
“I’ll deal with Special Agent Jamison separately.”
The line went dead.
Decker slowly put the phone away. It seemed that his days at the FBI were numbered.
He looked over at Lancaster, who was in the car with him.
“Problems?” she said.
“There are always problems.”
They drove on.
Susan Richards was not pleased. “You’re shitting me, right? You think I killed that son of a bitch? I wish I had.”
Decker and Lancaster had just walked into the interrogation room at police headquarters. Jamison had gone back to her hotel because Decker had not received authorization from Bogart to work on the case. And that permission obviously would not be forthcoming. Bogart had probably already contacted her.
They had had to wait for a few hours while the paperwork was drawn up to bring Richards in after she angrily refused to voluntarily comply with their request. And the fuming woman had apparently taken her time getting ready while the uniforms impatiently waited.
Thus it was now nearly five in the morning.
Lancaster looked ready to fall asleep.
Decker looked ready to question the woman for the next ten years.
The interrogation room’s cinderblock walls were still painted mustard yellow. Decker had never known why, other than maybe that was the color of some old paint the custodians had found somewhere in the basement. Leaving the cinder blocks their original gray would have been nicer, he thought. But maybe no one wanted “nicer” in an interrogation room.
Richards had been forty-two when her family was wiped out. She was in her midfifties now. She had aged remarkably well, Decker thought. He remembered her as tall, but plump and mousy-looking, her light brown hair hanging limply around her face.
Now she was much thinner, and her hair was cut in a chic manner, with the tresses grazing her shoulder. She had colored her hair and blonde highlights predominated. Her mousy personality had been replaced by an assertive manner that had made itself known with her outburst the moment the two detectives walked into the room.
Richards looked from Lancaster to Decker as they sat down across from her. “Wait a minute, you’re the two from that night. I recognize you now. You know what he did.” She sat forward, her sharp elbows pressed against the tabletop. Her face full of fury, she snapped, “You know what that bastard did.”
Lancaster said calmly, “Which is why, when he was found dead, we thought we needed to talk to you. So that you could tell us where you were between around eleven and midnight.”