“If you break or ruin anything in my home, I’ll sue your ass off!” Dresden cried out. “You have no right to…what the fuck is that!” Dresden was responding to noises emanating from one of the bedrooms. He stomped down the hallway and Decker could hear him venting his spleen at Oliver.
After completing his phone call to the tech, Decker took a few moments to get the layout of the room and decide how he wanted to organize the search. Dresden was probably telling the truth when he’d said he threw the phone away. If there was something incriminating on it, he’d dump it without thinking. Yet there were those occasional perpetrators of violent crime who retained damning evidence. Some of the criminals were too arrogant or too lazy to bother chucking the offending article, but others kept indicting evidence as a memento; something that allowed their warped minds to visit and revisit the crime over and over.
The component that occupied the most space in the living room was a stark white entertainment unit complete with drawers, cabinets, and shelving-almost a quaint nod to yesterday’s technology because nowadays so many families were buying flat-screens. It appeared that Ivan hadn’t moved up yet. Maybe that was the first thing on his agenda as soon as he got the insurance money.
Dresden’s white elephant unit contained a big bulky TV behind pocket doors and lots of shelves on either side of the screen. One side was taken up by DVDs, CDs, and stereo components; the other side held a row of books, another row of CDs, and a lone shelf devoted to curios and pictures: six silver-framed photographs, all of them showing Ivan in various poses of physical prowess. The only hint that a woman had once lived there were several scattered scented candles and a small collection of porcelain cats.
Decker started by carefully taking out the books, the CDs, and the DVDs and searching behind them. When nothing materialized, he checked behind the audio/video equipment. Satisfied that the phone wasn’t stashed anywhere in the entertainment unit, he began looking under couches and chairs. Since the condo’s living room, dining room, and kitchen were open space divided by a breakfast bar, he could hear Marge opening and closing doors in the kitchen.
“Any luck?” Decker asked her.
“Not so far. What about you?”
“Zilch.”
The three detectives searched through the late afternoon until the sunlight dimmed and early evening set in. They rooted through drawers and cupboards, peered under couches and chairs, snooped inside medicine cabinets, and turned over the master bedroom’s mattress to see if anything had been squirreled away. Ninety minutes had elapsed before the blood-spatter experts arrived. By that time, Ivan had all but barricaded himself inside his home office.
Once the techs arrived, it took another hour to focus in on the areas to test. They decided to concentrate on spraying the carpet under the couch where Marge had found the pen and felt something sticky. Then they moved on to the walls, the floorboards, and the baseboard molding in the kitchen. They also sprayed the walls in the living room, office, the guest bedroom, and the master bedroom. Last, they applied luminol to the marital mattress. By then night had fallen. They drew the drapes and turned off the lights, shrouding the condo in inky darkness.
To say there was no blood-protein luminescence at all would have been a lie. A very careful eye could pick up random specks of blue in the kitchen (accidental cuts made in food preparation), a decent amount of glow around both bathroom toilets (urine as well as blood glows blue under luminol), and as Judge Puhl had predicted, there were several splotches of blue on the master bedroom’s mattress (old menstrual leakage). But there was nothing indicating a bloodletting had taken place anywhere inside the condo.
The lights were turned back on. Decker then asked if the techs would luminol the corners of the dining-room and the coffee tables as well as the breakfast bar. His logic was that maybe a physical altercation had taken place and perhaps Ivan pushed Roseanne, causing the phone to fly from her hand and under the couch. Just maybe she fell and hit her head on the table, and the blow knocked her unconscious or dead.
The breakfast bar and the corners of the tables were tested and came up clean. The breakfast bar did glow slightly, but that could have been caused by raw chicken or ground beef spilling juices. Luminol did not distinguish between animal or human sera. The techs took a slide scraping, hoping to have enough material to test for presence of human blood.
And that sticky area that Marge had felt under the couch-Decker had felt it as well-showed no luminescence. The matted carpet nap had probably come from some other source, most likely a food accident.
Four hours later, Decker was thanking Dresden for his time and for his cooperation. Dresden was magnanimous in his forgiveness, shaking Decker’s hand with a firm grip. “I hope that this finally puts to bed some very evil rumors about my love for my wife. It was hard enough grieving the first time, Lieutenant. By these hideous innuendos, I’ve felt like I’ve had to grieve all over again.”
Decker said, “We’re sorry for any inconvenience, Mr. Dresden, but your wife’s body hasn’t turned up. We’re doing our job and I’m sure you can appreciate that.”
“I realize you’re public servants, but it’s still a terrible thing…to lose your wife and then be a suspect in her disappearance. Now if you don’t mind, I’d like you to leave. I could use a little privacy…not to mention the cleanup.”
“Of course.” Decker granted Dresden a slow smile. “By the way, I didn’t see your lawyer anywhere.”
“I decided not to call him. Why bother wasting bucks when all he’d do was twiddle his thumbs and watch you work. I knew I didn’t need him. I had nothing to hide.”
THEY PILED INTO the unmarked, Oliver driving them back to the station house to pick up their respective cars, Marge sitting shotgun. Oliver said, “Could it be that the sleaze had nothing to do with his wife’s disappearance? Lots of guys cheat. Most of them don’t kill their wives.”
“Yeah, that part’s true. But of the guys who kill their wives, almost all of them have girlfriends.” No one spoke for a second. Marge looked over her shoulder at Decker in the backseat. “What do you think, Loo?”
“I don’t know. He seems sleazy enough. Maybe Roseanne did die in the crash. Just as likely, she was murdered elsewhere.”
Marge said, “Even if she was murdered elsewhere, it doesn’t mean that Dresden didn’t do it.”
“Or he could be innocent,” Oliver insisted. “Maybe the phone we saw was Roseanne’s old, lost phone. Maybe she bought another one exactly like it.”
“Then why didn’t Ivan just tell us that?”
“Because he knew that our finding Roseanne’s phone would make him look bad.”
“Not as bad as throwing it away,” Marge said. “That’s an immediate sign of guilt.”
Decker said, “If Ivan did it and the condo wasn’t the murder scene, where else could he have done it?”
Marge shrugged. “Maybe he did it in his car. Maybe that’s why he sold it.”
“Who’d he sell it to?” When the question was met with silence, Decker said, “Maybe we should find out?”
IN THE HEART of the north Valley sat the major parts manufacturing plant for Katumi Motors, the factory housed in a white, cinderblock rectangle, and fronted by a green lawn sporting a flower bed that spelled out KATUMI in white petunias. The commercial area held industries of all types, along with granite, brick, lumber, and marble yards. Decker often came here for wholesale prices whenever he embarked upon a home-improvement project, and each year it seemed to get uglier and uglier. Today the Sunday skies held rain clouds and the smoggy, foggy air was infused with gloom. The bad weather plus the lack of anything green made the vicinity feel like an old, depressed company town.