“Captain.”
“Hey, Tal.” Dempsey leaned against the doorjamb, looking over the desktop. “Got a minute?”
“Sure do.”
Tal had known that the brass would find out about the 2124, of course, and he’d planned to talk to Dempsey about it soon; but he’d hoped to wait until his proof about the suspicious suicide was somewhat further developed.
“Heard about the twenty-one-twenty-four at the Whitleys’.”
“Sure.”
“What’s up with that?”
Tal explained about the two suicides, the common denominators.
Dempsey nodded. “Kind of a coincidence, sure. But you know, Tal, we don’t have a lot of resources for full investigations. Like, we’ve only got one dedicated homicide crime scene unit.”
“Didn’t know that.”
“And there was a shooting in Rolling Hills Estates last night. Two people shot up bad, one died. The unit was late running that scene ‘cause you had them in Hamilton.”
“I’m sorry about that, Captain.”
“It’s also expensive. Sending out CS.”
“Expensive? I didn’t think about that.”
“Thousands, I’m talking. Crime scene bills everything back to us. Every time they go out. Then there’re lab tests and autopsies and everything. The M.E. too. You know what an autopsy costs?”
“They bill us?” Tal asked.
“It’s just the more we save for the county the better we look, you know.”
“Right. I guess it would be expensive.”
“You bet.” No longer smiling, the captain adjusted his sleeves. “Other thing is, the way I found out: I heard from their daughter. Sandra Whitley. She was going to make funeral arrangements and then she hears about the M.E. autopsy. Phew... she’s pissed off. Threatening to sue... I’m going to have to answer questions. So. Now, what exactly made you twenty-one-twenty-four the scene, Tal?”
He scanned the papers on his desk, uneasy, wondering where to start. “Well, a couple of things. They’d just bought—”
“Hold on there a minute,” the captain said, holding up a finger.
Dempsey leaned out the door and shouted, “LaTour!... Hey, LaTour?”
“What?” came the grumbling baritone.
“Come over here. I’m with Simms.”
Tal heard the big man make his way toward the Unreal Crimes side of the detective pen. The ruddy, goateed face appeared in the office. Ignoring Tal, he listened as the captain explained about the Whitleys’ suicide.
“Another one, huh?”
“Tal declared a twenty-one-twenty-four.”
The homicide cop nodded noncommitally. “Uh-huh. Why?”
The question was directed toward Dempsey, who turned toward Tal.
“Well, I was looking at the Bensons’ deaths and I pulled up the standard statistical profile on suicides in Westbrook County. Now, when you look at all the attributes—”
“Attributes?” LaTour asked, frowning, as if tasting sand.
“Right. The attributes of the Bensons’ death — and the Whitleys’ too now — they’re way out of the standard range. Their deaths are outliers.”
“Out-liars? The fuck’s that?”
Tal explained. In statistics an outlier was an event significantly different from a group of similar events. He gave a concrete example. “Say you’re analyzing five murderers. Three perps killed a single victim each, one of them killed two victims, and the final man was a serial killer who’d murdered twenty people. To draw any meaningful conclusions from that, you need to treat the last one as an outlier and analyze him separately. Otherwise, your analysis’ll be mathematically correct but misleading. Running the numbers, the mean — the average — number of victims killed by each suspect is five. But that exaggerates the homicidal nature of the first four men and underplays the last one. See what I mean?”
The frown on LaTour’s face suggested he didn’t. But he said, “So you’re saying these two suicides’re different from most of the others in Westbrook.”
“Significantly different. Fewer than six percent of the population kill themselves when they’re facing a possibly terminal illness. That number drops to two point six percent when the victim has medical insurance and down to point nine when the net worth of the victim is over one million dollars. It drops even further when the victims are married and are in the relatively young category of sixty-five to seventy-five, like these folks. And love-pact deaths are only two percent of suicides nationwide and ninety-one percent of those involve victims under the age of twenty-one... Now, what do you think the odds are that two heart patients would take their own lives, and their wives’, in the space of two days?”
“I don’t really know, Tal,” LaTour said, clearly uninterested. “What else you got? Suspicious, I mean.”
“Okay, the Whitleys’d just bought a car earlier that day. Rare, antique MG. Why do that if you’re going to kill yourself?”
LaTour offered, “They needed a murder weapon. Didn’t want a gun. Probably there was something about the MG that meant something to them. From when they were younger, you know. They wanted to go out that way.”
“Makes sense,” Dempsey said, tugging at a sleeve.
“There’s more,” Tal said and explained about the gloves, the fiber, the smudges on the note. And the recent visitor’s tire prints. “Somebody else was there around the time they killed themselves. Or just after.”
LaTour said, “Lemme take a look.”
Tal pushed the reports toward him. The big cop examined everything closely. Then shook his head. “I just don’t see it,” he said to the captain. “No evidence of a break-in or struggle... The note?” He shrugged. “Looks authentic. I mean, Documents’ll tell us for sure but look—” he held up the Whitleys’ checkbook ledger and the suicide note, side by side. The script was virtually identical. “Smudges from gloves on paper? We see that on every piece of paper we find at a scene. Hell, half the pieces of paper here have smudges on them that look like smeared FRs—”
“FRs?”
“Friction ridges,” LaTour muttered. “Fingerprints. Smudges — from the manufacturer, stockers, browsing customers.”
“The fiber?” He leaned forward and lifted a tiny white strand off Tal’s suit jacket. “This’s the same type the Crime Scene found. Cotton worsted. See it all the time. The fibers at the Whitleys’ could’ve come from anywhere. It might’ve come from you.” Shuffling sloppily through the files with his massive paws. “Okay, the gloves and the tread marks? Those’re Playtex kitchen gloves; I recognize the ridges. No perps ever use them because the wear patterns can be traced...” He held up the checkbook ledger again. “Lookit the check the wife wrote today. To Esmerelda Constanzo ‘For cleaning services.’ The housekeeper was in yesterday, cleaned the house wearing the gloves — maybe she even straightened up the stack of paper they used later for the suicide note, left the smudges then. The tread marks? That’s about the size of a small import. Just the sort that a cleaning woman’d be driving. They were hers. Bet you any money.”
Though he didn’t like the man’s message, Tal was impressed at the way his mind worked. He’d made all those deductions — extremely logical deductions — based on a three-minute examination of the data.
“Got a case needs lookin’ at,” LaTour grumbled and tossed the report onto Tal’s desk. He clomped back to his office.
Breaking the silence that followed, Dempsey said, “Hey, I know you don’t get out into the field much. Must get frustrating to sit in the office all day long, not doing... you know...”
Real police work? Tal wondered if that’s what the captain was hesitating to say.