The Reveal: A Detectives Seagate and Miner Mystery (Book 6) (2 page)

Chapter 1

The protocol is, since the
day shift starts at 8:00
am
, and
since it should take us an hour to wake up, scrape off the night crud, and roll
in to work, anything that happens 7:00
am
or later we get the call. The night shift is still officially on duty, but if
you send them out at 7:00, they’re so ragged they’re going to try real hard to
wrap things up by 7:30—even if the wrapping ends up a little sloppy—so they can
get back to headquarters by 7:45 and make it out to the parking lot before
8:01.

So I wasn’t surprised that my buzzing phone showed
7:02. The call was from Rawlings Police Department. I wasn’t happy, of course.
Just not surprised.

I cleared some of the crap out of my throat.
“Seagate.”

“Good morning, Detective. This is Mary.”

I think I was supposed to say good morning to
Mary, maybe ask her how she was. But at 7:02 in the morning, I was blanking on
who she was. “Yeah.”

“We have a suspicious death.”

“Yeah?”

“At 411 Harkins. A forty-something white female.
Lying at the bottom of her staircase.”

I cleared my throat again and started to come out
of my fog. I’m a forty-something white female lying on my bed. It takes me a
little time. “Did you say homicide?”

“No, I said suspicious.”

Suspicious
isn’t an official cause of death. There are only six official ones—natural,
accident, suicide, homicide, undetermined, and pending—and only one person gets
to call it: the medical examiner. But
suspicious
is as good as any other word. Cops use it all the time. It means the first
officer on scene was surprised she was dead because he didn’t see any bullet
holes or a knife sticking out of her or a suicide note in her hand.

If the victim had been real old or sick-looking,
it would have gone straight to the EMTs and an autopsy. But an apparently
healthy forty-something year-old corpse stays put until the detectives and the
medical examiner look her over. If we see signs of struggle or a crime—or
really anything that doesn’t look right—then we open a case file and crank up
the machine.

“Did you call Ryan?” That’s my partner: Ryan
Miner.

“Yeah, and Harold, too.” That’s the medical
examiner: Harold Breen.

“Okay. I’ll be there in twenty. You said 411
Harkins?”

“That’s right.”

After a quick shower, I ran a comb through my wet
hair. These days I leave the steam on the mirror so I don’t have to be reminded
of the increasingly puffy grey bags beneath my bloodshot eyes. I threw on my
cop-casual outfit of dark slacks and light blouse, grabbed a granola bar, and
headed out to my carport. I didn’t bother with coffee. New cases come with
their own caffeine.

It took me less than ten minutes to make it to
Harkins, a main street in the neighborhood called the North End. That’s an area
about six blocks square, mixed commercial and residential. It’s the only
neighborhood in town where nobody complains if you paint your house pink and
purple, let the grass grow knee-high, and run an aromatherapy business for dogs
on the street level. There’s a tea house, a shoe-repair shop, a store selling
used paperbacks for fifty cents, and a place that carries only crafts and
trinkets made by poor people in Africa. The sign out front says all the profits
go directly to the people who made the stuff, but in the ten years it’s been
open, I’ve never seen the two parking spaces out front even half-full.

The North End is home to working-class folks,
students living six to a house, and some highly educated types, including
professors and low-level administrators at the university and people who run
the little art museum, the food bank, and the refugee center. The kind of
people we admire rather than reward.

If Rawlings were a hipper city, the North End
would have a more colorful name, perhaps something with the phrase
People’s Republic
in it. But here in tiny
Rawlings, Montana, the neighborhood is called the North End, which says a lot
about our no-nonsense approach to things—the North End being the end that’s
north of downtown—but also says something about our lack of whimsy. In our
defense, it’s Montana. It gets real cold and stays real cold for what seems
like six or eight months a year. Whimsy would freeze and shatter by late
November.

I parked my Honda at the curb in front of one of
the two coffee shops on the 400 block of Harkins and put down my visor with the
sign that says Official Police Business. It being colder than fifty degrees on
a bright blue late April morning, and there being only one squad car in front
of the house—parked alongside the curb, no lights flashing—there were no
civilians milling about.

The house at 411 Harkins was built around World
War II, a two-story Craftsman with concrete steps leading to a little porch
with a couple of wicker chairs too ratty to bother stealing. The asbestos
shingles were painted a dark red, although the ones on the north side of the
house were lighter from the annual sandblasting we call winter. The white paint
on the short picket fence was showing a lot of weathered grey wood, the lawn a
mix of bare spots as big as manhole covers and tall, scraggly grass full of
dandelions.

The gate creaked as I pushed it open and followed
the flagstone path to the concrete steps, then up to the porch.

“Hey,” I said to Officer Truman. That’s me
chatting with my colleagues.

“Detective.” He nodded.

“You the first officer?”

“Dispatch got a call around 6:30. Woman wanted us
to check the house.”

“Did she say why?”

“No.”

“Name?”

“No.”

“So you swung by?”

Truman nodded. “Looked in through the glass.” He
pointed to the front door. “Saw her there.”

“How’d you get in?”

“Turned the doorknob.”

“How about that?” I said. “So that was around
6:40?”

He nodded. “I cleared the house. Nobody else
inside. Radioed it in. Detective Miner got here eight minutes ago.”

I like Truman. When he speaks, you get a lot of
facts per word.

I’d met my partner, Ryan, at a crime scene before
shift at least fifteen times, and he’d beaten me there every time, even though
he lives about five miles out of town. I think he sleeps in his clothes,
waiting for a call.

“Thanks, Truman.” He nodded. I slipped on a pair
of paper booties and snapped on a pair of gloves. I pulled the storm door open
without touching the handle, even though Truman had probably smudged any
prints.

I pushed open the wooden door and walked in. It
was a standard-issue North End house, a small foyer at the landing of a center
staircase. Off to the left was the living room; to the right, the formal dining
room and the kitchen. The oak floor, scratched up and dull, was covered by a
mat to catch some of the dirt and crap. Then a braided oval rug at the stair
landing. And on the stairs—more precisely, on the third through the ninth
treads—was a dead woman. Her left arm trailed, back near her hip. Her right
hand dangled over the third riser. The wrist was swollen.

Her hair, brown and grey, cut medium length, was
half-covering her face. I crouched down and lifted the hair carefully to get a
look at her face. Her grey eyes were half-closed. She looked about forty-five.
No makeup. Her mouth was open, the jaws encircling the edge of a riser, as if
she was about to chomp down on it. One of her canine teeth, dislodged but still
attached to her jaw by some stringy pink roots, was touching the edge of the
tread.

She wore a grey blazer with a single brass button,
black jeans, new but simple, and a red cotton turtleneck, the kind that women
our age wear when the neck starts to go all turkey.

“Good morning, Karen.”

I looked up. Ryan was standing at the top of the
landing, hands on his hips. He was wearing one of his navy blue suits. I
couldn’t quite tell if it was one of the plain ones or a pinstripe or a chalk
stripe. White button-down shirt and rep tie—this one red and green. The shiny
dot on the tie was his gold tie tack. This guy lives in a town where some of
the bars still have spittoons, and he looks like he’s ready for the board of
directors’ annual meeting.

He was also wearing the other part of his uniform:
a big, broad grin. It’s not one of those phony grimaces, the kind where the
eyebrows are tight and knotted but the mouth is doing all the work. No, Ryan’s
grin is one-hundred percent joy. It starts at the mouth, with his many sparkly
teeth, and heads north, all the way past his blue eyes.

When we first partnered up, a couple years ago,
when I was drinking heavily, the grin put me off, like he was laughing at me
for saying or doing something dumb, which happened even more frequently then
than now. I checked his file to see if the grin came from a brain injury in the
army or a car crash or something. That wasn’t it. One day, we’re in some
idiot’s back yard, the uniforms digging the guy’s fiancée out of a half-hearted
grave next to a Pontiac with no doors. We’re checking to see if the tat on her
wrist matches the one in the photo from the bedroom, and I say to Ryan, Why so
chipper? He grins and says it’s just a beautiful day to be alive. It wasn’t
that he was insensitive to the dead fiancée. Turned out he’s Mormon.

I didn’t say “Good morning” back to him. He
doesn’t get offended. He understands that I’m crankier than usual when we have
to talk about dead people before shift starts. “Natural causes?”

He put on a thoughtful expression and rubbed his
chin theatrically. “I like it. She has a massive heart attack, falls down the
stairs.”

“Accident?”

“Sure. She’s standing at the top of the stairs,
slips and falls.”

“Suicide?”

“Could be—but that would make her a masochist, as
well. The wooden stairs must have hurt. Personally, I’d have gone over right
here.” He pointed a few feet to his side, where she could have climbed over the
bannister or just pushed on it hard and ridden gravity for a second until she
hit the oak floor on the main level.

“Murder?”

Now his grin was gone. “Can’t tell. She’s pretty
beat up, maybe from the stairs and hitting the wall. Or maybe from getting beat
up first, then tossed down the stairs.”

“The carpet up there thick enough to take an
impression from a shoe?” I knew he used to lay carpets.

He crouched down and ran his fingers over the nap.
“I don’t think so.”

“Can you tell what she was doing before she came
down the stairs?”

“Not specifically, no. There was some kind of
party here. Lots of wine glasses, grocery-store veggie platters, cheese.
Someone was washing the dishes but hadn’t finished yet. Broken plates and
glasses on the kitchen floor, near the sink, and a bread knife.”

“So if someone grabbed her, it probably happened
in the kitchen.”

“What it looks like.”

“But nothing tells you why she went upstairs? How
she got there?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Can’t say.”

“Maybe Harold can tell us.” I paused. “Can you
give her a name?”

“Her wallet’s in her room. Virginia Rinaldi, age
forty-six. Professor of sociology at Central Montana.”

“Anyone else live here?”

“The photos throughout the house show a guy,
college age. But the person living here is a young woman.”

“Name?”

“Can’t find anything. But she’s living here.”

“You mean, stuff in the bathroom?”

He nodded. “That and the clothes and a few CDs put
her in her twenties. But no wallet or ID or photos. Nothing to identify her on
the walls or on the little desk or anything.”

“Phone? Computer?”

“No and no.”

“You think the professor went down the stairs last
night, right?”

“My guess. I can’t tell from the rigor, but with
all the food and glasses still out in the living room, I’d say last night more
likely than this morning.”

“If it was me,
I’d’ve
left everything till morning.”

“Maybe so, but someone started to clean up, then
stopped.”

“Maybe she needed to wash up some of the glasses
and shit during the party?”

“I checked the cabinets.” Ryan shook his head.
“She had plenty of clean glasses and shit.”

When I curse, Ryan often quotes me back to myself.
When we first started working together, I think he was trying to show me a
better way. He was so polite he wouldn’t come right out and tell me that, you
know, it doesn’t really showcase your intelligence and creativity to say
shit
four- or five-hundred times in an
eight-hour shift. So he tried to demonstrate how to speak in actual English.

In the last year or so, however, I’ve heard him
work a
shit
or two into conversation
even when I haven’t used the word. Perhaps he’s starting to enjoy cursing. For
all I know, it’s how a Mormon takes a walk on the wild side.

I’m not proud of my language. I wish I could speak
better. But I’m just so tired most of the time I don’t have the energy to think
of the right word. I was never that bright to begin with. Plus, over the years,
most of my brain cells drowned in a Jack Daniel’s marinade.

In my defense, however,
shit
is often the right word, especially if you’re a detective. An
eighteen-year-old girl, first week on campus, dies from doing a dozen shots?
Shit. A guy pops his girlfriend in the face, and now she’s dead and he’s gone?
Shit. A middle-aged guy gets laid off third time this year, walks into the
office and starts shooting? Shit.

No, I’m not proud of my language. But fuck it: You
are what you are, and this, unfortunately, is what I am.

I called up to Ryan. “While we wait for Harold,
you figure out who the young woman is, okay?”

“Absolutely.” He turned and disappeared down the
upstairs hall.

I looked at Virginia Rinaldi, lying there on the
steps, her wrist all swollen up, her busted tooth hanging from her mouth, her
grey eyes half-closed. Was it about twelve hours ago she was standing in front
of the mirror, smoothing her hair, making sure the collar of the red turtleneck
folded over evenly? Buttoning the grey blazer, frowning a little and shaking
her head, then unbuttoning it. Turning to the left, standing up straight. Then
turning to the right. Sighing, walking out of her bedroom and heading
downstairs for the party.