Dream Man (3 page)

It took them about ten minutes to reach the address, but there was no mistaking the house. The street was almost blocked with patrol cars, a paramedics van, and various other official-capacity vehicles. Uniformed officers stood around on the small lawn, while neighbors gathered in small bunches, some of the onlookers still in their nightclothes. Dane automatically studied the onlookers, looking for something that didn’t fit, someone who didn’t seem to belong or who was maybe just a little bit too interested. It was amazing how often a murderer would hang around.

He shrugged into a navy jacket and grabbed the spare tie out of the backseat, loosely knotting it around his neck. Somehow, he noticed, Trammell had managed to impecca-bly tie his own tie in the car. He looked again. Damn, he didn’t believe it! The dapper bastard had chosen a double-breasted Italian suit to wear
on his day off.
He’d simply slipped into the suit jacket as they’d left the house. Sometimes he worried about Trammell.

They showed their badges to the policeman at the door, and he stood aside to let them enter.

“Sheeit,” Dane said in an undertone as he got a good look.

“And all the other bodily excretions,” Trammell replied in the same disbelieving tone. Murder scenes were nothing new. After a while, cops reached the point where violent crimes were pretty routine, in their own way. Stabbings and shootings were a dime a dozen. If anyone had asked him half an hour earlier, Dane would have said that he and Trammell had been detectives long enough that, for the most part, they were unshockable.

But this was different.

Blood was everywhere. It was splattered on the walls, on the floor, even on the ceiling. He could see into the kitchen, and the bloody path wound from there through the living room, then into a small hallway and out of sight. He tried to imagine the kind of struggle that would have sprayed blood so extensively. Dane turned to the uniformed policeman who was guard-ing the door. “Have the crime lab guys showed up yet?”

“Not yet.”

“Shit,” he said again. The longer it took the crime lab, or forensics, team to arrive, the more the crime scene would be compromised. Some disturbance was unavoidable, unless the forensics boys were the ones to discover the victim and immediately secured the area. But forensics wasn’t here, and the house was crowded with both uniformed and plainclothes policemen, milling around and inevitably mud-dying the evidential waters.

“Don’t let anybody else in except for Ivan’s guys,” he told the officer. Ivan Schaffer was head of the crime lab team. He was going to be really pissed off about this.

“Lieutenant Bonness is on the way.”

“You can let him in, too,” Dane replied, his mouth quirking.

The house was middle-class, nothing out of the ordinary. The living room was furnished with a couch and matching chair, the required coffee table and matching lamp tables of genuine wood veneer, while a big brown recliner had the best spot in front of the television. The recliner was occu-pied now by a dazed-looking man in his late forties or early fifties, probably the victim’s husband. He was giving mono-syllabic answers to the questions put to him by another uniformed officer. The victim was in the bedroom. Dane and Trammell forced their way through the crowd and into the small room. The photographer had already arrived and was doing his job, but for once was noticeably lacking in his usual nonchalance.

The nude woman lay jammed in the cramped space between the bedside table and the wall. She had been stabbed repeatedly—
hacked
was a better description. She had tried to run, and when she had been cornered in the bedroom she had tried to fight, as evidenced by the deep defensive wounds on her arms. She had been nearly decapi-tated, her breasts mutilated by the sheer number of wounds, and all of her fingers had been severed. Dane looked around the room, but he didn’t see the missing digits. The bed was still neatly made, though splattered with blood.

“Has the weapon been found?” Dane asked.

A patrolman nodded. “It was right beside the body. A Ginsu knife from the kitchen. She had a whole set. It looks like they really do what the ads say; I think I’ll get my wife some.”

Another patrolman snorted. “I’d rethink that idea if I was you, Scanlon.”

Dane ignored the black humor, which all cops used to help them handle the ugliness they saw on a daily basis. “What about her fingers?”

“Nope. No sign of ‘em.”

Trammell signed. “I think we’d better go talk to the husband.”

It was a fact that most homicides, except for the random gang drive-bys, were committed by someone who knew the victim: a friend, a neighbor, co-worker, or relative. When the victim was a woman, the usual list of suspects was narrowed down even more, because the murderer was almost invariably her husband or boyfriend. A lot of times, the murderer was the one who “discovered” the body and reported the crime.

They went back to the living room, and Dane caught the eye of the officer who was talking to the husband. The officer came over to them.

“Has he said anything?” Dane asked.

The officer shook his head. “Most of the time he won’t answer the questions. He did say that his wife’s name is Nadine, and his name is Vinick, Ansel Vinick. They’ve lived here twenty-three years. Beyond that, he ain’t talking.”

“Is he the one who called it in?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. We’ll take it now.”

He and Trammell went over to Mr. Vinick. Dane sat down on the couch, and Trammell moved the other chair closer before sitting down, effectively sandwiching Mr. Vinick between them.

“Mr. Vinick, I’m Detective Hollister and this is Detective Trammell. We’d like to talk to you, ask you a few questions.”

Mr. Vinick was staring at the floor. His big hands hung loosely over the padded arms of the recliner.

“Sure,” he said dully.

“Are you the one who found your wife?”

He didn’t answer, just continued to stare at the floor.

Trammell stepped in. “Mr. Vinick, I know it’s tough, but we need your cooperation. Are you the person who called the police?”

Slowly he shook his head. “I didn’t call no police. I called 911.”

“What time did you call?” Dane asked. The time would be on record, but liars often tripped themselves up on the simplest details. Right now, Vinick was a suspect by virtue of being married to the victim.

“Dunno,” Vinick muttered. He took a deep breath and seemed to make an effort to concentrate.

“Seven-thirty or thereabouts, I guess.” He rubbed his face with a trembling hand. “I got off work at seven. It takes about twenty, twenty-five minutes to drive home.”

Dane caught Trammell’s glance. They had seen enough death to know that Mrs. Vinick had been dead for several hours, not half an hour or so. The medical examiner would establish the time of death, and if Mr. Vinick had been at work during that time, if witnesses could reliably state that he hadn’t left, then they’d have to start looking at other possibilities. Maybe she’d had a boyfriend; maybe someone had been keeping Mr. Vinick’s bed warm for him while he worked third shift.

“Where do you work?”

There was no answer. Dane tried again. “Mr. Vinick, where do you work?”

Vinick stirred and named a local trucking company.

“Do you normally work third shift?”

“Yeah. I work on the dock, loading and unloading trailers. Most freight comes in at night, see, for delivery during the day.”

“What time did you leave to go to work last night?”

“Usual time. Around ten.”

They were on a roll, finally getting some answers. “Do you punch a time card?” Trammell asked.

“Yeah.”

“Do you punch in as soon as you get there, or wait until time for your shift to start?”

“As soon as I get there. The shift starts at ten-thirty. We have half an hour to eat, and get off at seven.”

“Do you have to clock in and out for lunch?”

“Yeah.”

It looked like Mr. Vinick’s night would be pretty much accounted for. They would check out everything he’d told them, of course, but that wouldn’t be any problem.

“Did you notice anything unusual this morning?” Dane asked. “Before you came in the house, I mean.”

“No. Well, the door was locked. Nadine usually gets up and unlocks it for me, then starts cooking breakfast.”

“Do you usually come in the front door or the back door?”

“Back.”

“What did you see when you opened the door?”

Mr. Vinick’s chin trembled. “Nothing, at first. The shades were pulled and the lights weren’t on. It was dark. I figured Nadine had overslept.”

“What did you do?”

“Turned on the light in the kitchen.”

“What did you see then?”

Mr. Vinick swallowed. He opened his mouth but couldn’t speak. He put his hand to his eyes.

“B-Blood,” he managed. “All—all over the place. Except—it looked like ketchup, at first. I thought she’d dropped a bottle of ketchup and broken it, the way it was splattered. Then—then I knew what it was. It scared me. I thought she must have cut herself, real bad. I yelled her name and ran to the bedroom, looking for her.” He stopped, unable to carry the tale any further. He began to shake, and didn’t notice when Dane and Trammell got up and stepped away, leaving him alone with his grief and horror.

Ivan Schaffer and an assistant arrived with their bags and disappeared into the bedroom to gather what evidence they could salvage from the carnage. Lieutenant Gordon Bonness arrived practically on their heels. He skidded to a stop just inside the door, his expression one of shock. “Holy shit,” he muttered.

“That seems to be the consensus,” Trammell said in an aside to Dane as they joined the lieutenant. Bonness wasn’t a bad sort, even if he was from California and could come up with some pretty weird ideas on things. He was as fair as possible in the way he ran the unit, which Dane considered a pretty good recommendation, and he was tolerant of the different quirks and work habits of the detectives under him.

“What have you got so far?” Bonness asked.

“We have a lady who was hacked to pieces, and a husband who was at work. We’ll check out his alibi, but my gut says he’s in the clear,” Dane answered.

Bonness sighed. “Maybe a boyfriend?”

“We haven’t gotten that far yet.”

“Okay. Let’s move fast on this one. Jesus, look at these walls.”

They went into the bedroom, and the lieutenant blanched. “Holy shit,” he said again. “This is sick!”

Dane gave him a thoughtful look, and his stomach tightened. A feeling of dread went up his spine. Sick. Yeah, this was sick. And he was suddenly a lot more worried than he had been before. He squatted beside Ivan as the tall, lanky man painstak-ingly searched for fibers, hair, anything that could be analyzed into giving up its secrets. “Found anything?”

“Won’t know until I get it to the lab.” Ivan looked around. “It would help if we could find her fingers. Maybe there’d be some skin under the nails. I’ve got people going through the trash in the neighborhood. No garbage disposal here, so that’s out.”

“Was she raped?”

“Don’t know. There’s no obvious semen.”

Dane’s feeling of dread was growing stronger. What had seemed like a fairly simple, if gruesome, murder was getting complicated. His gut feeling was seldom wrong, and he had alarm signals going off like an entire brass section.

He followed the gory trail back to its beginning, in the kitchen. Trammell came with him, and they both stood in the small, homey room, looking around. Nadine Vinick had evidently liked to cook; the kitchen was more modern than the rest of the house, with gleaming appliances, a small cooking island, and a variety of shiny but well-used pots and pans hanging over the island. A butcher’s block stood at one end of the counter, and a set of Ginsu knives, with one knife missing, was arranged in a rack on top of the butcher’s block.

“How did the son of a bitch get in?” Dane muttered. “Has anyone even looked for signs of forced entry, or did they just play the odds that the husband was the one who did her?”

Trammell had worked with him long enough to read him. “You getting a feeling about this?”

“Yeah. A bad one.”

“You don’t think maybe she had a boyfriend?”

Dane shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not. It was just some-thing the lieutenant said, about this being sick. It is. And that makes me real uneasy. Come on, let’s see if we can figure out how he got in.”

It didn’t take long. There was a small cut at the bottom of the screen on the window in the spare bedroom. The screen was in place but unfastened, and the latch on the window was open, not that it would have kept out even a determined ten-year-old. “I’ll get Ivan,” Trammell said. “Maybe he can lift a print, or find a couple of stray threads.”

Dane’s gut feeling was getting worse. A forced entry put a different slant on the situation, indicating a stranger. This didn’t feel like a burglary that had escalated into violence when the intruder had been suddenly confronted by Mrs. Vinick. The ordinary burglar would have been more likely to run, and even if he had attacked, it would have been quick. The attack on Mrs. Vinick had been both vicious and prolonged.
Sick.

He walked back into the kitchen. Had the first confronta-tion taken place here, or had Mrs. Vinick seen the intruder and tried to run out the back door, getting as far as the kitchen before he caught her? Dane stared at the appliances as if they could tell tales. A small frown knit his brows and he went over to the automatic coffee maker, the kind that was installed under the upper cabinets so it didn’t take up counter space. The carafe held about five cups of coffee. Using the backs of his fingers, he touched the glass. It was cold. The coffee maker was the kind with the automatic switch that turned off the warming plate after two hours. A coffee mug, filled almost to the rim with coffee, sat on the counter. It didn’t look as if it had been touched since the coffee had been poured into it. He stuck his finger into the dark liquid. Cold. He pulled a pair of surgical gloves out of his pocket and put them on. Carefully touching only the wooden rim of the cabinet doors rather than the metal handles, he began opening them. The second door revealed a canister of decaffeinated coffee. Mrs. Vinick could drink it late at night without worrying about her sleep being disturbed.