In Self Defense (19 page)

“Where was it before you put it in the closet?” Erin asked.

“I don’t know,” Clare said with a shrug.  “I guess it must have been in Richard’s car.”

“How did it get out of Richard’s car?” the detective pressed.

“I don’t really remember, things were so crazy there for a while, but I suppose I must have taken it out,” Clare said.  “After -- you know.  I must have unpacked it, and put his shirts and underwear in the laundry, and sent his suits to the dry cleaner.  It was what I always did when he came home from a business trip.”

Dusty handed the suitcase to Eddie.  “We’ll have to take this with us,” he informed her.

“It had to have been in his car,” Clare offered.

“The suitcase?”

“Yes.  I must have found it and unpacked it and put it away in the closet.”

“Where in the car did you find it?” Erin asked.  “In the front seat . . . the back seat . . . the trunk?”

“I don’t really remember,” Clare replied.  “Maybe it was on the back seat.”

“So you think you might have brought your husband’s suitcase into the house, but you left his briefcase.  How odd.  His suitcase was filled with dirty clothes, but his briefcase might have had important papers in it.  Maybe relating to that new product you were talking about.  Can you say why you would have done that?”

Clare shrugged again.  “I don’t know.  Richard usually brought his own briefcase in.  Unless it was late, and he wasn’t going to need it until the next morning.  I guess I didn’t think about it.”

Outside, the sky, which had been heavy and threatening all day, had grown dark.  “If you’ll excuse us,” Erin said politely.  “We’re going to need this room for a little while.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Nothing damaging, I assure you,” the detective declared.  “We just have to check a few things out.”

“Didn’t you do all this that night?” Clare persisted.  “Your people were here for the longest time.”

“Yes, but sometimes, things come up, and we have to go over what we’ve done before,” Dusty explained.  “And on your way out, will you please turn on the light in the hallway -- the one that was on the night your husband was shot.”

Clare had little choice in the matter.  She left the room, snapping on the light as she went down the hall.

The two detectives and the investigator went into action.  Eddie followed Clare out of the bedroom, shut the door, and waited.  Erin closed the curtains to block out the remains of the day, and then sat down on the bed, with her back against the headboard, in much the same way as Clare indicated her position was on the night of the shooting.  Dusty turned off the overhead light.  The room was now in almost total darkness., with only a small strip of light showing beneath the bedroom door.

“All right,” Erin said.  “Now let’s just see what it was that Clare Durant saw when her husband walked in that night.”

Eddie opened the bedroom door.  The light from the hallway was soft, diffuse, but it was more than enough for Erin to see a clear silhouette of the man standing there.

“I can’t see your face,” she conceded.  “But I can certainly see things about you -- the shape of your body, your height, the case you’re carrying.”

“Do you think it’s enough?” Dusty asked.

Erin swung herself off the bed.  “I don’t know,” she said.  “Let’s go find out.”

Clare was suddenly nowhere to be found. She was with the children, Doreen told them.  They were upset.  And confused.  It didn’t matter.  They were done here.

The housekeeper showed them out, standing in the doorway, watching silently while they climbed into their vehicle and took off down the drive, watching until their taillights faded into the dusk.  It was her job to protect this family, and she had always taken her job very seriously.  She wondered how much longer it would be before she was called upon to do just that.

***

The lights at the King County crime lab burned late into the night.  They ordered dinner in – a pepperoni pizza and a six-pack of root beer.  It was almost eleven o’clock before Eddie was ready to talk.

“I found two sets of fingerprints both on the doors and in the interior of the Mercedes,” the crime scene analyst reported, “Richard Durant’s, and an unidentified.”

“What do you want to bet the unidentified turns out to belong to Stephanie Burdick?” Erin murmured.

“There were also two sets of prints on the suitcase,” Eddie continued, “Richard Durant’s and Clare Durant’s.”

              They had taken a set of Richard’s fingerprints at the time of his autopsy, and they had lifted Clare’s from the Beretta.

“But did she lie about taking the suitcase from the car?” Dusty wondered.

“We don’t know,” Erin said.

“Yes, we do,” Eddie told them.  “She took it from the carpet beside her husband’s body.”

Erin looked at him intently.  “Are you sure?” she breathed.

“Yep.”  Eddie pulled out one of the photos taken of the scene on the night of the shooting.

“Take a look,” he said.  “You can pretty much determine what happened by examining the blood spatter pattern,” he said, zeroing in on the carpeting beside the body.  “We didn’t bother before because we were looking at this as an accidental shooting.  But now it clearly shows that Durant was hit nine times, there was a lot of blood, and it was spattered all over the place -- all except for this little area.”  Dusty and Erin followed his lead to a patch of gray carpet, just to the right of the body, a patch that was clearly defined by the absence of blood.  “Something stopped the blood here.  And I think it was the suitcase.”

“How can you tell?” Erin asked.

“Aside from the shape of the bag fitting the space perfectly, I found blood on it,” Eddie replied.  “Someone obviously tried to wipe it clean, but I used Luminal, and found a couple of really small spots that were missed.  We’ll run it through DNA just to be sure.”

“She stashed it in the closet before we could get up there,” Erin said.  “She was hoping we wouldn’t think to look for it, and she was right.  It just sat there until we were gone.”

“But why do that?” Dusty wondered.  “And then why lie about it?”

Erin smiled, a cat-catching-the-canary kind of smile that she reserved for the moment when a case began to come together.

“She didn’t have a choice,” the detective explained.  “When that bedroom door opened, she didn’t see the silhouette of an unknown attacker standing there.  She saw what I saw when Eddie opened the door -- a man of familiar height and build, carrying a suitcase.  The suitcase alone should have stopped her from firing, or at least made her hesitate.  But it didn’t even slow her down.  I think because she knew exactly what she was doing, and exactly who was walking into that room.  When she turned on the light and saw the suitcase, she realized she couldn’t very well just leave it there.  She couldn’t let us see it -- or more importantly -- she couldn’t let us know that
she’d
seen it.”

“If that’s how it happened, I think you’re pretty damn close to making the case that she knew she was shooting the husband all along,” Eddie said.

“It’s beginning to look that way, isn’t it?” Erin concurred.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Dusty murmured.

***

“We were hoping you could help us clear up a few little things,” Dusty said at ten o’clock the following morning when, at his and Erin’s request, Clare agreed to come down to police headquarters for a friendly follow-up chat.

“I’ll certainly try,” the widow said, settling herself in the chair indicated by the detectives.

“The night of the shooting,” Dusty began, “do you, by any chance, have any recollection of turning the alarm system on?”

“Yes, of course I do,” Clare replied.  “And I did turn it on.  In fact, Nina and I turned it on together.  You can ask her.  We thought it was going to keep us safe.”

“Yes, well, that’s sort of the point,” Dusty said.  “Because we never heard the alarm go off.  Did you?”

Clare looked puzzled.  “Now that you mention it,” she said after a moment, “no I don’t recall hearing the alarm.  But under the circumstances, it wasn’t the most important thing on my mind.”

“No, of course not,” Dusty conceded.

Erin leaned forward.  “But thinking back on it now, how do you suppose an intruder, a stranger, would have been able to get into the house without setting off the alarm?” she asked.  “It wasn’t like the flowers, when you hadn’t set the alarm, and a window was left open.  No, that night, all the doors and windows were locked and armed.  Nina Jacobsen confirmed it.  And there you were, asleep in your bed, assuming you were safe, the alarm on and us outside to protect you, and all of a sudden, he was at your bedroom door.”

“I don’t really know what I was thinking that night,” Clare said.  “I don’t think I was thinking too clearly about anything.  If I had been, if I had realized that the alarm hadn’t gone off and that it was Richard coming into the room, and not the stalker, a lot of things might have turned out differently.”

“Yes, well, that was another thing we wanted to talk to you about,” Erin said without missing a beat.  “Your husband’s suitcase.”

“What about it?”

“We had our lab take a look at it last night,” Dusty told her.

“And?”

“And it’s our opinion that you didn’t remove it from the Mercedes, as you thought you might have.”

“I didn’t?”

“No,” Dusty said.  “You see, our examination indicates that your husband was carrying it when he entered the bedroom.”

“It does?” Clare murmured.

“It does,” Erin confirmed.

There was a long pause.  “I was frightened out of my wits that night,” Clare said finally.  “And then afterwards, I was numb.  So numb I couldn’t tell you what day it was.  I thought I’d taken the suitcase from his car.  I’d done it before.  Sometimes he brought it in, sometimes he didn’t.  But maybe I didn’t do it that night.  I honestly don’t remember.”

“You don’t remember stepping over your husband’s bleeding, bullet-ridden body to pick it up and put it in the closet while we were knocking down the front door?” Erin queried.

Clare shrugged.  “To tell you the truth, I don’t remember very much about that night at all.”

“Well, do you remember, when you went back into the closet, and found blood on the suitcase, that you tried to wipe it off?”

“No, I don’t remember that, either,” Clare said.  “And I’m not sure I like where you seem to be going with all of this.  Am I under suspicion of something?  Should I be calling my attorney?”

“That’s up to you,” Erin told her.  “But it might not be a bad idea.”

***

David Johansen had grown up in Ballard.  In fact, he had lived right next door to the Nicolaidis family.  His mother and Clare’s mother had been the best of friends, and the two families were always in and out of each other’s houses.

From his early teens, David was big and comfortable to be around, with sandy hair and hazel eyes and a crooked smile.  Clare never had a brother, but if she had, she would have wanted him to be just like David.  He could do anything, from fixing her broken bicycle to finding her lost kitten.  She couldn’t help but adore him.

He played baseball during the school year and Little League during the summer, and she went to every one of his games, although baseball held no real interest for her, just to cheer him on.  In return, he attended all her piano recitals, looking very uncomfortable, but being a good sport about it.  She decided if he couldn’t be her brother for real, he would certainly be her friend for life.

Two months after David turned eighteen, a drunk driver killed his father.  When a lawsuit failed to provide much of a settlement, Gus arranged to have the mortgage on the Johansen house paid off, and then gave David’s mother a job.

“It’s too much, Gus,” she protested.

“No,” Gus replied.  “It’s not enough.  What’s the good of working hard all your life and having a little money to show for it, if you can’t do what you want with it?  You’re family.  It’ll be enough when your boys graduate college.”

And he had kept his word.  David and his brother not only earned their bachelor’s degrees from the University of Washington, they both went on to graduate school.  Today, David’s brother was on staff at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Institute, and David was the head of his own successful law firm.

Clare had every intention of keeping in touch after her marriage, even though Richard disliked David on first meeting, and dismissed any connection out of hand.  Clare didn’t understand why, but then, she didn’t let it stop her, either.  So between Christmas cards, and telephone calls, and bumping into one another as if by chance at various social gatherings, and lunches squeezed in every month or so, she and David managed to maintain their friendship.  Ironically, they had last seen each other just a couple of weeks ago, at Richard’s funeral.

He took her phone call without hesitation.  “Hey, kiddo, how’re you doing?” he asked, a smile in his voice.

“Not all that well, actually,” Clare confessed.  “Could we get together and talk?”

“Sure,” he replied, looking at his calendar.  “I could drop by later this afternoon.”