Jude Devine Mystery Series (83 page)

Jude picked a careful path toward a display cabinet in the adjoining dining area. The contents had to be worth a fortune, but there was no sign of a smash and grab or even an attempt to force the door. Either the burglar was in a hurry to leave, or he had no clue what antique Pueblo pottery was worth.

“The attack occurred in Maulle’s office upstairs.” Pratt placed the self-help book back where he found it. “The place was ransacked. They were probably looking for cash. A safe, maybe.”

They climbed the stairs, avoiding photo evidence markers and tape barriers. Deputy Belle Simmons met them at the top where a large area of blood spray and bloody footprints had been marked. Belle was in charge of the MCSO crime scene technicians and was one of the few officers with major crime scene experience. As usual, her makeup bore testimony to hours in front of a mirror. Jude had never seen her without the works. She was still in her summer shades: bronze foundation, frosted copper lipstick, and green eye shadow. In winter, she favored coral lips and more dramatic eyeliner. Her bold red curls were scraped into a bun and adorned with a spangled pink hair net.

“How’s it coming?” Pratt asked.

“Well, it’s quite a blood scene. Everything’s taped off and we’ve taken the wide-angle views. Just waiting on the coroner now.” Belle gave Jude a smile. “Good to see y’all, Detective.”

“You, too. How are the kids?”

“I’m about ready to send them back where they came from.” To Pratt, Belle said, “Count yourself lucky you just got those gorgeous little girls to worry about, Orwell.”

The sheriff looked smug. He and his wife had daughters so sweet and well-behaved that Belle wondered if they were quite right in the head, at least that’s what she’d confided to Jude. She and her mild-mannered husband, refugees from Louisiana, had two boys who didn’t know the meaning of discipline. One of them, the twelve-year-old, had recently driven the family car onto the street and rear-ended a neighbor’s BMW. Luckily, he wasn’t injured and they could afford the repairs. Belle’s husband had an Internet shoe business and did okay.

Jude was always surprised when good people had monsters for children. There was a time when she blamed parents for every failing of their children, but that didn’t explain all the creeps who came from good homes, or the responsible adults who had shitty childhoods. The more homicides she investigated, the more she believed in the idea of evil in its many facets. What else could explain the brutal banality of the Menendez brothers, or the calculated sadism of a child killer?

She hoped Belle’s boys were just going through a phase. She was a good woman and a good cop. She deserved kids she didn’t have to apologize for.

“Are you hanging around after you finish with the scene?” Belle asked.

“I can if you need an extra pair of hands.” If there weren’t enough technicians, Jude sometimes helped out, labeling bags and sorting evidence.

“No, we’re okay,” Belle said. “Three more deputies finished their CSI certificates this year, and one of the guys added a bloodstain analysis course.”

“There’s plenty for him to do here,” Jude remarked.

Pratt excused himself to answer his cell phone, returning a moment later to announce, “If you’ll excuse me, ladies, the media’s here, and the coroner is on his way up.”

Jude’s stomach stopped curdling when she heard the word “his.” She would have been surprised if Mercy Westmoreland attended a Montezuma County crime scene at this time of day unless no one else could be found. But the Maulle killing would be a high-profile case, and the sheriff liked to involve Mercy in those. Thanks to regular stints on Court TV, her name had courtroom cachet, a state of affairs that bugged other hardworking but unglamorous forensic pathologists in the Four Corners.

She and Belle stepped back as the wiry figure of Norwood Carver came into view downstairs. Jude knew exactly what he was wearing under his bunny suit: high-priced cycling apparel he didn’t care to sully on the job. No doubt he’d pedaled up here on his carbon-framed racing bike, complete with support crew bringing up the rear in an SUV with a spare bike strapped to the roof. The sides of Carver’s vehicle bore the legend
I Brake for Cadavers
, his idea of sophisticated wit.

Sure enough, a red-faced dweeb Jude recognized as a pathologist’s assistant from Carver’s office came panting up the stairs after his master, weighed down with body bag and field kit. Carver occasionally glanced back at him with the cheerful disdain of a man accustomed to leading the meek.

“Dr. Carver. Good evening. Thank you for coming so quickly,” Belle said deferentially. “This way please.”

Carver marched toward the room at the end of the hallway. Jude always had the impression that he was driven by a mental stopwatch that never stopped counting off the seconds until he could return to the real work of fitness training.

He called over his shoulder, “Step on it, Fritz, or that’s your brain in the next jar on my desk.”

The coroner called all his assistants “Fritz” in honor of the only one he thought was worth a dime, a minion who had laid down his life on the altar of science, stung to death by a wasp colony at a crime scene.

Picking his way across the ransacked office to the man lying in a dark pool of blood on the floor, Carver said, “I understand we have a positive identification.”

“Yes, the victim is Fabian Maulle,” Jude said. “His niece ID’d him and recorded time of probable death at 4:46 p.m. She was with Mr. Maulle when he stopped breathing but did not attempt resuscitation.”

“Has the body been moved?” Carver asked.

“The victim was dying when his niece discovered him,” Belle said. “She held him in her arms. This is the position she placed him in after he appeared to be deceased.”

Carver took Maulle’s pulse, tested for rigor, examined the torso wounds and what appeared to be blunt force trauma to the head, looked down his throat and up his nose, then crisply announced, “It would seem money doesn’t buy happiness. Wrongful death.”

He rose and moved away from the body, signaling “Fritz” to complete the initial tasks. The ruddy underling took a series of in situ photographs, then rolled Maulle on his side, arranging his clothes to obtain his core temperature.

“He’s still warm. Rectal is ninety-six point two degrees and room temperature is sixty-eight.”

Jude did the math. In an air-conditioned room like this, the normal body temperature of 98.4F would drop at slightly less than one degree per hour. Maulle’s temperature was consistent with the time of death Pippa Calloway claimed. At the postmortem they would get an estimate of how long exsanguination had taken. Depending on which internal organs were affected and which arteries were severed, stabbing deaths often occurred in a minute or less.

While Fritz scraped beneath Maulle’s nails, fingerprinted him, and bagged his hands, Carver admired a parrot staring from a birdcage near the desk. “African Grey. Smart bird. Thinks like a four year old, so they say. Which makes him roughly the equivalent of Fritz here.”

“Great,” Jude muttered. “Our eyewitness has feathers.”

“All yours, Detective.” Carver waved a hand expansively around the blood splattered scene, indicating they could complete their processing. “I’ll notify the sheriff.”

As soon as Carver departed, the photographer took over the crime scene and began setting up his tripod and lights. Jude and Belle issued some instructions and left him to it. The fewer people in the scene at any one time, the more likely that evidence would be preserved. Jude glanced toward Fritz, who was roaming the hallway with his body bag. A couple of paramedics trudged up the stairs with a stretcher, ready to cart Maulle off to the morgue as soon as the detectives had seen all they wanted to see.

Pete Koertig followed them, his ruddy face scrunched with the effort of containing his glee. “Meet your primary,” he told Jude.

With his scalp aglow beneath the fuzz of short blond hair, and his big white grin, he looked more like a college football player than a detective. His heavyset build made him intimidating, and his general clumsiness gave the impression of a guy who wasn’t the sharpest crayon in the box. As a consequence he was often underestimated, a factor in his impressive confession record. When suspects thought they were smarter than the cop doing the interview, they lowered their guard.

Jude had worked several cases with Koertig, and once they got beyond first impressions, they’d settled into a productive camaraderie. She found him methodical and hardworking. He was also self-aware enough to capitalize on his own strengths and weaknesses, something more egotistical males found difficult.

“I thought you’d catch this one for sure,” he said. “All the guys did.”

Jude shrugged. “I’m not the only show in town. Congratulations, boss.”

Chortling, Koertig dragged on a pair of gloves, which promptly split. “Shit.” He grimaced. “Excuse my French.”

Belle took a spare pair from her pocket and checked the sizing on the bag. “These are extra large.”

Koertig peered into the office. “Burglary? I don’t think so.”

“No, the place was tossed.” Jude studied the chaos. Papers spilled from the filing cabinet. Every bookshelf had been emptied onto the floor. Expensive looking paintings were stacked carelessly behind the door. No burglar would have walked out of Fabian Maulle’s house empty-handed if he knew enough to target it in the first place.

“No sign of forced entry,” Koertig said. “I checked all the outside windows and doors.”

This wasn’t Washington DC. Violent crime was rare enough that people felt safe in their own homes. Maulle probably didn’t lock his front door while he was at home. Jude made a mental note to ask Pippa about her uncle’s habits.

“The killing seems personal,” she said.

Stabbings usually were. Aside from serial offenders whose crimes were sexually motivated, it was rare for a stranger to invade someone’s home and kill him with a knife. Guns or blunt instruments were the norm, and Maulle’s killer had coldly shot a dog, execution-style. How did such a calculated act jive with the messy killing of Maulle himself? Had the gun jammed when he tried to shoot Maulle?

She considered the burglary-gone-wrong theory carefully. It was conceivable that a robbery had been interrupted. The intruder could have picked up a knife at the scene. Perhaps he’d been near the kitchen and Maulle confronted him. There was no sign of a struggle downstairs, but she and Koertig would walk the scene over the next hour and come up with an initial theory. The next day, once Belle and her team had collected all the forensic evidence, they would return for a more thorough search of the house, looking for anything that could suggest a motive for the crime.

“We’ll need a warrant,” Jude said.

While a warrantless search could keep things simple, she always thought ahead to courtroom challenges. The defense invariably raised questions about the competence of investigators, evidence collection, and chain-of-custody issues. The legality of the search could become an issue. Obtaining a warrant with the broadest possible scope was a good way to sidestep at least one hurdle. Prosecutors appreciated when detectives dotted the i’s.

Belle gave the photographer a few more instructions, then looked toward Jude and Koertig. “Why don’t y’all make your notes before I get started in there.”

A couple of flash pops were followed by a raucous squawk, and the African Grey shook the bars of his cage.

“We ought to remove the bird,” Jude said. “If he keeps flapping around all kinds of crap is going to fly out of his cage. Let’s get animal control up here.”

“I can carry him out,” Koertig said. “That cage lifts off the stand.”

“Put the cover over it,” Jude suggested. “I think that’s supposed to calm birds down.”

“Hang on. Let me dust it first.” Belle picked up her glass fiber brush. “If only he could talk. He saw everything.”

*

“Check this out,” Koertig said, moving to the far end of the kitchen.