Thai Die (13 page)

“I’m not going to move her, but I want you to take a good look at her face.” He pressed the shoulder of the coat down to expose her face. It belonged to a beautiful woman in her middle thirties, with shining, dark brown hair. If it hadn’t been mussed up, her hair would have fallen into that style that made curves like parentheses to just under the ears. Her eyes were closed, and above them her eyebrows were so perfect they looked combed.

“I don’t know her,” said Dorie. “I’ve never seen her in my life.”

The woman’s skin looked flawless. She was wearing makeup, but it’s the kind you don’t notice on a woman until you realize her skin looks too nice to be real. He could see a golden earring with a dark blue stone that matched the one on her finger. Her hands were thin and beautiful even though the fingernails were short and painted with clear polish. The brown coat was real leather, thicker under Phil’s hand than it looked—well, for heaven’s sake, look there by her leg, it was lined in mink! He straightened. “Who gets all dressed up like this to go shoot someone?” he wondered aloud.

Dorie took it as a real question, directed at her. “I don’t know. Why would a stranger come and ask me a stupid question, and try to shoot me, unless she was crazy?” She leaned over to look at the body from a different angle. “Oh, Phil, look at the way her head is.”

Phil moved to get a better look. “Yes, I see.” The dead woman’s head was bent at an angle no intact spine could assume. It confirmed his belief that she was thoroughly dead. He stood up, his fingers rubbing against themselves as if to dust something off. He grasped Dorie’s hand again and took a big step over the body, bringing Dorie with him into the dining room. The siren was getting louder, but slowly—the streets must be really bad out there.

“I killed her, didn’t I?” Doris said in a scared voice. “The police are going to arrest me.”

“No, they won’t. This is clean self-defense. She came here with a gun, and we got into a fight to keep her from killing you. And she fell.”

“I pushed her.”

“Well, dammit, so did I.” Phil didn’t think that was true, but Dorie needed reassurance.

“Did you? Well, that’s good. And thank you.”

“The question about the silk—was it the silk you brought home from Thailand that she wanted?”

“She said she looked and looked and didn’t find the silk. But the burglar took my biggest piece of silk. So if that was her in my apartment looking for silk, she found it. That’s why this doesn’t make any sense.”

“Maybe she’s not the one who burgled your apartment.”

“No, she said she looked . . . Maybe she came after the first burglar left? But why are they after that silk? There were half a dozen panels of it hanging on Ming’s wall in the market.” Dorie thought for a few moments then frowned. “She knew my name, Phil. She called me by my name and said, ‘Where’s the silk, the Thai silk?’ And she was really, really mad at me, she said she was going to kill me.” Dorie shivered.

“God, I wish I knew what this was all about,” Phil muttered, as he put his arms around her.

The siren’s wail came closer. “I wish it were over, I just wish it were over and we were safe at home,” she whispered.

Nine

THE siren had been growing louder and louder, and now red and blue lights flashed into the windows as a vehicle, bigger than an ordinary squad car, pulled partway into the driveway at the back of the house. More sirens could be heard screaming from farther away. Seconds later, Phil caught a glimpse of a figure at the side door, holding a gun. “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot!” he called.

Heidi screamed out from the kitchen, “Be careful! The body’s right inside the door!”

The door opened just enough for two uniformed policemen to sidle in. They seemed huge in their dark blue jackets, and they shed snow and melting snow all over everything. They both held guns pointed at the ceiling.

“Who’s in the house?” the bigger of the two asked.

Heidi gestured at Phil and Doris near the doorway. “Me, and Mr. Galvin and Ms. Valentine are all the ones down here,” she said, “and upstairs there are three women—Bershada Reynolds, Shelly Donohue, and Alice Skoglund. They had the two front bedrooms.”

“Is anyone else hurt?”

“Down here? No, just that woman on the floor. I think she’s dead.”

The other cop had holstered his gun and gone to one knee beside the dead woman.

“Kelly,” he said, “go clear the upstairs.”

“Right,” said Kelly. Gun in hand, he went up the stairs faster and more quietly than Phil would have thought possible.

“Who is she?” asked the kneeling policeman, who was pressing two fingers into the woman’s neck.

Heidi said, “I don’t know. I never saw her before. I heard the door alarm go off a little while ago, but when I came out, there wasn’t anyone here. If that was when she came in, I guess she went right upstairs. It was just a couple of minutes later that I heard some kind of a fight, and a gun went off three or four times. I was calling nine-one-one when she fell down the stairs.”

“Where’s the gun?”

Phil said, “I saw it near her hand when we came down, and I kicked it away.”

Heidi stepped back a little and pointed to the floor near a counter.

“Was that the gun that was fired?” asked the cop.

Heidi said, “I think so.”

“Yes, it was,” said Dorie. “At me.”

The policeman looked at Dorie so sharply that she took a step back. “Who are you?” he asked, even though Heidi had already told him.

“My name is Doris Valentine,” she said, with a tremor in her voice.

“I’m Phil Galvin,” announced Phil. “We’re together.” He took Dorie’s hand. “All of us, Bershada, Shelly, and Alice, and me and Dorie, were coming up from Amboy when the snow got so bad we had to stop here in St. Peter.”

“Are you from Amboy?”

“Nossir, we’re from Excelsior, and we were headed back there.”

The policeman nodded. “The both of you just stand there a minute, okay?”

“Yessir.” Phil gave Dorie’s hand a reassuring squeeze.

The policeman went over to the gun, bent low, and said, “It smells like it’s been fired.” He turned to Heidi. “Is this your gun?”

“No, sir.”

“Do you have a gun?”

“No, sir!”

Then he looked at Doris and Phil. “Not our gun, either!” said Phil, and Dorie shook her head emphatically.

The officer pushed a button on a microphone clipped to the shoulder of his jacket and said, “Base, this is Officer Max here. We’re in. Kelly’s clearing the upstairs. I’ve got one down, a DOA, at the foot of the stairs right inside the back door. Three people here with me—one’s the manager, two are guests. The rest of the downstairs not cleared.”

They must have been waiting on the front porch for Officer Max to say something. Phil heard a rattle and then a thumping as someone tried the front door.

“Locked,” apologized Heidi. She crossed the kitchen, came through another door into the dining room, and disappeared into the parlor. Phil heard the door open. He leaned backward, looking through the dining room, and caught a glimpse of two people in brown as they entered the front door. Sheriff’s deputies. One peeped into the dining room, and Phil straightened hastily. The deputy waved briefly at the cop, then went back out of sight. The other came into the dining room. Her brown jacket was soaked, and her trousers were wet to the knees. “Whatcha got, Max?”

“The DOA’s a female, unidentified as yet, and there are supposed to be three more females upstairs. Kelly’s gone up to have a look. Is Hansen watching the front?”

She nodded, pulling off a pair of heavy leather mittens. Phil noticed that they looked like shooters’ gloves: There was an overlapping split in the palm so fingers could come out without removing the mittens.

“Whad’ja do, Amhurst, walk over?” asked Max.

“That’s a big roger, Max,” she replied, matter-of-factly. “We heard shots were fired, so we came the fastest way. All our SUVs are out on the highway working accidents and bringing in strandeds. Is your DOA shot?”

“Not that I can see, but I haven’t moved her. Three shots fired, according to the witnesses, but none of my three here are wounded.”

“She fell,” said Dorie. And when the law turned its regard on her, her tone became defensive. “Well, she did! She had the gun, but we fought—”

“Who fought?” asked Max.

“The three of us,” said Phil. His gesture took in the dead woman, Doris, and himself. “She was like a crazy person. We don’t know why she attacked us.”

 

 

 

OFFICER Jack Kelly quickly searched the back bedrooms and bathroom, reporting them cleared via his radio to Max downstairs. He found quite a lot of pottery fragments on the floor of the back hall, including a broken handle. Then he went around a corner, up two steps and down the carpeted hall to the front bedrooms. He went all the way to the front of the hall and waved at the sheriff’s deputy at the bottom of the stairwell. The twist of wooden stairs made an interesting and dizzying shadow play as he moved around the top of it.

The door to one bedroom was open. He did that sly, rolling-around-corners entry that had been drilled into him at the academy—he was new to all this, and halfway between excitement and terror. He paused to look around, with his gun at the ready. The light was on, but the room was empty. The bed looked very disordered, a blanket half on the floor. The bathroom had a set of women’s underwear hanging on the shower curtain bar.

He went across the hall, listened briefly at the door, then rapped sharply on it. “Police! Open up!” he barked in his deepest register.

There was a louder murmur of voices from the other side.

“I said, open up! This is the police!”

“All right,” said a woman’s voice near the door. “But please, there’s just three of us, all women, and we’re scared.”

“I am not going to hurt you,” Kelly said in a milder tone.

The door opened and behind it were, as advertised, three scared females: a slim attractive black woman, a tall elderly white woman, and a medium-sized young white woman with lots of disheveled brown hair. The black woman and old woman were dressed, but the woman with all the hair was wrapped in a duvet, which she held as if she might be nude under it.
Well, well, kinky
, he thought. All three pairs of eyes were wide with alarm.

“What’s going on out there?” quavered the woman in the duvet.

“We’re still figuring that out,” he replied. “Is anyone else in here with you all?”

“No, just us,” said the elderly woman, surprising him with her deep voice.

But he took a quick look around anyway, in the closet and the bathroom—where more women’s undergarments hung drying—ignoring their slightly insulted faces. He’d been warned never to take civilians’ words at face value no matter how innocent their appearance.

“Now,” he said, “what’s going on here?”

Ten

ANOTHER siren announced the arrival of emergency medical crews. Two women and a man made up their party, and again the mysterious intruder was checked for signs of life. And, as before, none were found. They stepped away and stood in the kitchen awkwardly, professionals with no call for their profession. The investigators had their work to do, though the woman was not officially dead until the coroner, who had not yet arrived, said so.

“Have you called Dr. Sholes, Max?” asked the man.

“No, I decided to wait until a thaw clears the streets.” Max said this so deadpan that it took a moment for the emergency tech to laugh.

One woman tech said, “He’d wade through drifts taller than this to come here. Nothing he likes better than to be at the scene of a nice, juicy murder.”

Which was true, so it was a sorrow to him that St. Peter was such a quiet, friendly town, despite its being host to both the large Gustavus Adolphus College and the Minnesota Security Hospital, where the dangerously insane were held and treated.