The Reveal: A Detectives Seagate and Miner Mystery (Book 6) (3 page)

Shit.

Chapter 2

I walked into the living
room, an obstacle course of mismatched, moth-eaten old chairs, end tables, and
loveseats—Victorian, early American, mid-century Scandinavian—cluttered with
cheap Wal-Mart pillows and throws. I lifted one of the throws, which covered a
large stain. I checked another: a three-inch tear in the fabric, stitched up by
an amateur. On various end tables and shelves I counted six statues, including
a nude couple sitting on a rock, embracing; a girl in a ballet outfit, one leg
out in a pose; and a teenage girl wearing armor, sitting on a horse and waving
a big flag.

All the tables were crowded with glasses, plates,
and silverware. The food included vegetables and guacamole dip, a few different
kinds of coffee cakes, and a pretty nice-looking cheesecake, which I lingered
over for a moment. There was serious dark coffee, plus tea, soda, and wines
both red and white. One woman had left a pair of glasses, and there were a
couple of cheap pens.

I stepped around little clusters of crumbs on the
old blue wall-to-wall to look at the framed posters on the walls. Some were
prints of famous paintings. I recognized the one with the guy with the
lightbulb head and his hands over his ears, like the kid in
Home Alone
. I also thought I’d seen the landscape
painting with the swirly purple and blue sky and the yellow moon off to the
right.

But most of the posters were photographs of famous
people with important things they’d said. Fidel Castro, dressed in fatigues and
smoking a cigar, said, “Condemn me, it does not matter. History will absolve
me.” Another poster said, “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” It had
about fifty tiny black-and-white photographs of women. I recognized Eleanor
Roosevelt, Rosa Parks, Billie Jean King, and Helen Keller. My favorite poster
showed a forty-year-old Gloria Steinem, who apparently said, “The truth will
set you free. But first it will piss you off.” I knew the second part was true.
I hadn’t experienced the first part yet.

On the mantel above the white brick fireplace were
six photos, head shots of Virginia Rinaldi and a guy who had to be her son. The
photos were all shot outdoors in the sunlight. They spanned about twenty years,
the infant morphing into a college-age man. Virginia was once a young, pretty
woman with sleek chestnut hair, an unlined face, and bright eyes. Then she
became a middle-aged woman, comfortably wrinkled, the hair losing its sheen and
going grey.

In each of the photos, the pose was the same:
Virginia Rinaldi’s face was right up against her son’s. When he was little, he
was laughing at something someone had said or was kissing his mother on the
cheek. As he became a teenager, he tried to pull away from her, and his
expression had become uncomfortable, almost hostile. In the two most recent photos,
he was wearing a polite smile, as if he had decided his mother had earned this
small but embarrassing indulgence.

Virginia Rinaldi’s expression remained the same in
each of the photos. Her big, radiant smile promised a limitless future full of
joy for herself and her son. I closed my eyes for a moment, took a deep breath,
then turned and headed out of the living room.

I crossed the foyer and walked into the formal
dining room, barely big enough for the heavy old table that seats eight. It
smelled like old carpet. I glanced down at a threadbare old Persian. A long,
dark buffet spanned most of the inside wall. Next to it was a corner cabinet
with some formal dishes and glassware. The walls were covered with hideous
wallpaper full of red and white roses. There were no pictures or posters or
anything on the walls. It didn’t look like Virginia Rinaldi and her son or the
woman living here spent any time in this room.

I walked up to the entryway to the kitchen but
didn’t go in. If Ryan was right about how she was washing dishes when the
killer grabbed her, there was a decent chance there would be forensic evidence
on the old linoleum. Most of the broken shit on the floor was to the right side
of the sink. Only a long bread knife was on the floor
to
the left. On the counter, left of the sink, were more dirty plates and glasses.
To the right of the sink, the counter was mostly clear.

I closed my eyes and tried to visualize what had
happened. She heard the killer, stopped the water, and turned to face him. If
she was right-handed, which Robin, our evidence tech, would be able to confirm,
she already had the bread knife in her right hand or had the presence of mind
to pick it up. The killer came at her; she tried to defend herself, but he
overpowered her and grabbed the knife from her, in the process screwing up her
wrist. At some point, her body got bent back against the counter, to the right
of the sink, sending the plates and glasses to the floor. He must have beaten
her up some so he could get her up the stairs. Harold would be able to tell us
how he beat her up.

I walked back to the foyer, carefully stepped over
the body, and climbed the stairs. I went down the hall for a quick look in the
rooms. The last bedroom was her son’s. The mattress on the single bed had no
linens on it. The walls were covered in rock posters. He liked Radiohead, which
I had heard of, and Spoon, Blur, and Wilco, which I hadn’t. There were some
high-school pennants and ticket stubs and assorted teenager crap on a small
bulletin board. Five student trophies for track and field sat on top of a small
pine bookcase, which was full of study guides for AP math and science courses,
as well as some science-fiction books I didn’t recognize. I walked over to a
fiberboard desk that had nothing on it but a fairly thick layer of dust. In the
small closet were a Boy Scout shirt, covered in sewn-on badges, a VCR, an old
hamster cage, and a fish tank with colored rocks and a plastic castle.

Next was the bathroom. Ryan was right about a
woman living here. I looked in the medicine chest and opened the doors to the
vanity. She was post-menstrual and pre-menopausal. The razors, waxes, creams,
portable laser things, and chemicals said she had a zero-tolerance policy on
body hair. All the tubes, bottles, boxes, hairdryers, and rollers were fairly
neatly arranged by function, although some of the stuff was in the wrong place.
My guess was she’d moved in about a month ago, during which time the system had
started to break down. I checked the shower. She was a little cleaner than me:
not an oblivious teenager, but not anal about making the shower shine.

I walked into her bedroom. There was nothing on
the little desk or on the walls. The narrow bed was half-made: the blankets
were pulled up and sort of in place, but she hadn’t tucked anything in neat. I
lifted the blanket and top sheet up so I could check out the bottom sheet. I
leaned down. No obvious stains or any evidence she’d been nailing anyone there.
The dresser had a few pairs of jeans, underwear, socks, and some cotton blouses
and T-shirts. College-girl tastes and sizes. The closet, with its vague aroma
of high-end perfume, told a different story: a few dozen pairs of heels, and
twenty or twenty-five dresses, most with high hemlines, low necklines, and
sheer tops. On a shelf above the dresses were the bras and panties that went
with the dresses. They were definitely not for college girls.

I left the woman’s room and met up with Ryan in
the master bedroom. He looked up when he heard me.

“You
seen
the mystery
woman’s closet?” I said.

He nodded. “She’s quite a people person.”

“That’s what they call hookers these days?”

He smiled. “I don’t like to judge.”

“You didn’t find anything identifying her?”

“No, I didn’t. No mail, no paperwork. Nothing.”

“What’d you get in here?” I scanned Virginia’s
room.
 
It
had a queen-size bed, a couple of soft chairs off to the side, a desk with a
laptop, muted area rugs on dark wood floors, and lots of art prints and photos
of her son on the walls. Off to the side was the entrance to the bathroom. I
glanced over there. It looked like a recent re-model.

Ryan pointed to the neatly made bed. “She was
attacked last night, not this morning.”

“Yeah, I see.”

“No sign of a guy living here.”

“Was she screwing the woman down the hall?”

Ryan looked at me, as if the question was out of
line or unanswerable or something. “I really wouldn’t know.”

I pointed to the end table. “I mean, any
double-sided dildos or shit like that?”

He paused. “Haven’t gotten there yet.”

I walked over and opened up one of the end-table
drawers. Then I walked around the bed and checked the other end table. Nothing
of interest. “So,” I said, “we can’t identify the mystery woman?”

He gestured toward the desk in the corner of the
large room. “Maybe on the laptop.”

I nodded. “We’ll bring it in.” I looked at my
watch: 7:38. “Let’s start the canvass, then meet up with Harold back here. He
might be able to tell us something from a quick look at the body.”

Ryan nodded, still looking a little preoccupied,
as if the worst thing that had
happened to
Virginia Rinaldi was she didn’t have a man.

“On the canvass,” I said, “we’ll ask about last
night, maybe nine
pm
till around
midnight?”

“Sounds right.” He gave me a small smile.

We left Virginia Rinaldi’s bedroom. “I’ll do west,
both sides of the street, three or four houses. You do east.”

We walked downstairs, stepping over the body. As I
headed out the front door, I turned to Truman. “We’re gonna do a quick canvass.
If Harold Breen shows up, tell him we’ll be back in a couple minutes. Ask him to
wait.” I closed up my coat against the morning chill and fished through my big
leather shoulder bag to retrieve my detective’s shield on the metal chain. I
hung it around my neck.

At the house next door, I knocked. Silence. Waited
and knocked again. I walked back out toward the street to see if any lights
came on upstairs. Nothing.

At the next house, a retired guy in a bathrobe
opened the door. A few feet behind him was his wife, her face scrunched up in a
concerned expression. A strange woman at the door, wearing a detective’s
shield, will do that—especially before eight in the morning.

After introducing myself to the guy—and reassuring
his wife that nothing bad had happened to their son or the grandkids—I asked
about the woman two doors down.

“We didn’t know her name—Virginia Rinaldi, you
say?” He turned to his wife. She shook her head to confirm they didn’t know her
name. I’d known some old folks like that, married a hundred years. You ask him
if he’s seen this movie, he’d turn to her, like she’d know better than he
would.

I described Virginia Rinaldi. Forty-five or so, a
professor at the university? A younger woman living there, too? Maybe a
daughter? They both shook their heads.

Then the wife said, “Wait a second, Arthur, you
remember Ruth was telling us about the professor who invited her students over
to her house? Remember you were annoyed about all the cars parked on the
street?”

It all came back to him. He launched a rant about
the parking problems they’ve been having on their street, and how inconsiderate
it was for that woman to bring all those cars into the neighborhood, and how it
got real noisy with those kids talking and laughing on the sidewalk before they
started their cars around ten o’clock when he and his wife were trying to get
some sleep.

I let him go on for a minute, then broke in when
his train of thought derailed. Bottom line: they didn’t know anything about
Virginia Rinaldi, didn’t know who the young woman was who lived there, hadn’t
seen or heard anything. So, it had taken me four minutes to learn that the
people drinking from all those wine glasses at Virginia Rinaldi’s house might
have been her students. Or not.

Fifteen minutes later, I had talked with three
other neighbors and met up with Ryan back on Virginia Rinaldi’s porch. Truman
was standing next to the front door, watching passersby and glancing at the
cars going past.

“What’d you get?” I said to Ryan.

He shook his head. “Virginia Rinaldi lived in that
house for about three or four years but didn’t have anything to do with the
neighborhood. She didn’t go to the annual block party or any of the local
events. Didn’t spend any time outside gardening or taking care of the place.
The lights were lit on both floors late into the night.”

“What about the woman living there?”

“Two of the neighbors knew there was a woman the
last month or two, but that’s all.”

“And last night?”

“One neighbor remembered there was a party or
something. Lots of young people. It broke up around nine or nine-thirty.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“Shit.” I glanced down the block, but I didn’t see
Harold Breen’s rusty old minivan.

“Harold called me,” Ryan said. “Said he’s on his
way.”

I nodded. The buzz I had felt about a new case was
starting to wear off. I was ninety percent sure it was homicide, with the mess on
the kitchen floor and the anonymous phone call early this morning. And the
unlocked front door wasn’t right.

“Let’s hang around here, wait for Harold.” I
didn’t want to drive to headquarters and then have to come back here if he had
a question or something for us to look at in the house. “I’m gonna grab a cup
of coffee, okay?” I gestured toward a place a few doors down, on the other side
of the street. “You want something? Water?”

“No, I’m good.” He turned to talk to Truman.

I was almost inside
Jitterz
when I saw Harold pulling up in his minivan at about two miles per hour. I knew
he would need five minutes to park the thing, extract his enormous body from
it, and lumber his way up the steps and into the
vic’s
house. I ran into the coffee place and grabbed a cup. By the time I made it
back, he was just disappearing into the house.