The Garden of Eden and Other Criminal Delights Page 7

  “Not at ten-thirty in the morning.”

  “But what if you’re not done?”

  “Call a taxi.”

  Decker said, “Oliver, go over her car first. First of all, the body had to get from the apartment to the house—”

  “Body?” Laurie interrupted. There was panic in her eyes. They darted from person to person. “What body are you talking about?”

  Decker didn’t answer her and went on with his instructions. “If her car interior is clean, you might as well let her have access to it. I’ll do the bedrooms, Lee and Wanda can do the rest of the house.”

  He marched down a small foyer that led to a series of bedrooms. The first belonged to her sons, two beds separated by a nightstand. The bookshelves were repositories of trophies from Little League, toys, CDs, DVDs, and an iPod.

  The next room was Matt’s office. His bookshelves actually held books. It was neat, clean, and dusty, as if it hadn’t been used in many months. Decker suspected that Matt had been doing some of his take-home work at Solana’s apartment.

  The master bedroom was in the back and was about twice as large as the other two. It had an enormous walk-in closet. Laurie’s clothing took up three-fourths of the space, relegating Matthew’s portion to one shoe rack and a couple of poles for suits. It would have been easiest to start on Lombard’s side, but that wasn’t the focus of Decker’s attention. Instead, he began by looking at Laurie’s sneakers. Solana had been strangled, meaning there probably wouldn’t be big puddles of blood to step in. But Solana did have a big scrape on her head that had bled, and Decker remembered the rusty blob in the corner of the room. The murderer might have stepped in something.

  Laurie had decided that Decker was in charge, so she addressed her pleas to him. “Please, Detective, I’ve got a house to run. I have to get groceries for dinner.”

  “You might think about doing takeout tonight . . . with delivery.” There was a pair of athletic shoes hidden in the back recesses of the closet. Hands encased in latex gloves, Decker pulled out the shoes and studied them. Suede and leather top, with dirty gray laces that had once been white. He sniffed the tops: They smelled of dishwashing soap. The bottoms gave off a slight foul odor. Lucky for him that today’s athletic shoes were made with a topographical map’s worth of grooves and ruts. Decker could see specks of brown crud lodged inside one of the furrows. It could have been dirt, it could have been dog turd, or it could have been human waste. He turned to Laurie.

  “The police have chemicals that can pick up tiny, tiny droplets of human matter—blood, waste, urine, skin. And there are scientists who can get an entire DNA profile from these tiny droplets. What do you think about that?”

  Laurie opened her mouth, then closed it.

  “Would you mind taking off your scarf for me, please, Mrs. Lombard?”

  Her hands flew to her neck. Then her mouth tightened and her chin jutted out in an expression of defiance. “I don’t have to do anything for you.”

  “I’m afraid you’re going to have to come to the station house with us.”

  “I’m not going to talk to you.”

  “That’s your choice. But before I do the tests on this material that’s stuck inside the treads of your shoes, you might want to tell me your side of the story. You see, we’re already doing tests on the human skin that was found under Solana’s fingernails. And I suspect that you have scratches underneath your scarf. You might think about cooperating now, while there’s still a question mark. Because once this shoe is tied to Solana’s DNA, and the human material under Solana’s nails is tied to you, there won’t be room for negotiating anything.”

  Laurie’s bottom lip began to quiver.

  “But sure, call up your lawyer, if you want.” Decker shrugged. “Did you call your lawyer?”

  Slowly, Laurie shook her head.

  “Well, if you want your lawyer, now’s the time to call him or her.”

  “Him,” she whispered.

  “You can’t tell me anything, if you want your lawyer. You know that. So I guess the powers that be won’t hear your side until your lawyer wants us to hear it.”

  “And if I don’t want a lawyer?”

  “Well, you’ve watched enough TV to know the drill, Laurie. You’ve got to sign a card saying that you were offered a lawyer and you didn’t want one. Then you can talk to me.”

  There was no reaction from the woman. For a brief moment, Decker thought that she might lunge at him and try to wrest the shoes from his grip. Then her mood turned as gray as her skin tone.

  “Bitch!”

  “I’m sure she was . . . carrying on with a married man with two children.”

  “You don’t know the half of it!”

  Her nostrils flared with anger. It was easy to see how this big-boned woman could choke the life out of Solana, drag her into a car, and stuff her into a closet.

  “I’d like to hear it all, Laurie. So let’s go down to the station house. We’ll sit and have a cup of coffee together, and you can tell me all about it.”

  “Do you have French-press coffee?”

  “Uh, no, but I’ll see what I can do.”

  “How’d you know it was she and not he who did the choking?” Oliver asked Decker. “Matt was acting pretty guilty, if you ask me.”

  “Guilty because of what had happened, not because of what he’d done. Initially, it was nothing more than a gut feeling. When the preliminary DNA of Solana’s nail scrapings came up female, I had no doubt in my mind what had happened.” Decker took a sip of his coffee. “She killed his mistress, then set him up to take the blame.”

  “How did she get inside the open house unless he left a door open for her?” Marge said.

  “They originally had gone to the open house together, just as it was closing, and they had a long list of questions to ask the agent. Then Laurie suddenly claimed that she had a headache and had her husband handle it. But not before she’d unlocked a window so she could come back in. In the meantime, Matt had bombarded the agent with enough questions that Adele would be sure to remember him.”

  “And Laurie knew that her husband’s fingerprints would be all over Solana’s apartment,” Oliver said.

  “Right.”

  “Do you think Matt knew that his wife had done it before she confessed?” Marge asked.

  “Definitely,” Decker said. “All his talk about taking the Fifth—not to protect himself but to protect his wife.”

  “She kills his girlfriend and tries to set up her husband. But he still takes the Fifth,” Oliver said. “What an idiot.”

  “He felt guilty, Scott,” Marge said.

  “I repeat: What an idiot.”

  “Solana’s parents are coming in tomorrow from Texas by bus,” Decker said. “They want to take their daughter back to Mexico and bury her there, but they don’t have a lot of money.”

  “We’re taking up a collection,” Marge said.

  Oliver grimaced, then took out his wallet and opened it. “I’ve got a five.”

  “You’ve also got a twenty.” Marge plucked it out of his wallet. “We’re trying to raise two hundred to give her a good church burial in a decent coffin. Pete and I offered to drive them to their town in Mexico.”

  Decker said, “I figured I could use a little practice with my Spanish.”

  “That’s how you two want to spend your days off?” Oliver was incredulous.

  Marge said, “We’ve been thinking that maybe afterward we’d go to Acapulco.”

  Oliver’s ears perked up. “Now you’re talking my language. Do you know Spanish, Margie?”

  “Not really. What about you?”

  “Sí, no, and Usted cuesta mucho dinero.”

  Decker smiled. “Coming with us, Scottie?”

  “Us?” Again Oliver was surprised. “You’re going to Acapulco with us and without your wife?”

  “Rina’s going to meet me there. We’ve decided to turn it into a mini-vacation. You two will be on your own.”

  Mar
ge winked at Oliver. “You come and help split the driving, I’ll be your wingman when we hit the bars.”

  “You’ve got a deal.”

  “But don’t go too far, Pete,” Marge said. “We’ll need someone Spanish-speaking to plead his case after he’s been arrested for a drunk-and-disorderly.”

  “You wound me,” Oliver said.

  “Not as much as you wound yourself,” Marge said.

  “And not as much as Solana Perez was wounded.” Decker shook his head in disgust. “The capacity of human beings to inflict pain on one another is just astonishing.”

  “At least we got her a modicum of justice,” Marge said. “Until the next one.” She gave her words some thought. “And there always is a next one.”

  “Speaking of which . . .” Decker handed them a detail sheet. “Lee and Bontemps just caught this case. They could use some help.”

  Marge and Oliver let out a collective moan.

  “Aw, quit your bitchin’,” Decker said. “Crime may make us cynical and ugly, but it’s how we earn our paychecks. It’s a nasty job, but someone has to do it.”

  BULL’S-EYE

  “Bull’s-eye” features Peter Decker and

  his daughter Cindy dissecting a

  perplexing shooting of an unpopular

  drill instructor at the Los Angeles

  Police Academy. It required a visit to

  the academy, a fascinating place within

  spitting distance of Dodger Stadium. I

  was surprised to learn that many of the

  academy facilities were funded by Jack

  Webb of Dragnet fame. This story is

  the first time that Cindy Decker

  appears in a professional capacity.

  Father and daughter have a few issues

  to work out as they edge toward solving

  this baffling case.

  CRAZY BROAD! HOLSTETTER KEPT HIS FEELINGS in check, his face impassive, as Sergeant Rigor talked and talked . . . trying to break him, break them all. He knew all the others felt that way, too, even the girls—uh, women. Martinez was always calling Rigor a fascist, MacKenny rolling her eyes whenever she lectured. Even Decker despised Rigor, said she suffered from a bad case of queen-bee syndrome, whatever that was.

  Rigor wasn’t a particularly big woman—around five-six or -seven, medium build, brown hair clipped close to her scalp, one step below a crew cut. Psycho eyes that took you in and spat you out.

  Holstetter realized he was beginning to slump. He straightened, hoping Rigor hadn’t noticed.

  “Gettin’ tired, Holstetter?”

  “No, ma’am, no!”

  Rigor’s eyes drilled into his. “Sure? I wouldn’t want to tire you out.”

  “No, ma’am, no!”

  “Maybe you and your troop should take a run up the hill—say, five, ten miles. Sound good?”

  Holstetter could feel the anger rising around him, his fellow cadets silently cursing him. His momentary lapse in posture had cost all of them. Still he remained expressionless. “Yes, ma’am, yes!”

  “Great!” Rigor said with mock enthusiasm. “Tell you what, Holstetter, I’ll even run with you.” She lifted a finger. “But first things first.”

  She addressed her charges. “You people think you’re making progress? You got miles to go—I mean light-years—before you’re even fit to call yourselves trainees.”

  She glared at them. “I can’t stress brainpower enough. You’re going to need every cell in your less than adequate craniums when you’re out on the streets. Those bad guys out there . . . tell me about the bad guys, Baldwin.”

  A burly African American answered in a deep voice: “There’s more of them than of us.”

  “See, folks?” Rigor announced. “Baldwin’s actually learned something! There are way more of them than of us. And they got no morals. They got nothing holding them back, nothing to prevent them from turning you into a colander. Why did I bring up a colander, Martinez?”

  “Because it’s full of holes,” a young Latina said.

  “Excellent, Martinez. My job here is to prevent any of you from turning into a colander. Got it?”

  The group answered in unison, “Yes, ma’am, yes!”

  “That’s good. I’m glad you understand. Because this is what I wanna do. You get good shooting practice here, but I don’t think it’s enough. So you know what I’m gonna do for you? I’m gonna take you out on Saturday—voluntary, of course. We’re going to run a bit, train a bit, shoot a bit. Not here. At another range . . . to get you used to different situations and circumstances. So you don’t get to thinking that Mr. Scumbag is always directly in front of you, twenty feet away, just waiting to be shot at. You gotta train all over the place!”

  The sergeant stared at her cadets in their regulation blue sweats, her eyes scanning the names sewn on the shirts: Darwin, Holstetter, Baldwin, Martinez, Jackson, McVie, Decker, MacKenny . . . all of them so damn young!

  “This extra target practice is my idea, not part of the academy program. So you don’t have to sign up. But let me say this. You can go into the streets two ways: prepared or unprepared. I’m willing to give up my free time to prepare you. I don’t need you to be grateful. But I do need you to be good cops.”

  Rigor held up a sign-up sheet. “This’ll be waiting for you in my office. Anyone asks you what it means, just tell them it means a fun-filled Saturday with Sergeant Rigor. You sign it or not—up to you.”

  She turned to Holstetter. “Cadet, how ’bout you and me leading the way now?”

  “Yes, ma’am, yes!”

  “Fall into rank!” Rigor shouted, and the troop shuffled into place, one long line, two abreast. She nodded to Holstetter, and they began their uphill jaunt. Holstetter had to pump hard to keep up with Rigor’s stride, his breath quickening, leg muscles contracting, as he concentrated on his step.

  Sadistic bully!

  “What can I say? It’s cruel and unusual punishment. But who am I complaining to . . . or, rather, to whom am I complaining?”

  Peter Decker smiled at his daughter. “If you want to be technical.”

  Cindy laughed and sipped her coffee. “Three months out of college and I’m already talking like a Valley Girl! What would my lit professor say?”

  “Probably that you should have stayed in graduate school.”

  “Wasting my time and your money,” Cindy said wryly. “Anyway, I know I’ve been griping nonstop for the last half hour.”

  “Oh, you took a couple of breaths,” he said.

  She grinned at her father, showing a crescent of white, even teeth. She was a fine-looking girl, Decker thought—well-sculpted face, big brown eyes, white skin paprikaed with freckles, and a mop of red hair. He had never seen her in such fine physical shape. The Police Academy’ll do that for you, he thought.

  “I’m not unhappy, Dad. I’m just venting. I can vent to you, can’t I?”

  “I”m honored.”

  “The classroom courses are a snap. As far as the physical training goes—well, yes, I am exhausted. But it feels terrific to be forced to go that extra distance, knowing your life may depend on it, propelling yourself until it hurts. Because out on the street, when you’re giving chase to a criminal, there’s no time limit.”

  Her words were straight from some instructor’s mouth, he thought. Still, they were even truer today than they had been in his time. He was glad Cindy was taking them seriously.

  Decker stretched his long legs under the table. “You’re right about that,” he told her.

  Again Cindy grinned at him. “Like you need me to explain this to you.”

  Decker took a bite of his onion bagel. “We’re not talking about me, we’re talking about you.” He chewed a moment. “You haven’t said much about your classmates. Found any friends?”

  “Sure. It’s a nice group. Some of the guys are a little . . . heavy-handed.”

  “They give you a hard time?”

  “They give everyone a hard time. T
hey come down like he-men in hand-to-hand combat. They get a charge out of hurting people. No big deal. You just fight back hard.”

  “Exactly. Just make sure you do it calmly, not out of anger. They hassle you in other ways?”

  “Like harassment? No. Not overtly. The academy doesn’t put up with that. One of the first lectures we got was the ‘No harassment, no racism, no discrimination’ speech. You know—that ‘Cops come in only one color: blue’ thing.”

  “That’s good. What about the women in your group?”

  Cindy shrugged. “Ordinarily, I don’t think I’d have a tremendous amount in common with them. But we’re going through such an intense experience together, there’s some bonding. Two of them—Angelica Martinez and Kate MacKenny—come from cop families, too, so we’ve had similar childhood experiences.”

  “Like never having a father around?”

  “More like we’re just now beginning to understand the pressure our fathers must have been under. And we haven’t even made it onto the streets yet! So much to learn in six months. It’s overwhelming.” She shrugged again. “Oh, well. One day at a time.”

  “That’s the right attitude. How are your instructors?”

  “Some are better than others. Controlled Substances is okay. Report Writing—now, there’s a real snoozer. Evidence is great—really interesting. I’m going to make a great detective!”

  Decker laughed.

  “Our Combat Wrestling instructor is a woman—Sergeant Peoples.”

  “Don’t know her.”

  “Our Firearms instructor is also a woman—Sergeant Rigor. Well named—she’s a maniac.”

  Decker’s face was immobile. “Lynne Rigor?”

  “You know her?”

  “Yes. Known as a crack shot. Why do you say she’s a maniac?”

  “She’s obsessed with training us . . . making us do extra work on weekends. She believes in training us at different sites, getting us involved in different situations. We start this Saturday.”

  “So it’s mandatory?”

  “Voluntary mandatory. The way she set it up, we really don’t have a choice.”

  Decker frowned. “Well, I guess a little extra exercise can’t do you much harm.”