The words rang so loudly in my mind that they hurt. Becky hadn’t named the woman who tried to report her rape and was dismissed. A woman who never received justice.
A woman who might be Becky. If her rapist was Bruce Vilsack, she might have decided to take justice into her own hands.
As soon as Becky’s car pulled out of the parking lot of Dad’s Hardware, I took out my phone and did a search on her name. The only thing that came up was her Facebook profile. All her privacy settings were locked down tight, so I couldn’t get a look at her old posts to see if she’d ever shared a non-work-based picture of herself and Bruce Vilsack. I sent her a friend request.
My mom slid into the passenger seat. “Did you put your phone on vibrate?”
Was this going to turn into a lecture on how she couldn’t call me when she needed to check if I was in trouble? Because I had to play my part. It would have been rude to have my phone ringing during the meeting in the same way that it would be rude not to mute it during church or a movie. “Of course.”
My mom clicked the seatbelt into place. She was supposed to drive my car home, so clearly this was about more than scaring her.
“What’s going on?”
My mom flipped her phone toward me. The screen displayed a single text message with an address. It was from Elise.
My mom was already reaching toward the car’s built-in GPS. “There’s been another death.”
11
Even in the dark, it was easy to find the right house. Police vehicles sat out front, lights flashing. The red, blue, and white danced off the front of the house in a way that made it look like it belonged in a Tim Burton Christmas movie. I half expected Jack and Sally to peek their skeletal and sutured heads around the corner. The thought alone made me shudder. Tim Burton’s movies were too creepy for me.
Elise waved to us from beside the front door. “It might be a waste bringing you out here, but when I called Chief McTavish, his wife said she’d been instructed to tell anyone who called to go bother the consultants.”
I circled my hands in a walk-it-back gesture. “What’s happened?”
Elise led us over to where we could put on crime scene gear. “At first glance, it looks like a suicide. He left a note confessing to abusing his wife for years.”
A note, or the lack of one, didn’t prove or disprove a suicide, but it certainly helped. Especially when it revealed the reason the deceased had felt life wasn’t worth living anymore. “Hand-written?”
Elise nodded, but her body posture was awkward. She reminded me a bit of a high school chemistry student being asked to perform an experiment alongside a Noble laureate.
Elise didn’t often get the chance to participate in an investigation, let alone lead one. Maybe she felt like this was above her pay grade, and she didn’t want to disappoint Chief McTavish. Or, more likely, Erik. “Do you have a reason to suspect it’s not a suicide?”
“Not really. It’s just that most of the suicides around here are teenagers or the elderly. This time it’s a former Fair Haven police officer.”
Like with any high-stress profession, especially one that involved trusting your co-workers with your life, the police took a death of one of their own seriously. Not that they didn’t take all death cases seriously—they did—but when one of their own died under suspicious circumstances, they became almost anal about making sure they investigated everything. I’d seen it before in DC when an off-duty officer died in a hit-and-run accident.
But in this case, it might be unwarranted. More police officers died in the United States each year from suicide than from gunfire and traffic accidents combined.
“Did he have any connection to Bruce Vilsack?” I asked.
“Doesn’t look like it, but I sent Scherwin to ask Vilsack’s family and roommate.”
“When did it happen?”
Elise pulled out her notebook. “The neighbor called 911 about an hour ago and reported hearing what sounded like a gunshot next door. Mark says time of death is consistent with that.”
I hadn’t realized I’d been holding tension in my shoulders until it let go. It wasn’t likely this case was connected to Vilsack’s, and if it turned out it was, Becky would be off the suspect list. An hour ago, I could alibi her myself.
My mom and I finished gearing up, and Elise led us into the house. The inside had a 90s décor look to it—blonde wood; a mustard-colored couch with green, blue, and pink pillows; and a coffee table that looked like it belonged outside in a bistro rather than inside.
“He’s in here,” Elise said. She held open a door.
My mom went straight in. I sucked in a deep breath, but the air didn’t want to go down, like swallowing something too wide for my throat.
I could do this. I’d accepted this consultant position, and that meant I had to be a part of things. Whether my stomach liked what my eyes saw or not.
I ducked past Elise.
Had it not been for the crime scene techs crawling over everything like ants on a potato chip, the room would have looked like any living room.
Then I glanced in the other direction.
My stomach contents rolled up into my throat, and I wanted to sink down onto the floor.
Mark and my mom now stood next to the man’s body. He was sitting in a chair, but his posture had an unnatural backward slump to it, to one side and with his head lolling backward at an uncomfortable angle.
I kept my gaze away from the wound where his temple should have been.
My mom and Mark were perfectly capable of looking at any detail that needed to be seen up close. Unless they wanted me contaminating the crime scene by losing my dinner, I was better off taking in the big picture. If I was going to keep getting involved with murder cases this way, I should carry a supply of ginger candies in my purse.
From my wide-angle position, the placement of the dead man’s chair seemed strange compared with the rest of the room. It was the kind of chair I’d have expected to see nestled up to a dining room table, and it wasn’t even angled toward the TV. Instead, had the man been alive, he would have been facing a wall.
I shifted my view. The wall he’d been facing wasn’t bare. It was one of those family photo walls that were popular when I was little, with the parents’ wedding photo in the center and then family photos and pictures of any children growing out from it.
If he had committed suicide, he’d chosen to spend his last seconds on earth looking at pictures of his family. That made sense, given that his note expressed grief over how he’d hurt his wife. Mark would probably decree this a suicide by tomorrow.
I moved closer to the wall.
