40
Grass Valley, California
Chief Jackman had ordered Gil to go home for the day in no uncertain terms. When Gil did so, he left his city-owned Crown Vic in the departmental parking lot and headed home in his bedraggled five-year-old Camry, which had been sitting forlorn and abandoned in the city parking lot since Gil been called out to the Herrera brothers crime scene on Friday afternoon.
On the way, Gil drove past Target. A few blocks beyond that, he made up his mind. Pulling a quick U-turn, he went back and parked in front of the store. He wasn’t sure how much room was left on his Visa card, but he was about to find out.
Pushing a shopping cart, Gil marched through the homemaking aisles on the first genuine shopping spree of his entire life. He bought a set of dishes-four place settings of all blue dishes because blue was his favorite color and a set of silverware for four, stainless not silver of course. He picked up a set of twelve glasses-four each of three different sizes. He bought a toaster- $29.95-a dish drainer, a nonstick set of fry pans, a couple of spatulas, and a laundry basket. He bought two bath towels, two hand towels, and two washcloths as well as a new shower curtain to replace the moldy one with several missing rivets that currently hung in his bathroom.
Gil bought himself a new set of plain white sheets, a fitted sheet and a flat one that came with a pair of matching pillowcases. Then, just for good measure, he bought one of those bed-in-a-bag things that came with a blue plaid comforter and a couple of decorative pillows. At least from now on his damned AeroBed would look like a real bed. He also bought a four-drawer dresser that came in a box, some assembly required.
When he got to the checkout stand, he held back on the dresser just in case he ran out of room on his credit card. Fortunately, the charge went through without a hitch. Now, thank God and Visa, the time for Gil Morris to keep his clothing in one of Linda’s discarded suitcases was finally a thing of the past.
He was alone now. It was high time he started living his own alone life.
Leaving Target, just for good measure and just because he could, Gil made two more stops on the way home. He went to the grocery store and replenished his supply of bread, cereal, milk, and cleaning supplies. Then he stopped by the liquor store and picked up a box of fifty Antonio y Cleopatra cigars. He was determined that the next time he had to show up at a crime scene, he would be the one handing out the smokes.
Before Linda took off, one of the things that had always mystified Gil about the woman was that whenever she was pissed at him, she turned into a housecleaning demon. In the past Gil had dreaded those cleaning marathons because he understood that the cleaner the house got, the more trouble he was usually in.
That Monday morning Gilbert Morris finally started to understand it. Huffing on one of the previously prohibited cigars and using his old cracked dinner plate as an ashtray, Gil went to work. He swept; he mopped; he dusted; he scrubbed. He decided that once he paid off his credit card purchases, he was going to buy himself a new television set, maybe even a baby flat-screen. He had seen some of those on sale at Target too and was surprised by how little they cost.
He unwrapped the dishes as well as the glasses and the silverware and ran them all through the dishwasher. He put his dirty clothes into the laundry basket along with his dirty sheets. He threw away his musty bath towel, the dead shower curtain, and his ragged, much-used sheets. He knew that Linda would never have considered putting new sheets and pillowcases on the bed without laundering them first, but Linda had taken the washer and dryer. Gil would be damned if he’d go to the laundromat and spend good money washing and drying brand-new sheets and pillowcases. He would sleep on them as is.
Linda had left the toilet bowl brush behind, but no toilet bowl cleaner. Fortunately he had picked up some of that at the grocery store. He didn’t want his toilet bowel to resemble the ones he had seen in Richard Lowensdale’s house. It took several tries and lots of scrubbing before, to his immense satisfaction, the stubborn stains finally disappeared.
He cleaned the bathroom sink until it gleamed and did the same thing to the porcelain sink in the kitchen. By then the dishwasher had run through its cycle. With the dishes still almost too hot to handle, Gil took them out and arranged them in the cupboard the way that suited him best, with the plates on the upper shelf and the glasses and cups on the lower one. This was his kitchen now; Gil would do things his way, not Linda’s way.
The relatively mindless work of cleaning and scrubbing allowed plenty of time for thinking. Maybe that was what Linda had always known-the link between cleaning and thinking.
Gil let his mind wander back through the intricacies of those two somehow intertwined cases-Richard Lowensdale’s murder and Brenda Riley’s apparent suicide. Some of the puzzle pieces didn’t make sense. For one thing, a luminol test of the shoes from the Scotts Flat Reservoir showed no sign of blood spatter of any kind. The booties might have accounted for that. Still, with as much blood as Gil had found on the scene, it surprised him that there were no traces at all. And for shoes that had evidently walked through the woods, the soles had been pristinely clean, with no dirt or gravel caught in the tread.
Since John Connor had handled the purse, Gil had been obliged to take a set of elimination fingerprints on the boy, but he was relatively sure that his manner of questioning John had left the kid-a good kid, evidently-plenty of wiggle room. There had been no questions about John’s friends in the interview, and no mention of them in Gil’s written report either. There was no reason to suspect that John and his friends were in any way responsible for what had happened to Brenda.
What mystified Gil most, however, were the contents of the purse, all of which he had carefully inventoried. It was the usual women’s purse junk-a compact, several tubes of lipsticks, all the same color, two packages of new tissues as well as a loose collection of old ones, a change purse along with some loose change, a package of dental floss, some aspirin, several pens, a tampon container, and a wallet. The wallet contained four twenty-dollar bills, one credit card in Brenda’s mother’s name, and three crumbling photos-one of a man and a woman and a twenty- fifth wedding anniversary cake, and two high school senior photos of two women who looked very much alike. From the hairstyles Gil estimated that the photos were most likely of Brenda herself and maybe a female relative. A sister, maybe?
But what didn’t fit in with all that was the bloodied thumb. Why had Brenda taken it along to begin with? Without the thumb, it seemed likely that she would have gotten away with killing Richard Lowensdale. After all, as far as Gil had been able to discover, there was no physical evidence linking Brenda to the crime.
So what was the point of taking that one piece of incriminating evidence with her? Yes, killers often collected trophies, but collecting trophies and then committing suicide seemed illogical. After all, if Brenda was going to kill herself, why would she torture her poor mother by leaving behind the unmistakable message that her beloved daughter was also a murderer? That made no sense.
And then there was the purse itself. Gilbert was hardly a connoisseur of such things, but he knew that purses-even cheap ones-weren’t free. Why would Brenda have decided to wreck hers? To Gil’s unpracticed eye, the soft leather purse seemed expensive, but it was wrecked now. Because of the bloodied thumb, it now stank to the high heavens.
While returning all the separate inventoried items to the evidence box, Gil had picked up the tampon holder. On a whim, he pulled it open. Yes, there were two paper-wrapped tampons inside the plastic container, but there was also something else. A key of some kind, a key that could have been to a locker, perhaps, or maybe even a desk.
Gil had planned on taking the key to the crime lab later in the day to see if Mona and her crime techs could track down where it came from or what it opened. That, of course, was before Chief Jackman had sent Gil home, so chasing after the key was something that would have to wait for another day.
When it came time to tackle the dresser, Gil opened the box, fished out the directions, and determined what tools he would need-a Phillips screwdriver and an Allen wrench. With those in mind, Gil headed for the garage.
Had Linda made off with her husband’s bright red rolling tool chest or if she had emptied it, there would have been all-out war. With two cars in the garage there had been barely enough room for both vehicles to park side by side. That had left the tool chest virtually inaccessible and had rendered the workbench under the window completely useless. Rather than a haven, the garage had become a passageway, good only for coming and going.
With Linda and the kids gone, Gil could have worked in the garage, but he hadn’t. What had once been
