Closer Than Blood

the block as he made his way up the painted gray steps. He nodded at another officer by the door.

“House is secure?” he said. The officer nodded.

“Yeah, neighborhood canvass at work, too.” Kaminski pulled the knob and stepped inside. The foyer was grand, museum-entryway grand. The floor was burnished oak topped with a powder blue and gold oriental rug, its pile so thick that the soles of his shoes nearly levitated as he walked to the sitting room. The coffered ceiling seemed a mile overhead. He looked up; pale blue insets filled the voids between dark oak mullions. The staircase was curved, sweeping from the first floor to the second like an anaconda. A series of portraits artfully illuminated by unobtrusive spotlights added to the museum vibe. Not my taste, he thought. But who knows what a man will do with the dough if he has too much? He glanced in the direction of the pocket doors, pulled open to reveal the activity of the murder scene. The smell of blood and gunpowder was unmistakable. Sweet and smoky. Not like barbecue, of course, but more like the scent of a Fourth of July picnic. A Tiffany fixture overhead sprayed gold light from its mushroom shades; Kaminski could see the coroner and assistants in clean suits, assuring that whatever evidence would be gathered from the deceased would not be anything they brought in from the outside. There was never a time when that procedure didn’t make sense, but it didn’t become official until a case a dozen years before in which a defendant claimed chain-of-custody issues when a detective’s Persian cat’s fur was discovered on the corpse. If a person visiting an open house was required to wear disposable booties, then no one should argue the need for initial criminal responders to suit up. Kaminski caught the attention of forensics specialist Cal Herzog, hunched over the area by the sofa where the body had been found. Cal, a balding man of about fifty, who began working in the forensics unit at the Tacoma Police Department after a reasonably distinguished career in the military, was crouched over the dead man.

“Evening, Cal.”

“Just in time. Medical examiner’s about ready to bag him,” Cal said. Kaminski stepped closer.

“Let me have a look.”

“Point-blank,” Cal said, indicating the wound on the back of Alex Connelly’s head. The place of entry for the bullet was like a bloody borehole that cut through the man’s skull and into his brain. Death, no doubt, was instantaneous. Alex Connelly, sitting in his robe, facing the television, might not even have had an inkling that the gun was going to fire.

“SOB didn’t struggle,” Cal said.

“Didn’t even know this was going to happen.” Kaminski crouched behind the camelback sofa and looked up at the TV over the mantel.

“I don’t know about that,” he said.

“Pretty good reflection off that plasma. Almost like a mirror.” Cal looked up. The TV had been on when the blues arrived and secured the scene, but it had been loud and one of the cops shut it off. Kaminski fixed his eyes on the victim. He wore a blue and gold robe. It was a flimsy, silky fabric that he wouldn’t be caught dead in. Which, of course, Alex Connelly had just been. He had slippers on his feet. Nothing else.

“What does the vic do for a living?”

“Works for an investment firm downtown. About middle on the high-up scale, if you ask me. You know, makes enough dough for a lease on this place, but not enough to buy it.”

“Lexus, actually a his and hers, in the garage, er, carriage house,” one of the cops said, correcting himself.

“Not a Porsche.”

“Almost feel sorry for him,” Kaminski said.

“You know, not being able to get a Porsche.” It took three men to move the body to the split-open bag. In doing so, the robe slipped to reveal the victim’s chest. A tattoo of an eagle with artillery and olive branches in its talons soared over his right pec, which, given his age, was well defined.

“Nice ink,” Kaminski said.

“Looks like navy.” While the techs and cops worked together to process the scene for evidence, Kaminski took a tour of the house. It was late by then, but the place seemed as if it had been ready for a Realtor’s open house. Nothing was out of place. The kitchen, small by the standards of what modern people wanted, was nicely redone to include the niceties that big-bucked folks wanted. A Sub-Zero refrigerator was clad in white cabinetry to match the rest of the kitchen. A Viking range was another giveaway that the place had been redone. Nothing was out of place on the plane of soapstone that served as the counter. Upstairs, Kaminski entered the master bedroom. A Rice bed that in someone else’s house would have been ridiculously oversize commanded the large room. The bed had been turned down. All perfect. The dead guy was in a silky robe and slippers. Where were his clothes? The bathroom was also show-ready. He went inside and a flash of red caught his eye. On a hook on the back of the door, a woman’s teddy. Nice, he thought. As he moved the door, the fabric fluttered, like a red flag. He opened the shower door and caught a whiff of cleaner. The marble surface was slick, dripping wet. Cal appeared in the doorway.

“Everything diagrammed, photographed. ME is taking the body now. Some blood in the hallway, fair amount of spatter on the wall behind the couch. We’re dusting everything. Place is pretty clean. Must have a maid.”

“All right. I’m going to the hospital to see Mrs. Connelly.”

“Techs are there now.”

“Gunshot residue?”

“Hands have been swabbed.” Kaminski nodded.

“Prelim?”

“Clean.” The two started down the stairs as the body was being carried out, bagged and tagged, on a gurney. A breeze from Commencement Bay filled the air with marine smells, a welcome reprieve from the odor of blood and gunfire.

“She talk?”

“Not on the way to St. Joe’s. Didn’t say a word. Told the neighbor that a guy broke in, shot her and her old man. Nobody’s seen anything to approximate a break-in.”

“Security system?” Cal watched the ambulance doors as they closed on Alex Connelly.

“Looks like it was turned off,” he said. The sirens started and about ten onlookers started to head back to their homes.

“Show over,” Kaminski said.

“At least for now. I’m going to the hospital.”

Most who inhabit such a fine street as North Junett would consider the most dominating piece of artwork that hung in the Connelly living room as something incongruent with the home’s stature or the place in society that its inhabitants surely held. It was a bourgeois depiction of a stone cottage in the midst of a snowstorm. The artist, Thomas Kinkade, was known for a popular, albeit kitschy, style that stoked memories of a long-ago time when skaters wore fuzzy earmuffs and free-flowing scarves as they skimmed over the surface of a frozen pond. This Kinkade print on canvas was called Evening Glow. Besides its stone cottage, it featured an illuminated gas lamp that appeared to emit an orange red glow. In fact, such a feature was the hallmark of Kinkade’s paintings. He was, his aficionados insisted, “not an artist, but a painter of light.” None of the men and women from the Tacoma Police and the Pierce County Coroner’s offices at the crime scene paid the lush accoutrements of the Connelly household much mind as they went about tagging and bagging the victim and the assorted evidence they’d need to run through the lab. If they’d have looked closer, they would have noticed that Thomas Kinkade’s ability to trick the eye with illumination techniques was in better-than-average form. The light on the top of the lamp standard twinkled. As it did so, the discourse among the interlopers on the scene continued.

“What do you make of the lady of the house?” a cop asked a forensics tech.

“Meaning?” a woman’s voice answered.

“A lot younger than the husband,” the man’s voice said.

“Better looking, too.” The same woman’s voice responded.

“I guess.”

“I’ll tell you what I guess,” the man said.

“I guess that when they do a GSR test on the missus they’ll find that she was the shooter. Honestly, the