Louis turned away to hide his smile.
Jesse stood up, brushing the snow from his pants. “Kincaid, do you have rape kit in the car?”
Mrs. Jaspers set her flabby jaw and wagged a finger. “I’m going to report you, young man. For all the good it does.”
“Just having a little fun, Mrs. Jaspers,” Jesse said.
“That reindeer has been in my family for years.”
“Well, maybe the life insurance can help with the burial expenses.”
Mrs. Jaspers crossed her arms and began to describe the hoodlums. Jesse pulled the cap of his pen off with his teeth and started to write in his notebook. Louis glanced up and down the street. Kids usually liked to see the results of their pranks and he suspected the culprits were lurking nearby. But his eye was drawn to the white house at the corner.
It was a pretty house, two stories with green shutters and trimmed evergreens. It was the kind of house you’d expect to see on “Happy Days”. Only this one had yellow crime tape strung on the porch.
“Jess, you need me here?”
“What?” Jesse said, scribbling in his notebook. He spun around. “Where you going?”
Louis crossed the street and stopped at the black mailbox. Across its side it read: THE PRYCES. He heard Jesse come up behind him.
“What are you doing?” Jesse asked.
“I’d like to go in,” Louis said.
“What for?”
“I’d just like to see the scene.”
Jesse looked at the house then shrugged. “Go ahead. “We’ve already been through it a hundred times.”
Louis trudged up the snowy walk and stepped over the crime tape onto the porch. The green wood door was intact but a piece of plywood had been nailed over the hole where the glass window once was. There were black smudges on the edges of the door and the porch railing where they had been dusted.
“What happened exactly?” Louis asked Jesse.
“Pryce came downstairs. He was standing behind the door when he was blasted through the window. It was a twelve gauge. Hit him in the chest. We found Pryce’s gun lying on the floor.”
“He pulled his gun?”
“Never fired it.”
“What time?”
“About three-fifteen a.m.”
“You get anything?”
“One boot print. A neighbor heard the shot. Another neighbor thought he saw somebody in the backyard.”
“Not much to go on,” Louis said, his gaze roaming over the door.
Jesse let out a sigh. “There was one other thing.”
Louis turned.
“We found a card next to the body.”
“A Christmas card?”
“No, a playing card, like for poker. It had this weird drawing on the back.”
“Of what?”
“A skull and bones, you know, like a pirate flag or a poison bottle.”
“What number?”
“Huh?”
“The card…a number or a face card?”
“It was an ace.”
“Of what?”
Jesse shifted uneasily. “Spades.”
Louis watched him for a second then looked away. “Think it was symbolic of anything?”
“I don’t know,” Jesse said. “Maybe it meant something, maybe it didn’t.”
“You’re sure Pryce wasn’t working on something when he was killed?”
“I told you, we went through all the stuff in his desk but there was nothing but a routine burglary of a tourist cabin. Other than that, I’ve got no clue what Pryce was doing.”
Louis turned to face him. “He didn’t talk to you about what he was working on?”
Jesse picked at an evergreen. “No. He wasn’t big on casual conversation. He never really talked to anybody in the department about much.”
“How long was he with the department?”
“About three years.”
“Three years on a force with only nine men and he didn’t talk to the rest of you?” Louis said.
Jesse was looking at him but Louis couldn’t see his eyes behind his sunglasses. “Yeah, that’s right,” he said. “Pryce wasn’t exactly your basic party animal.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means he kept to himself. That’s all it means.”
Louis stared at him. “What about you? Did you like him?”
Jesse shrugged.
“What about the chief? Did Pryce get along with him okay?”
“You’ll have to ask the chief that.”
Louis turned away, looking again at the porch. “Where’d you find the boot print?”
Jesse came up the steps. “Right here, where the overhang kept the snow off. We lost anything out there in the yard because it was snowing like a motherfucker that night.”
“You try to trace it?”
“Yeah, I did. It was from some company called Warden’s. Cheap work boot, thousands of them sold around the state.”
Louis reached for the knob but Jesse caught his arm. “It’s locked. Hold on.” He disappeared around the back of the house. Minutes later, Louis heard sounds inside the house and the door opened. “Went through the basement window,” Jesse said.
The white tile foyer was wallpapered in faded pink roses. The bottom four stairs, carpeted in pale pink, were splattered with dried brown blood. There was a brown stain the size of a dinner plate on the bottom stair.
Louis looked left into the living room. It was empty of furniture, but little things — small plastic toys, dust bunnies and books — were scattered across the rug.
“They left in a hurry,” Louis said.
Jesse came up behind him. “Mrs. Pryce took the kids and went back to Flint the next day. A week later, she came back for the body.”
Louis started up the stairs, Jesse trailing behind. He paused at the door of a blue bedroom. There was a wallpaper border of ducks and some toys on the floor.
“How many kids did they have?” Louis asked.
“Two. One was just a baby.”
Louis went down the hall to the master bedroom. The walls were painted a mint green. There were depressions in the carpet where the king-sized bed had been. On the floor were bits of papers, some beads from a broken necklace and several magazines.
Louis went to the center of the room. He thought he could still smell the scent of aftershave, hear the kids giggling. He closed his eyes and imagined the sound as the blast ripped through the door below. He saw Stephanie Pryce bolting upright in her bed. He turned and saw Jesse staring at him.
“You take this kind of personal, don’t you, Kincaid?”
“What do you mean?”
“I was watching you. It’s like you could see it in your head.”
“Sometimes it helps to try and get a feel for things,” Louis said. He saw something in the closet and went to it. Hanging there were two Loon Lake uniforms, still in their plastic dry cleaning wrappers.
