Sweet Masterpiece: The First Samantha Sweet Mystery

It led directly into the kitchen. People who skipped out didn’t seem to feel the need to wash dishes or clean up. A trash can in one corner overflowed, primarily with fast food wrappers, pizza boxes and paper plates. All the real dishes were stacked in the sink and on counters. Sam didn’t even want to guess at the guck that had dried onto them.

She felt a little embarrassed by the mess, as if she’d invited a guest into her own home and they’d found it in this condition. But Beau didn’t seem to care. He gave the kitchen a glance, ignoring the trash and the table, which she’d just noticed was covered in beer cans with a half eaten pizza dried to a crisp in its box. He’d walked into the living room.

Almost on auto pilot, Sam went to the sink and tested to see if there was hot water. After a minute the cold stream became warm, then hot, then steamy. She found a nearly empty bottle of dish detergent under the sink and squirted it liberally over the haphazard stack. Stoppering the basin, she let the whole thing fill with hot water.

“Sam?” The deputy’s voice came from another room. “You’re not moving anything, are you?”

Oh shit. In her haste to make the place presentable, she’d forgotten that the whole house might be considered part of the crime scene.

He strode in from the other room. “Don’t tell me you’re washing away our evidence. Please don’t tell me that.”

She’d turned off the faucet but the sudsy basin gave her away. “Deputy, I . . . should I let the water out?”

He stared down at her from his six and a half feet, eyes dark beneath the Stetson. “No, it’s okay.”

She felt like a complete idiot. Hadn’t she watched enough episodes of CSI to know that you didn’t touch a thing at a crime scene?

He glanced out the back window, noticing that the younger deputy had quit digging. He opened the back door. “Relax. And just call me Beau.” He seemed about to say something more but turned away instead.

She watched him walk to the back of the property. Suppressing the urge to bag the trash, she jammed her hands into her pockets and stepped out to the back porch. She could see that the deputies had found something. The shovel stuck up from the ground and the young guy was squatting at the edge of the hole, tugging at something. Beau, too, hunkered down examining the object. Curiosity piqued her interest but she wasn’t sure she wanted to know the details, close up. After a minute or two Beau stood and spoke into his shoulder mike. He brushed dirt off his hands and walked back toward the house.

From the porch step Sam was exactly eye level with him as he stopped to speak.

“There’s a body, all right,” he said. “It’s wrapped in blankets, not exactly a funeral director’s style. We’re going to need to exhume and identify it.”

Exhume, as in dig up and bring out into the open. Sam really didn’t want to know too much about that.

“It would take me probably another week to get a team of crime lab folks out here from Santa Fe, and this isn’t exactly a fresh scene. It’s just that Padilla and myself will be the only qualified ones in the office the rest of the week—”

“Could I help in some way? Is that what you’re trying to say?”

“Well, yeah.” He actually scuffed the toe of his boot in the dirt. “It would just be to go through things in the house and try to get more information about the owner.”

She shrugged. “It’s what I do.” As long as she didn’t have to get a good up-close look at a decomposing body, she was happy with any other little task. Plus, the sooner this whole thing was resolved, the sooner she’d finish her real job here and be able to submit her invoice. And that meant a check. And that meant groceries.

Damn Kelly, Sam thought. It’s an awful way to feel about my own daughter, but cleaning out my checking account was a shitty thing.

She suppressed that line of thought and stepped back into the messy kitchen.

“What kind of information do you want me to look for?” she asked. “Anderson’s relatives, that kind of thing?”

He grinned at her. “You’re getting the idea. You’ll make a great assistant deputy.”

“Isn’t a deputy already an assistant?”

“Yeah, but we’re kind of winging it here. Unless you want to go out there and help pull the body out of the grave, you’ll have to be content without an official swearing in.” Was he flirting?

“Trust me, I’m very content not to be sworn in. Just tell me what I have to do to get on with cleaning this place up.”

“Okay. We need papers, bills, checks—anything that might let us know more about Anderson. How long ago since anyone last heard from him. That sort of thing.”

“There’s a desk in a corner of the living room. I can start with that.” He handed her a pair of surgical gloves and she cut through the kitchen, refusing to look at the heaping trashcan and piles of food-encrusted dishes. Beau followed, poking at the bathroom door, using a ballpoint pen to pull drawers open, scanning the rooms quickly to get a general feel for the layout.

“He must have had someone else living here,” Sam observed. “Both bedrooms look lived in. I mean, one guy living here alone—even a husband and wife—there’s going to be one bedroom used and the other as a spare, right?”

“Good observation, assistant.” He was flirting! Sam noticed how there was the tiniest gap near one of his incisors; he had a habit of smiling slightly wider on that side of his mouth. It had the effect of making him human, dimming slightly the otherwise near perfect looks. Stop thinking about that!

“Both beds are rumpled, there are clothes in both closets,” he said, stepping back into the hallway. “I’ll canvass a few of the neighbors later. The medical investigator should be getting here soon.”

Like a prophecy coming true, they heard a vehicle pull up to the house. Beau went out the front door while Sam turned back to her work. Through the open drapes at the back bedroom window she could see him showing a man in a suit out to the gravesite, the same guy who’d been at Bertha Martinez’s yesterday. The men were standing over a bundle of cloth, the blankets Beau had mentioned. The bundle hardly looked large enough to contain a person, she thought with a pang.

She pulled open the first of the desk drawers. So, Mr. Riley Anderson, who were you? Are you the sad little heap out there in the yard now, or did you put someone else there?

Chapter 6

Beau and the younger deputy loaded the blanketed bundle into the back of the OMI vehicle to be taken to Albuquerque for autopsy, and saw the man off before coming back into the house. They worked with Sam for a couple of hours side by side, until the men pretty well decided that they weren’t going to find blood stains, bullet holes or signs of violent death. The goal now was to identify the body, so Beau took fingerprints from several surfaces. Two radio calls had come in while they worked and they were beginning to feel the squeeze to attend to other cases. Sam agreed to box up whatever bills or personal papers she came across and turn them over. Otherwise, she was free to clean the place to her heart’s content.

She filled four garbage bags in the kitchen, threw them into her truck. Scrubbed the appliances, put away dishes, sanitized countertops and floors. In the other rooms, she gathered books and trinkets and boxed them for her favorite thrift shop. There was a book on plants that she thought Zoe would like, and a couple of mysteries that Ivan might be able to sell in his shop. The rules allowed her to distribute the household furnishings in the way she saw fit, so she tried to make the best use of everything. Furniture stayed with the house, those pieces in decent condition. Sometimes they weren’t, and the trashed-out things would be hauled to the dump.

She spent some time at the desk in the living room, gathering statements from the local bank, unpaid utility bills with progressively harsh warnings and scraps of anything that might provide the sheriff with clues about