tenderly. “I told her it didn’t matter. That I’d pay any price for the man I’d become as a result of her love. We’d enjoy our life in Maine for as long as we were given breath. We’d be together. But the agony of guilt consumed her. I begged her to call you. She said her shame was too large. She wanted you to remember her as she once was.” He turned his rheumy eyes to Lydia. His shoulders shook as he cried out. “But she made one last visit to your office porch. Why, Dr. Corriger? Why did she do it?”
Lydia told him she had no answer. She offered her sympathy and her support and sat with him as he cried. Still, she needed one more question answered. “Where were you when you found out about Buchner’s death?”
Her question stopped his tears. “Me?” He gave her a befuddled stare. “I was at my home, of course. It was on the news the morning after his murder.”
“Was Savannah with you?”
The look on his face signaled he wasn’t following her logic. “No. She was away for a few days. She’d gone to Maine to find us a house. Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know, Dr. Childress. Like you, I’m trying to make sense of things.”
The Fixer sat with the desolate man and his comatose beauty a few minutes longer. She rose, reiterated her sorrow, and promised to return. She walked out of the ICU, headed for her car, and cried for innocent little Greta.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“I’m having a deja vu experience, Mort.” Jim DeVilla, Chief of Forensics for the Seattle Police Department, stood in Walter Buchner’s kitchen as his team searched the crime scene for the second time in nine days. “You got anything in mind or are we just fishing?” Jim scratched the ears of the eighty-five pound German Shepherd sitting beside him.
Mort opened the freezer and eyed the contents. He pulled out a half-eaten container of ice cream and frowned. “Man, wouldn’t it be easy if we found a ball of cash or two inches of blow instead of half a pint of Cherry Garcia?” He slammed the freezer door shut. “There’s got to be something.”
De Villa called out to the two women re-dusting the living room for prints. “You hear that? We highly-paid investigative types will continue to stand here with our thumbs up our asses while you diligent forensic officers re- do what you did last week. Make sure to give us a shout if you run across, wait a minute.” He turned toward Mort. “What was it you said you were looking for, Detective? Oh, that’s right. ‘Something’. Officers, make sure you let us know if you find ‘something’.”
The two women responded with stifled grins. Mort walked past them into Buchner’s bedroom. De Villa followed, his canine shadow matching step-for-step. They stood at the foot of the unmade bed. Mort, hands on hips, surveyed the room while De Villa rocked on his heels and Bruiser sat at attention.
“We’re missing it, Jimmy. Buchner was Joe Average. No record. No tickets. Look at this place. It’s a dump. The only thing worth stealing is his laptop and that fancy recording gear in the front room.”
De Villa flipped through his notebook. “Buchner was a research geek in audiology. According to his co- workers, he was working on something to do with voice synthesizing. Cutting edge stuff and all that bullshit.” De Villa closed his notebook and slipped it back into his pocket. “That’s what the world needs. More talking.” De Villa reached down and tousled the shepherd’s rough fur around the scar from a bullet that had ripped apart Bruiser’s throat when he leaped in front of an undercover cop to save him from a drug dealer’s deadly intent. “Maybe we could hook you up, huh, Buddy? I sure would love to hear you bark again.” De Villa looked up at Mort. “University wants to know when they can pick the stuff up. I guess it’s worth more than you and I make in any given year combined.”
“That’s just it.” Mort turned to the man he’d trusted with evidence for more than a quarter century. “That fancy tape recorder’s still here.”
“Voice synthesizer,” De Villa said.
“What-the-fuck-ever. It’s here, not in some pawn shop. No forced entry. Nothing gone.” Mort took another look around Buchner’s room. “But Average Joes don’t get their faces blown off. You get anything off his background?”
De Villa shrugged. “Hard working boy genius type. Paid enough to live in this palatial splendor. A little more than two hundred in his savings account. Less in his checking. Sent twenty buck’s a month to the humane society, I thought that was nice. Car’s eleven years old. No girlfriends. No boyfriends, either. According to everybody he knew Buchner went to work, excelled at it, then came home. Occasionally he’d meet his cronies for pizza and beers.”
“What do we know about these cronies?” Mort asked.
“Same as Dead Old Wally. Nerds and geeks. A little beer, a little marijuana. Nothing to crank up the sirens about.”
“What about his folks?”
De Villa sighed and pulled the notebook back out of his pocket. He flipped through it and read. “Greg and Dana Buchner. Of the Walla Walla Buchners. Both fifty-seven years old.” He looked up from his notebook. “Hard to believe folks our age got kids in grad school, huh? Enough to make a fella feel old.”
“What do we know about the Buchners?” he asked.
“Greg’s a high school principal. Dana owns a fitness studio. Pillar of the community types. Wally’s their only child. They were in Australia chaperoning a group of students when they got the news.” De Villa’s voice softened. “Fuck. I can’t imagine what they’re going through.”
An image of Allie at four flashed through Mort’s mind. Twirling across the living room in her pink tutu. Mud half-way up her white tights from a puddle she found irresistible. Edie applauding. Allie holding up her arms for a dance with Daddy. A call from the other room pulled him back.
“Micki’s here.”
The two men and Bruiser left Buchner’s bedroom. Micki Petty stood in the living room, speaking with the forensic team. Mort smiled. Everyone did when they saw Micki. She was five feet five of no-nonsense cute. Thirty- two years old. Light brown hair streaked with gold and red. Blue eyes and a dusting of freckles across her nose. Exhibit A that not all techies are social misfits.
Mort met Micki when she was fifteen. Her best friend Jodi had left Micki’s house the morning after a sleep- over, running home to be on time for Sunday school. When Jodi’s parents called an hour later wondering where their daughter was, Micki went looking. She found her friend in a ditch, bloodied and broken. Mort remembered the resolute young Micki answering his questions through her tears and her tireless vigil during Jodi’s hospital stay. She displayed an endless curiosity about police work and Mort arranged a few ride-alongs with uniforms on routine day patrol. When Mort arrested the drunk who ran Jodi down, Micki convinced her friend to testify. “If there’s something we can do to stop the bad guys, Jodi, we gotta. We just gotta.”
Micki never missed a day of the trial and was fascinated by the trail of paint chips, tire treads, and time lines that led to a conviction and twelve year prison sentence. “It’s like putting a puzzle together, isn’t it?” They stayed in touch through the years and Mort teared up when he pinned on Micki’s badge the day she and Jodi graduated from the police academy. Nineteen months later Jodi walked up to a car she pulled over a car for a busted tail light and was shot in the face. At the funeral Micki told Mort she wanted in on the investigation. “I don’t have the seniority, but this guy’s mine.” He made significant withdrawals from his chits account and got her transferred. Ten years later she was still the best detective he ever supervised.
Micki walked toward Mort and Jimmy and signaled for Bruiser. She bent to one knee and ran her hands across the shepherd’s coat, cooing sweet nothings into the lovesick dog’s ear. She stood and pointed her briefcase in the direction of a small table. “You boys want to sit?”
Jim asked his forensic team if they were done in the kitchen. They were and he headed in ahead of Mort and Micki. He moved the toaster, pizza box, and seven soda cans covering the table. He pulled out a chair, brushed the grey residue of fingerprint powder off the seat, and offered it to Micki. Mort shook his head and smiled at a memory. Edie telling him one of the main differences between men and women is that women knew they looked stupid when they went gaga over someone twenty years younger.
Micki took a seat and pulled a folder from her briefcase. Mort sat across and Jim pulled his chair beside her.
