the body. If you became too obvious, the hammer of the American federal government, with all of the dark forces at its command, would fall on you. Liquida knew that his own employers would kill him long before they allowed that to happen.
He took a deep breath. He had no idea what they were up to, but whatever it was, they now believed it to be in jeopardy because of what he had done. The serpent “may crawl into places it should not go” in the words of the riddle. He had set in motion something neither he nor they could control.
It was by far the largest contract he had ever received. People didn’t pay that kind of money unless what they were doing was substantial and with a high degree of risk. What revelations might be uncovered he had no idea; what’s more, he didn’t care. He didn’t want to know. It was not his business.
What was his business, and the only thing that occupied his mind at the moment, was how to achieve the ultimate message of the e-mail, the answer to the riddle. The way you kill a serpent is by cutting off its head.
TEN
The fact that Katia told us about the note first, about writing it and leaving it on Pike’s desk, but never mentioned the dagger is, according to Harry, part of the deeper equation of truth.
“Think about it,” he says.
This morning Harry, I, and Herman Diggs, the investigator we have used for some years now, are inside the yellow police tape that surrounds Emerson Pike’s house on the hill above Del Mar. Herman is inside the house with one of the homicide detectives going over details of the crime scene.
The other homicide detective and a small cadre of uniformed cops stand huddled out near the front gate. Harry has the public defender’s file, including copies of the police and investigative reports from that night and for several days afterward as they processed the scene. Everything has now been transferred to us.
“If she plunged that dagger into Pike’s chest, then I’m a sword swallower and I’ll eat it whole,” says Harry. He is talking softly, under his breath, even though the officers are too far away to hear anything.
“You saw the look on her face. She didn’t know a thing about it. Nothing clicked until I mentioned her fingerprints and then only because she realized she moved the damned thing when she put it on top of the note.”
Harry is preaching to the choir. The entire chain of events leading up to and surrounding the murders reeks of contrivance. I had decided to take the case long before that point. Katia reminded me of my daughter. I could see Sarah caught up in circumstances in a foreign country, and I wondered if anyone would put out a helping hand. Katia had felt trapped and I knew it, though Harry did not.
“None of it makes sense,” he says.
“I know.”
“Then why don’t you say something?”
“Why, do you need convincing?”
He gives me one of those patented Harry looks. “Strangest damn house I’ve ever seen,” he says. “Looks like it’s falling apart until you get up close. Place gives me the willies.”
“It’s what Katia said, remember, when she asked Emerson about it. He just passed it off, told her he had a strange sense of curb appeal and that she’d get used to it in time. She didn’t understand what he was saying.”
What is clear is that Pike designed the house to avoid attention. It wasn’t what you would call an eyesore, just enough so that you wouldn’t look twice. It was all he had, that and the security system, to protect the place when he was away, which was most of the time.
“Weird,” says Harry.
“Maybe.”
“There’s so much, I don’t know where to start. Nothing we’ve heard, read, or seen so far makes any sense,” says Harry. “So I guess the house fits right in. We’re supposed to believe that Katia stuck the dagger into Pike in a rage, then stumbled into the maid downstairs and killed her, but then had the presence of mind to wash off the knife only to leave it on the sink…”
“With a trace of blood on it,” I remind him.
“Yeah, pure as a transfusion, no cross contamination,” says Harry. “She stabbed Pike and then the maid with the same knife and all we get on the knife is a trace of the maid’s blood, none of Pike’s.”
“And you would think she’d have rinsed her hands at the same time she washed off the knife,” I tell him.
Harry gives me a quizzical glance as we cross the grass near the side of the house.
“Begs the question, how did the blood get on the front door?” I ask. “According to the lab report, again, all of it belongs to the maid, no cross contamination, though they found evidence of Pike’s blood on the maid’s clothing.”
He thinks about this for a second. “The cops will probably say she touched the door before she realized it, then went back to the kitchen to ditch the knife.”
“I see, so she caught herself, but then forgot about the dagger upstairs, the one in Pike’s body with her prints all over it, and no blood at all on the handle, just her fingerprints. So why didn’t she wash them off?”
“Because she didn’t plant the dagger to begin with,” says Harry. “Some other dude did it. It’s the only thing we’ve heard so far that makes any sense.”
“To us, maybe.”
In the early going it can often look like a slam dunk, all the little inconsistencies in the state’s case, the things a prosecutor won’t be able to explain. In most cases, you can be sure that before they get to trial the state will find a way to wrap them all neatly into their case.
“We both know what the DA is going to say, through his experts, of course,” says Harry. “That your average killer is scared witless. That after the crime Katia panicked. And because of this she made stupid mistakes, blood on the door, dagger in the body. Three cheers for panic and stupidity.”
Harry makes all of this sound sufficiently plausible to worry me. Jurors might just believe it.
Harry is looking at his notes. “Seems for a while the cops thought they might have had evidence of drugs, but it turned out negative.”
I look at him.
“They found three or four little muslin bags, the tops tied off with string. They tested the substance. It came up catnip.”
“Three or four of these, you say?”
Harry pages through the report, finds it with his finger. “Actually five. One of them was ripped open. Some traces of dander on it, so they assume a cat must have gotten it.”
“Did Pike own a cat?”
Harry shakes his head. “Not as far as I know. No animals. Police would have brought in animal control. And there’s no indication in the report. According to the people who knew Pike, he was out of the country more than half the year, traveling. Mostly in Latin America, I assume for business. He would have to board an animal if he had one.”
“Let’s check it out. See if there’s any record of Pike having owned or boarded a cat.”
Harry makes a note.
We cease our aimless prowling along the grass at the side of the house and look for the motion sensors, part of the security system that was down the night of the murders.
