Catherine grinned. 'No-this morning.'
Sara grinned, too. 'He have a thing for you, or what?'
'I think he has a thing for money-this little item sells in mid five figures.' She sighed. 'That means we can stop looking at these grainy videotapes until he gets here and concentrate on other things.'
'For instance?'
'We could grab some food, if you like.'
Sara half-smirked, lifted a shoulder. 'Actually, I'm kinda stuffed.'
'Demon popcorn. There's always searching Lipton's house.'
Sara's eyes brightened. 'About time!'
Reaching for her desk phone, Catherine said, 'I'll call Conroy.'
An hour later they met Detective Erin Conroy-crisply professional in a gray pants suit-in the driveway of Ray Lipton's house on Tinsley Court, not far off Hills Center Drive. A baby-blue split level built in the 'eighties, the house perched on a sloping lawn, looking well-taken care of in a neighborhood of other well-maintained homes, always a quiet area, particularly so at this hour of the night. The driveway ran alongside the house, a two-car garage around back.
The detective stood next to her Taurus, warrant in her hand, at her side, almost casually. 'I've got it-let's go in.'
'How are we getting inside?' Sara asked.
'Look what our buddy Ray gave me…' Conroy flashed a key. 'The warrant's just to dot the i's. Lipton's still cooperative-insists he's innocent.'
The three of them pulled on latex gloves, then the detective unlocked the door and they stepped inside.
'You want upstairs or downstairs?' Catherine asked her coworker.
'Cool stuff's always in the basement,' Sara said, with a smile of gleeful anticipation. 'I'll take that.'
'Let's clear it first,' Conroy said.
So the three of them walked through the basement, then Conroy and Catherine went up.
Stairs from the entry way opened onto the living room. Catherine noted the good-quality brown-and-tan carpet, and heavy brown brocade drapes hanging from ornamental rods, shut tight, the sunlight managing only a hairline or two of surreptitious entry. With everything shrouded in darkness like this, the house gave the impression it'd been closed up much longer than twenty-four hours. Only yesterday's
A thirty-six-inch Toshiba color TV ruled the room from a wheeled stand in a corner of the room, while a tan high back armchair sat to Catherine's left, where she stood at the top of the entry stairs, the chair's twin across the room next to the sofa. Both were placed at angles to the couch so they faced the TV. Speakers were mounted to the walls around the room and she noticed a black sub-woofer on the floor next to the TV stand. A DVD player and VCR were stacked on the lower shelf of the stand and through a smoked-glass door below that, she could make out a row of DVDs.
'Why go out to the movies?' Conroy asked.
'It does beg the issue,' Catherine said.
'So maybe he
'We'll see….'
Using her Maglite, Catherine took a quick look at the DVDs, then at the other shelves of the TV stand, one of which had a few prerecorded tapes and a lot of T-120 cassettes, some with notations: 'Friends season closer'; 'Sat Nite Live w/ John Goodman'; and so on.
She checked the VCR: no tape. Question was, had Lipton recorded the Colts/Chiefs game, watched it after committing Jenna's murder, then hidden (or thrown away) the incriminating tape, just so he could have his TV ball game alibi?
Stranger things had happened, of course, but Catherine had a hard time buying that Lipton had strangled his girlfriend, come home, maybe had a beer while he watched the taped game, while at the same time getting his story ready for when the police came around. That seemed a reach to her.
Nonetheless, she gathered all the videotapes, including the prerecords, stacking them in front of the TV; she told Conroy to collect any video cassettes she might run across, and called the same instructions down to Sara. They would box them all up as evidence.
Catherine and Conroy checked the cushions of the furniture and behind the framed landscape over the sofa, finding nothing, not even loose change. They moved through the dining room, Conroy pausing briefly to riffle through the pile of mail on the table. She found nothing worth bagging.
The kitchen, a small galley-type affair, had a U-shaped counter at the far end, home to a double-basin sink with a couple of dirty plates and a glass in one side. The stove and refrigerator were a matching off-white, and Catherine found healthier food in the fridge than she would expect from a single guy. In the freezer and cupboards, she found nothing noteworthy.
The refrigerator had a piece of note paper held to the door by a Wallace and Gromit magnet: a list of names and phone numbers. Conroy put the list into an evidence bag and replaced the magnet on the refrigerator.
'Not much so far,' the detective said.
'Well, we know Jenna was living here,' Catherine said. 'Or do you know a man who could keep a house this tidy?'
'Not many,' Conroy admitted.
They moved down the hallway to where two doors stood opposite each other. The one to the right was a spare bedroom, the one to the left the bathroom. Conroy took the bathroom, Catherine the bedroom. Sparsely furnished with only a tiny dark dresser and a single bed covered with a tan quilt, the room with its bare cream-color plaster walls looked like a nun's cell.
A closet hid behind wooden, sliding double doors. Catherine opened one side and saw shoe and other boxes stacked from the floor to the shelf, with more boxes occupying that space.
She heard Conroy pad in from the bathroom.
'Nothing in there,' the detective said. 'I'm going to check out the master bedroom.'
'All right. I'll be going through these boxes.'
The fourth box down in the back row, a flowered Mootsie's Tootsies shoebox, presented Catherine with the prize. Opening the box-the only woman's shoebox in the stack-she found a false beard, mustache, and a small brown bottle of spirit gum.
She felt her hopes that Lipton might be telling the truth start to fade, as this discovery seemed to confirm what she'd seen in the videotape…that he had, indeed, worn a fake beard and mustache to throw people off the track, and yet still had the bad sense to wear a coat with his company's name on the back.
Lipton didn't seem that thick, but plenty of other criminals had done dumber things in the commission of their crimes. She recalled one Don Dawson, who had worked at Castaways Bowling Center. Dawson had been smart enough to know the boss had a camera in the office, so when he'd gone in to crack the safe he'd worn a mask-style stocking cap. The cap had gone nicely with the satin jacket with Castaways Bowling Center embroidered on the back, and his name, 'Don,' on the breast. Dawson had lasted through almost thirty seconds of interrogation before he'd copped to the robbery.
Such stories abounded in national CSI circles. Like the two star athletes who robbed a local Burger King where their pictures hung in honor on the wall; or the numerous bank robbers around the country who would write their robbery notes on their own deposit slips.
Over the years, Catherine had seen enough reasonably bright criminals do enough dim things to know that anything was possible. She carefully dropped the beard and mustache into an evidence bag, the spirit gum into another, and the shoebox itself into a third.
Sara appeared in the doorway. 'Any luck?'
