The place that Darlene Beckett had called home turned out to be a slightly rundown garden apartment complex in northern Tampa, a mixed neighborhood both racially and economically with a smattering of college students thrown in from the nearby University of South Florida.
The apartment was a half hour drive from the Brooker Creek Preserve and throughout the trip Harry hadn’t spoken a word. Again, Vicky said nothing. She simply concentrated on the passing scenery.
“Darlene wasn’t exactly living high, was she?” Vicky observed as they pulled up in front of the address listed on the registry. It was an end unit in a two-story apartment building, one of four built in a square surrounding a central green. Each apartment had its own entrance, driveway, and garage, making them seem more like town houses. The original intention was a quaint village effect, but the buildings’ white painted bricks were now flaking badly, and the grass front yards of several units had patches of heat-hardened earth showing through. Darlene’s was simply overgrown and dotted with weeds.
They tried the front and rear doors, found them locked, and located the building super, a short Latino about thirty years old with a ragged goatee and cynical eyes. He answered their questions, telling them the little he knew about Darlene. When told she was dead he simply shrugged, and asked when her apartment could be shown to prospective tenants.
“Nobody goes in until the crime scene tape is taken down,” Harry said, nodding to the roll of yellow tape Vicky carried.
The super, who had given his name as Juan Vasquez, sneered at the answer. “Owner’s gonna want it rented. Gonna be all over my ass about it.”
“Anybody goes in before the tape comes down they get busted,” Vicky said. “You tell the owner that goes for him too. In fact, you tell him he sees the tape’s down he better call us anyway. Make sure it was us who took it down.”
The warning produced another sneer. “Doan know why anybody gives a shit. Broad was nothin’. Jus’ a fuckin’ short eyes.”
Harry noted the prison term for a child molester and looked at the man more closely. Detecting something at the bottom edge of his T-shirt sleeve, he reached out and raised it, exposing a crude prison tattoo of a dagger piercing a heart. “Where’d you do your bit?” Harry asked.
Juan stared up at him. He was short and stocky with a swarthy complexion and dark brown eyes. His mouth twisted into a sneer that held a lifetime of hard-earned cynicism. He looked away and shook his head.
“Up north. New York.” He shook his head again. “So now I’m a fuckin’ suspect.”
Vicky took a step forward. “Hey, Juan, it’s like they say on TV. Everybody’s a suspect.” She gave him an innocent smile, and then let her eyes slowly harden. “So fish out your driver’s license.”
Vicky copied his name, address, and date of birth, then asked for his Social Security number and added that to her notebook. It would all be used later for a computer check at the National Crime Information Center. Finished, she gave him another smile. “Now open the damn door.”
Juan took out a massive ring of keys, found the one to Darlene’s front door, and opened it.
“You can go back to your apartment,” Harry told the super. “When we’re finished somebody will come and get you, so you can lock up.”
“How long?” Juan asked.
“It’ll be a couple of hours.”
Harry watched the man shuffle away, jotted his name in his own notebook with the words New York beside it, then got on his cell and called the CSI team.
“They still at the preserve?” Vicky asked when he had finished.
“They’re just loading up. Be here in half an hour.”
Darlene Beckett’s apartment was immaculate. Not a thing out of place; not a dirty dish in the sink. Even the bath off the master bedroom was scrubbed clean. Except for the full closets it looked like a model apartment; as if no one really lived there. Harry and Vicky donned latex gloves and cloth shoe coverings like those worn in hospital operating rooms and moved slowly through the apartment. They found the ankle monitor on the first pass through her bedroom.
“Somebody had to help her get that off,” Vicky said. “And that somebody is going to have some heavy questions to answer.”
They continued with the walk through.
“You think Darlene was this much of a neat freak?” Harry asked when they had been in every room.
“If she was, she was like no single woman I ever met.” Vicky paused and thought about what she’d said. “Actually, she was like no single woman I ever met.” She turned to Harry. “You think the perp came in here and cleaned up? Like maybe he’d been here before and wanted to make sure there was nothing for us to find?”
“There’s always something,” Harry said.
“Yeah, but maybe the perp doesn’t know that.”
They spent an hour looking through Darlene Beckett’s personal effects- clothing, bills, letters, books and magazines, makeup, food supplies, and prescription drugs-drawing together a picture of what the woman had been like, her personal needs and tastes.
Vicky concentrated on Darlene’s bedroom. Like the rest of the apartment the closets and dressers were neat and carefully arranged. Even so, they were close to overflowing. The woman had owned twice the amount of clothes and shoes as Vicky herself.
In the top drawer of a small bedside table Vicky found a collection of sex toys and a plain white envelope that held what appeared to be five Viagra tablets. She pointed them out to Harry.
“No prescription bottle,” she noted. “Probably bought on the street, either by her boyfriend or maybe she bought them herself. There’s a regular black market on stolen E.D. pills.”
“A boyfriend’s not gonna leave them here, unless he’s a pretty regular boyfriend,” Harry said. “According to Juan there were plenty of guys, but nobody special.”
“So you think she bought them?”
“Just a guess. Maybe she wanted to make sure her lovers could handle seconds or thirds.”
Vicky gave him a wide-eyed, innocent look. “Guys can do that?”
“You’re a regular comic.”
“I try,” Vicky said, turning away to hide an impish grin that had broken through.
“There’s something even more interesting in the kitchen,” Harry said, causing her to turn back.
“What’s that?”
“Come and see.”
Vicky followed him into the small, galley-style kitchen.
Harry opened a drawer next to a battered gas range. Inside Vicky saw a collection of red paper matchbooks, each identical to the one they had found on the Brooker Creek hiking trail, each bearing the name The Peek-a-Boo Lounge.
“Looks like Darlene had a favorite bar,” Vicky said.
“Looks like,” Harry agreed.
Vicky studied the floor, then raised her eyes to Harry. “I told you I never met a single woman like her. You can put a big star next to that line. I guess we better check that place out tonight. And bring some pictures of her with us.”
The CSI team arrived just as Harry and Vicky finished their search and were preparing to hit the streets to interview neighbors. Martin LeBaron, the deputy sergeant who headed up the unit, collected Harry and Vicky’s shoe coverings and bagged them so they could be processed for any trace evidence they had picked up.
“So tell me what you found,” LeBaron said.
Reading from his case notebook, Harry gave him a detailed list.
“Matches from a tits-and-ass bar, huh,” LeBaron said. “I’ve driven by that joint. It’s the pits. That broad, she was a piece of work, wasn’t she?”
Harry ignored the comment and reminded LeBaron that he needed a complete workup on the apartment as quickly as possible.
“I know, I know,” LeBaron said. “I already got that be thorough, be fast crap from your captain, as well as some clown in the chief’s office.” LeBaron was tall and slender and somewhere in his forties, with unruly black hair, a large nose, and eyes that seemed perpetually tired. “You guys seem to think we’ll do a half-assed job if you don’t
