“Ms. Lapin?”
Corrine nodded.
“We should probably wait until the bodies have been taken back to the morgue.”
“No. I need to do it now so I can contact my parents. They’re on a cruise. I need to know for sure before I try calling them.”
Detective Mumford shook her head. “All right. Wait here.”
Corrine waited. The detective walked over to the van. The attendants had loaded the gurney into the van and closed the door. After conferring with them for a few moments, Mumford returned.
“All right,” she said. “But you need to be prepared. This won’t be easy.”
“I’ll be okay,” Corrine insisted.
But she wasn’t okay. The gurney was removed from the van. As soon as the attendant zipped open the body bag, a cloud of putrid air exploded into the night. Covering her mouth and nose, Corrine approached the gurney. The face she saw was swollen and rotting, but she knew it was Esther’s. There was no doubt about that.
Nodding hopelessly, Corrine turned away and then was desperately sick, heaving into the expanse of front-yard grass Esther had planted and loved so much. While her back was turned, she heard rather than saw the bag be zippered shut. Moments after that, the door to the van closed as well. The engine started.
As the van lumbered down the street, Detective Mumford returned. She placed a comforting hand on Corrine’s shoulder. With the other hand she gave the woman a bottle of water.
“Thank you,” she said. “I know how difficult that was. We’ll need to ID the children, too, but we’ll do that later. ”
Corrine nodded and said nothing.
“The whole house is considered a crime scene, so you can’t stay here,” the detective continued. “We’ll have people here processing the scene for the rest of the night and on into the morning. You should probably get some rest. My niece Kimberly works nights at the Westlake Village Inn. Do you know where that is?”
Corrine nodded numbly.
“Go there,” Detective Mumford said. “I called Kim and told her you might be coming. She has a room reserved in your name, and she’ll give you a good deal on it. Tomorrow morning, or rather, later on this morning, one of our investigators will come by to interview you and to do the remaining IDs. It may be me or it may be someone else, but right now, you need to take care of yourself.”
“I’ll have to let my parents know how soon we can plan on scheduling a funeral.”
“The timing of all that will be up to the M.E.’s office,” Detective Mumford said. “They’ll have to perform the autopsies. That takes time. In the meantime we need to concentrate our efforts on locating Mr. Southard. Does he have relatives in the area, someone to whom he could go for assistance?”
Corrine shook her head. “Not that I know of. His parents are divorced and remarried. His mother lives somewhere in Arizona,” Corrine said. “From what Esther told me, he hates her guts. I don’t think he’d go to her for help even if he was dying.”
“And his father?”
“His name is Hank,” Corrine said. “Hank Southard. He lives in Ohio somewhere. I met him once, at the wedding, but that’s all I know about him.”
Detective Mumford was taking notes as Corrine spoke.
“Would you say there was trouble in your sister’s marriage?”
“I know there was,” Corrine said. “She was planning on leaving him.”
There was more Corrine could have said. She knew for a fact that Esther wasn’t blameless. She loved to spend money-had always spent money. She had also hinted to Corrine about having a “friend” on the side, but that was no excuse for murder. So rather than going into any of that, Corrine spared her dead sister’s reputation and made it all out to be Jonathan’s problem and Jonathan’s fault.
“Her husband lost his job months ago,” Corrine said. “According to Esther, they were about to lose the house. Jonathan had made plans to take money out of his 401(k). She had to sign so he could access it.”
“How much money?” Alex Mumford asked.
“I don’t know the exact amount. He was a middle manager for Thousand Oaks Federal before it merged with two of the big banks. He worked for them for the better part of fifteen years.”
“What about the timing on the payout?” Detective Mumford asked. “Any idea when it was due?”
“Soon, I think,” Corrine told her. “But Esther never mentioned to me if it came or not.”
“Go get some rest,” Detective Mumford advised. “When I know more, I’ll be in touch.”
Once Corrine was gone, Alex Mumford picked up the phone. Getting a court order to examine bank and telephone records at that hour on a Sunday morning wasn’t an easy sell, but she had been a homicide cop long enough that she knew who to call.
At that stage of the investigation, Jonathan Southard most likely should have been named as nothing more than a person of interest. But as far as Detective Mumford was concerned, there was very little doubt.
Southard had slaughtered his entire family. He had killed his wife and his children and even the family dog. It was up to Alex Mumford to make sure that the creep didn’t get away with it.
Tucson, Arizona
Sunday, June 7, 2009, 5:00 a.m.
62? Fahrenheit
Jack Tennant’s driver’s license info with the DMV yielded a brother named Zack Tennant with an address in Catalina Foothills Estates. Brian was there at 5:00 A.M. to give Jack’s relatives the bad news about what had happened on the reservation. Hearing about it seemed to hit the brother especially hard. While her husband went to collect address information for Jack’s son and daughter, Ruth Tennant gave Brian a hint as to why.
“Zack and Jack had been estranged for a while,” she explained. “Jack and Abby had one of those hot and heavy romances. Zack and I didn’t approve. In the course of their rush to the altar, some things were said that should have been left unsaid. The rift probably could have been healed, but now it never will be.”
When Zack returned to the living room, his eyes were red, but he brought with him contact information for Jack’s daughter, Carol, who lived in San Francisco, and his son, Gary, who lived in Chula Vista.
“You’ll be in touch with them?” Zack asked. “You’ll let them know what’s happened?”
“When it comes to something like this, I don’t believe in telephones,” Brian assured him. “I’ll be in touch with the local police departments. They’ll have officers go out and speak to them in person.”
“Good,” Zack said. “When they do, tell the kids to call me. I’ll do what I can to handle things on this end.”
After leaving the brother’s residence, Brian drove to Jack and Abby Tennant’s town home in a development called Catalina Vue. On the way he phoned in the next-of-kin information he had gleaned from Zack. He had mentioned that he thought Abby had a grown son somewhere, and Brian was curious why, rather than using her offspring as an emergency contact, Abby had used a woman named Mildred Harrison, who was evidently her next- door neighbor.
Just after 6:00 A.M. that morning, Detective Fellows stood on Mildred’s shaded front porch and rang her doorbell. A bathrobe-clad woman cracked open the front door.
“Who are you?” she demanded over a television set blaring in the background. “Do you have any idea what time it is? What do you want?”
“My name’s Brian Fellows, Detective Brian Fellows with the Pima County Sheriff’s Department. Are you Mildred Harrison?”
“I am,” she said. “What’s this about?”
In reply Brian, saying nothing, held up his ID wallet.
“Just a minute,” she said. “Let me get my reading glasses.”
Before Mildred returned to the door wearing her glasses, she paused long enough to turn down the volume on the television set. Back at the door, she reached for Brian’s identification, which she examined in some detail before handing it back.
“All right,” she said, unlocking the security chain and opening the door. “It looks legit, but these days a woman living alone can’t be too careful. What’s this all about?”
“I understand your neighbor, Abby Tennant, listed your name as an emergency contact on her driver’s
