Instead of standing there watching them go through his stuff, you know.”
Another indicator that Emily was more than she appeared, this ready grasp of the intrusiveness of a police search. Kate studied her thoughtfully as Emily took a set of keys out of her purse and handed the whole ring over to Kate. Kate wrote out a receipt for them and stood up to go.
“I’ll phone you later this afternoon,” Kate told the woman, “to make arrangements to get these back to you and let you know how things are going. Will you be at the shelter?”
“Oh. Well, I suppose I could meet you at the house, when you’re finished, if I can get a ride. There’s no reason not to go home now, is there?”
Looking at Emily Larsen’s bleak attempt at a smile, despite the woman’s deceptions Kate could have sworn that she was only now coming to realize that her husband was out of her life. “We have no objection to your returning there, if that’s what you’re asking, and I would be happy to arrange a ride if it would help. Thank you, Mrs. Larsen. Here’s my card, let me know if I can do anything for you. Ms. Lomax, could I have a word, please?”
Carla Lomax followed Kate out to the hallway, shutting the office door behind them.
“I’d rather not tell you the location of the shelter,” she began immediately, but Kate put up a hand to stop her.
“I wasn’t going to ask you, although I probably know already. What I wanted to say, Carla,” she said mildly, letting her gaze stray to a child’s drawing of a purple cat on the opposite wall, “is that your client seems to know more about her husband’s death than she was willing to say, and it might be a good idea for you to have a little discussion with her on the difference between not answering a question and obstructing justice. Before we get into the realm of actual perjury, that is.”
Kate gave her a smile as insincere as Emily Larsen’s declaration of ignorance, and left.
BACK AT THE HALL of Justice, Kate handed the Larsen keys over to Crime Scene, booted up her computer, and got to work. Hawkin came in an hour later sucking at a peppermint, his thinning hair giving off the aura of the lemon shampoo he habitually used after witnessing an autopsy. She asked him what the pathologist had found.
“Rigor might have been delayed by fat, might have been speeded by a struggle, but the internal temp confirmed time of death between nine-thirty and eleven-thirty Monday night. Cause of death strangulation. No obvious sign of drug use. So far absolutely zilch at the crime scene. Not even a tire track. Oh, and the tech was right, that was a taser burn on Larsen’s chest. Person or persons zapped him, cuffed him, tied a red cotton scarf around his neck, and pulled it tight. Exit one wife-beater.”
The lab work—blood, organs, fibers, and fingernail scrapings— would take days; there was no need for him to tell her that.
“Speaking of the wife,” Kate told him, “I think there’s something hinky about her.”
“Hinky?” Hawkin had gone to the coffeepot and paused in the act of holding the carafe up to the light to judge its drinkability. “What’s ‘hinky’ mean, anyway?”
“Odd. Strange. Out of whack. You know.”
“I don’t know. You’ve been watching that TV cop show again, haven’t you? You’re worse than Jules.”
“What’s wrong with the way Jules talks?” Hawkin’s brilliant teenaged stepdaughter was undeniably a handful, but Kate was very fond of her.
“Nothing, unless you want English. So, Ms. Larsen’s hinky. Would you care to elaborate?”
“I was about to, until you started going hinky on me. She looks like a typical Betsy Homemaker whose husband liked to slap her around on Friday nights, but she’s hiding something about the murder itself. I mean, I’d say she’s honestly sorry about his death, God knows why, but she’s more annoyed by the actual murder than horrified or in denial or any of the usual reactions. Plus that, when I asked if she knew who did it, she suddenly went all big-eyed and innocent. Even her lawyer thought it was weird.”
“Big-eyed and innocent like she did it, or like she knows who did?”
“I think she knows, or suspects anyway. She herself has an alibi— there was a meeting Monday night at the shelter, and after it broke up she sat around until nearly midnight talking. I’ve been trying to find out about her, but there’s not much there. She’s never been arrested, never even had a traffic violation.”
“People close to her?”
“I was just getting started on tracking down her family, but she doesn’t seem to have had any real friends. Not among the neighbors we talked to, anyway.”
“Doesn’t sound like the kind to know a couple of guys who’d be willing to bash the hubby for three hundred bucks. Still, you never know. See what you can find, and then tomorrow we can go back down and talk to the neighbors again. Those people across the street should be back by then.”
“So should Emily Larsen.”
“We can talk to her, too.”
They settled in for a session of keyboards and telephones. Hawkin was on the phone to James Larsen’s supervisor at the airport when he heard a sharp exclamation from Kate’s desk, and looked up to see a triumphant expression on her face. He finished the call and hung up.
“Was that a ‘bingo’ I heard?” he asked, scribbling a note to himself.
“My Catholic upbringing showing. Emily Larsen’s brother is one of your basic bad boys. Name’s Cash Strickland. In and out of trouble since juvy, just got out of prison in January for aggravated assault. The original charge was murder one, but he got off with a hung jury, and the DA took a plea instead of working through a retrial on the murder rap. Strickland’s on parole in San Jose.”
“Nice and close. Want to go talk with him tonight?”
Kate glanced at her watch. “The traffic will be hell, and I wanted to be home for an early dinner. Roz Hall and her partner, Maj, are coming over.”
“The minister and the monkey’s mother.”
“Right. In fact, I’d bet Roz knows about women’s shelters. Maybe I’ll pick her brains over dinner, see what she knows about one Carla Lomax, attorney-at-law.”
“Now, that ought to make Lee happy,” Al said dryly.
“Some casual, general conversation, that’s all.”
“Sure. Tomorrow, then. We can do Larsen’s neighbors on the way back. Want me to call Strickland’s parole officer?”
“I’ll do it—he’s a guy I knew when I worked down there. What do you think—make an appointment with Strickland, or sneak up on him?”
“I’d say talk to the PO, find out what he thinks. Of course, if you make a date with Strickland and he bolts, that tells us something, too.”
“True. What did the airport supervisor say?”
“He gave Larsen back his job when he got out, and Larsen lasted exactly one week before showing up drunk. The supervisor fired him.”
“All in all, not a great month for Jimmy Larsen,” Kate commented, and picked up the phone to call the parole officer assigned to Emily Larsen’s brother with the violent past, the brother whose life went far to explain his sister’s easy familiarity with arrest proceedings and the terminology of alibi and search.
Chapter 3
THE REAPPEARANCE OF A witness to one of Kate’s other cases delayed her, and in the end she was late anyway to Lee’s dinner party. Only a little, though, and by cutting the interview short and dodging through traffic in a manner that would have had Lee pale, she pulled up in her driveway only half an hour after she had said she would be home. Roz’s car was parked down the block, a bashed-up red Jeep Cherokee that still showed the signs of the rock face that her assistant pastor had misjudged the previous summer, driving through Yosemite with the youth group on a camping trip. Roz had no doubt found better use for the insurance check than paint repair.
Kate let herself in, settled for a quick scrub of the hands in lieu of a shower and a change of clothes, and slipped into the empty chair while the entree was still on the table. She glanced uneasily at Lee, and decided to opt for humor: she seized her spoon and twisted her face into a parody of winsomeness.
“Please, Mum, may I have some, too?”
Lee was not amused, but she relented enough to take Kate’s plate and fill it. Kate said hello to Roz and Maj, asked after Mina-the-monkey (who was two doors down the street at the moment, dining with a friend from school on the forbidden fare of fish sticks and chocolate cupcakes) and the baby (a seven-month lump under Maj’s dress,
