beyond that. Hurley and I work together, nothing more.”
Still no one moves, and it’s as if everyone in the room is waiting for a cue.
Richmond, thank goodness, finally gives them one. “There’s also evidence linking Hurley to Minniver’s death,” he continues, and with his words, the others in the room resume whatever they were doing. “We found this here in his garage.” He holds up another evidence bag and I see a container of potassium cyanide inside. “We also found a loose key in a drawer over there.”
He points to the same drawer that Hurley opened the other night when he pulled out the pair of earrings he gave me, earrings I realize I’m still wearing. It’s all I can do to resist the sudden urge I have to reach up and remove them.
Had that key been inside that drawer the other night? I try to recall what I saw when I looked in there. I don’t remember seeing a key but I can’t be certain. It might have been hidden beneath the many envelopes of jewelry.
Richmond continues skewering Hurley. “Colbert told me about the missing spare key Minniver kept inside his front porch light, so I had one of the officers take the key we found here over to Minniver’s house and try it. Want to guess what we found?”
“It was Minniver’s key,” I say with a sickening feeling.
“Bingo,” Richmond says. He shakes his head and frowns. “I don’t know what to think. I’ve always found Hurley to be a pretty straight-up guy and he’s a good cop as far as his abilities go, but I have to admit, all this evidence is pretty damning.”
Doubt rears its ugly head and I feel my hopes sinking faster than Toyota stock after the stuck accelerator debacle.
One of the evidence techs on scene, who has just finished taping black paper over the windows in the room, says to Richmond, “I’m ready whenever you are.”
Richmond nods his acknowledgment and then waves us back toward the kitchen. “Given the evidence we’ve found, we suspect that this might be the scene of Miss Dunkirk’s murder,” he explains. “So we’re going to Luminol the room.”
Izzy and I back into the kitchen doorway and Richmond flips the light switch for the garage, plunging the room into darkness. There is enough ambient light from the kitchen for us to see what’s going on, however, and we watch as the evidence tech starts spraying his Luminol solution on the floor of the garage. If there is blood here, the Luminol will turn fluorescent blue for about thirty seconds and one of the cops is standing by with a camera to snap pictures in case that happens.
For the first couple of minutes, nothing happens as the tech backs his way across the garage, skirting the center worktable and sweeping the floor with the Luminol spray. As we watch, Izzy leans over to me and whispers, “Do you remember that hair you found in Callie’s wound?”
I nod, but say nothing. My throat feels like someone has a stranglehold on it.
“It was short and black, like Hurley’s,” Izzy goes on.
I nod again, fighting back an unexpected sting of tears. Then everything goes to hell when the evidence tech sprays an area a few feet in front of us. The floor turns fluorescent blue in a few spots. The cop with the camera fires away and I’m momentarily blinded by the flash. My mind scrambles for an explanation, thinking that Hurley could have cut himself here in the shop and the blood could be his. I also seem to remember reading somewhere that copper can cause a false positive reading with Luminol and there’s plenty of copper in the room. Bleach can also cause a positive test and maybe Hurley used some to clean up the floor as part of his routine maintenance.
But before I can voice these thoughts, the evidence tech sprays again and over the next minute or so, a narrow smear of blood is highlighted, trailing from the area of the first few drops over to the bay door. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to imagine a body creating that trail as it was being dragged across the floor.
My heart sinks, and as the bright flashes from the camera mark the findings, my last glimmer of hope fades faster than the blue fluorescence of the Luminol.
Chapter 32
I assist Izzy with his part of processing Hurley’s house—the collection of possible blood evidence from cracks in the floor near the bay door—in a state of numb fog. Every part of me wants to believe in Hurley but Richmond is right; the evidence is both damning and overwhelming. And now, because David knows about my alliance with Hurley and the evidence I’ve shared with him, I fear my career is lost, for it’s only a matter of time before Izzy finds out.
I know in my heart that Hurley didn’t do this but I’m afraid to trust my heart. My mind is a different matter however, and when I analyze things as objectively as I can, my mind comes to the same conclusion my heart did.
I’m standing next to Hurley’s workbench, labeling a sample, when I make my decision. I turn around and call out Richmond’s name.
He stops what he’s doing—writing out a narrative report—and looks at me.
“Listen,” I say, “I know that when it comes to Hurley all of you think I’m about as objective as the Ku Klux Klan is toward Obama. But I have to tell you, none of this makes any sense. I mean, think about it. Hurley is a good cop . . . you said so yourself, Richmond. He has good instincts and as far as we know, a good reputation. What’s more, he’s also pretty savvy when it comes to crime scene evidence. So why, if he committed all these crimes, would he be so sloppy about leaving evidence behind?”
Richmond shrugs and says, “Maybe he’s had some sort of psychotic break and his mind is no longer thinking clearly. Maybe this medical problem he took leave for is a psychiatric issue of some sort.”
“But if that were true, how is it he had the sense to hide Callie’s car, and to move her body? Why wouldn’t he just leave it all here?”
“Maybe he didn’t fully snap until after Callie’s murder. Maybe it was Minniver’s that pushed him to the edge,” Richmond says.
I turn and look at Izzy. “You saw Hurley yesterday morning at the hospital. Did he seem like a psycho to you?”
Izzy thinks about it for a minute and then says, “No, if anything he seemed nervous.”
“Yes!” I say. “And if he’d had such a severe psychotic break at that point, do you think he’d look nervous?”
Several of the people in the room frown and look at one another, as if they hope to find the answers.
“I’m not buying it,” I tell the room. “At least not yet. The Hurley I know isn’t capable of something like this. And yes, I realize that I don’t know him all that well, but I think he deserves the benefit of the doubt. He’s a cop. He’s one of you. If the situation was reversed and one of you was under suspicion, wouldn’t you want your cohorts to do everything possible to make damned sure you were really guilty before throwing the book at you? Wouldn’t you want them to give you some benefit of doubt?” I don’t wait for any of them to answer. “I would.” I look Richmond straight in the eye. “I would do it for you, Richmond. You know I would.” I shift my gaze to Larry Johnson, one of the other cops in the room and someone who has harbored a small crush on me for years. “I would do it for you, too, Larry.” Next I look at the uniforms, one at a time. “And I’d do it for you, and you, and you.” They all look away from me wearing slightly embarrassed expressions.
“All I’m saying is that Hurley deserves nothing less than our best. He deserves the benefit of our doubt and a promise that we will look at all the evidence and consider it in every possible light. My gut tells me that Hurley is a very smart guy, too smart to leave behind evidence as obvious as his hair embedded in Callie’s wound, or his father’s one-of-a-kind, highly distinctive knife buried in her chest, or Minniver’s key sitting in plain sight in his drawer here. I mean, do you really think he’s stupid enough to leave behind a gas can with his handwriting and fingerprints on it if he set that fire at my house? Or stupid enough to use his personal gas can at all for that matter? Even a dumb kid would have enough sense to buy a cheap generic gas can and use that instead of one that has identifying information on it. And if he did commit these murders, why would he step back from the investigations? He left the scene where we found Callie’s body almost as soon as he got there, and yet if he’d stayed and handled the
