Takeover

The sun had barely come up, and already it was too hot. Theresa MacLean felt the first prickles of sweat on the back of her neck as she stared down at the dead man, and wished she had left her lab coat in the car. Humidity kept both the dew and the man’s blood from drying, and scattered red spots gleamed against the spring grass. “He hasn’t been here long,” she told the detective.

The dead man’s tie flopped across his chest as he gazed up with sightless eyes, past her to the azure sky. The tiny sidewalk framed his shoulders, and his head rested in the mulch and grass below lush juniper bushes. Two or three heavy blows had caved in his skull; he had tried to defend himself with his bare hands and damaged his fingers in the process. The killer had swung the weapon used with enough force to cut knuckles and dent the man’s wedding ring.

“A lady walking to the bus stop saw the shoes sticking out past the bushes.” Homicide detective Paul Cleary sketched the scene as he spoke, frowning in concentration over his pad and pencil. The
damp morning made his blond hair especially unruly. “He could have been here all night before that. The porch light isn’t on, so anyone driving by wouldn’t have seen him from the street. It’s a quiet neighborhood anyway.”

Despite the setting she took a moment just to look at Paul. They would be married in two months and thirteen days. Even her teenage daughter had overcome the instinctive reticence to a stepparent. But Theresa had something to tell him first, and she hadn’t yet figured out how.

“You’d think he’d be damper if he’d been out here all night,” Paul’s partner, veteran detective Frank Patrick, chimed in. He had been in the city all his years and with the police department for the past twenty, but he never tired of complaining about Ohio weather. “This friggin’ humidity soaks everything.”

Theresa prodded the man’s chin with a latex-clad hand; only tiny spatters along one cheek bespoke the damage to the back of his head. A tailored dress shirt held in his expanding girth. A few smears of blood crossed his stomach, probably swiped there by the cut fingers. “He’s cold, and his jaw and arms are pretty stiff. His stomach is still soft, though, so I’d guess between four and eight hours.” As a forensic scientist with the medical examiner’s office, she had learned a lot about rigor mortis, though one of the doctors on the staff would have to give them the official time-of-death frame. She looked up at the two-story Westlake Colonial. “He lives here?”

“Don’t know,” Frank said. “Whoever bashed his head in also took his wallet. The house is locked up, with no signs of forced entry, and no one answers. We don’t know if he belongs here or not.”

She frowned. “We’ve got significant damage to the skull but not a lot of blood spatter, not even a lot of blood soaked into the mulch. It could be lost in the grass or the bushes, washed off by dew, but I would expect to see at least some on this porch railing or the sidewalk.”

“You think he was killed inside and dragged out here?”

“Or dumped out of a passing car. He’s got some dirt on his shoulder, where the jacket is rumpled.” She scraped some particles onto a piece of glassine paper, folding it as a druggist would so none would be lost. “As if someone with dirty hands pulled him from the shoulders.”

Paul bent at the waist to examine the porch outside the front door. “I don’t see any drag marks, either in blood or in dirt.”

“Me neither. But I hate to think the rest of his family is inside, bludgeoned to death. Can’t we go in?”

“The search warrant is on its way to the judge right now.”

She stood up, stretched a crick out of her back. She loathed having to wait on search warrants. Finding a dead body in front of the place should be sufficient probable cause so far as she was concerned, but in these litigious times…“Who does the house belong to? Do we at least know that?”

Frank poked at the dead man’s pockets, producing a slight jingle, which proved to be a set of keys. “Mark Ludlow, white male, fifty-four. It could be him. So he pops out of the house on his way to work this morning and someone cracks him in the skull for the money in his wallet—”

“Leaving behind neither the weapon nor the cast-off blood patterns from swinging it.” Theresa looked around at the well-kept houses. “Besides, in this neighborhood? Not common.”

“—and then they leave this Lexus in the driveway.” He aimed the victim’s key fob at the sleek sedan in the drive and pushed a button. The car responded with a loud chirp. “It’s him.”

“No, it’s his car,” Theresa corrected. “This could be his girlfriend’s house. He stops by for breakfast, and girlfriend’s significant other number two doesn’t care to serve him coffee.”

Paul considered this theory. “And then killer and girlfriend hop over the body and take off, in their car? That’s pretty cold.”

“Or the killer kidnaps girlfriend,” Theresa said.

“Maybe girlfriend
is
the killer,” Frank put in. He and Theresa had been bouncing ideas off each other since she could talk; their mothers were sisters.

Theresa moved onto the porch. “Or another victim. I really want to get into this house.”

“You and me both,” Paul assured her. They turned as a patrol car pulled alongside the curb and stopped. A young man in uniform ducked under the ribbon of crime-scene tape and came up the twenty-foot driveway, sheaf of papers in hand.

“You get your wish, Tess,” Frank said before reading the search warrant to the empty house, a process required by law but absurd in practice. The cream-colored siding gave no sign of listening. While he spoke, Theresa crossed the grass to retrieve her small Maglite from the county station wagon and returned to the porch. The sun slanted from the rear of the house, throwing some areas into unexpected dimness.

Paul used the man’s keys to open the lock—no sense in breaking the door if it wasn’t necessary—and it cemented their theory that the deceased man was Mark Ludlow.

“Wait,” Theresa said before the three officers could step over the threshold.

“You were dying to get in here.”

“Just hold on a sec.” She crowded in beside them and aimed the flashlight at the glossy wooden floor of the foyer. If a trail of blood lay there, she would make the officers go in the back door. But the inside floor appeared as clean as the concrete front porch. “Okay, go ahead.”

“Wait here,” Paul and Frank told her in unison.

“Count on it.” Prowling through rooms that could hold a murderous assailant was so
not
her job, and the whole situation had her nervous enough already. The police did not often call her to fresh crime scenes; usually the murder had occurred days before by the time she got there to spray luminol or collect items for DNA testing. Even if the body remained, the scenes felt empty—whatever destructive collision of personalities had taken place had passed. The aggressors had moved on to damage control, covering up, running. It usually felt as if even the victim had lost interest by that point.

This seemed different. The conflict that produced this death had not been resolved. Bodies were still in motion. It might be preconnubial jitters, but she felt a need to be especially alert, especially observant, especially vigilant.

Frank reappeared at the end of the hallway, where the rising sun flooded the kitchen with light.

“Can I come in now?” she asked.

“Sure. There’s no one here. No sign of any murder either.”

“Can the patrol officer stay with Mr. Ludlow out here? I don’t want some passerby wandering up to our body.”

The young man stood guard over the corpse while Theresa photographed the neat suburban home. Two things quickly became clear: There were no indications of a bloody assault, and Mr. Ludlow did not live alone. He had a wife and a very young son, and there was no sign of what had happened to them.

Forty minutes later Theresa knelt on the kitchen floor, her head held at an angle to the surface, as Paul spoke from the doorway.

“This must be her.” He held up a framed photo of the deceased man with a young blond woman. A towheaded toddler sat between them, the boy’s cherubic face turned toward his mother.

“Yeah, I saw the picture. If that man died in this house, I have yet to find any evidence of it. There are no signs of cleaning up, no wet spots on the carpeting. There’s a mop up against the stationary tub downstairs that’s damp but not soaking. She cleans with bleach, which kills DNA, but so do I. This floor has a layer of grit on it, so it’s not a freshly cleaned surface. Maybe he
was
attacked outside. I’d just feel better if I had more blood on that sidewalk.” One of her knees let out a protesting creak as she got to her feet. “And a weapon would be nice, too. I
did
find this.”

He joined her at the sink, peering at three specks of dark red that traveled in a line up the tan ceramic tile behind the counter next to the sink. “It’s blood.”

“Not much of it.”

“Exactly. It could be the only three spots left after a superb cleanup job, or it could be an artifact from last night’s steak dinner. I’ll take a swab, of course.”

“Any scraps in the garbage?”

“No, the bin is clean except for a few paper towels and a tea bag.”

After swabbing the blood, she and Paul canvassed the home once more. Toys spotted the living room, along with a
TV Guide
and a half-finished crewel project in colorful yarn. Areas of the master bedroom indicated his and hers; his tastes ran to career-development books and vitamins, hers to paperback romances and matching organizer trays. The baby’s room held yet more toys, clean clothes, and a prodigious supply of diapers. If the family had a dark side—a drug or alcohol addiction, abuse, sex parties—all traces of it had been removed.

The third bedroom served as an office. With a twinge of envy, Theresa examined the heavy rolltop desk. “What is this, mahogany?”

“You’re asking me?” Paul said. “My taste runs toward Formica.”

“Not true—you bought me that walnut bench last month.”

“Rachael picked that out.”

The idea of her daughter perusing tasteful furniture made her feel proud and old at the same time. The cache of papers in the rolltop came as a welcome distraction. “This seems to be a loan form. Maybe they have money troubles, if they’re applying for a loan?”

Paul picked up a stack of business cards and held them toward her. “I don’t think so.”

She glanced at the cards. The words “Federal Reserve Bank of the United States of America” framed the upper edge. “He’s a bank examiner. I see—Ludlow doesn’t apply for loans—”

“He approves them.”

Frank leaned in the doorway behind them, fingering a cigarette. “That’s all I need. The murder of a freakin’ employee of the federal government.”

Paul explained his partner’s mood to Theresa. “The oral boards for the sergeant’s position are up this week. Frank might be the boss of the whole Homicide unit by the end of the month.”

“And you’ll have to break in a new partner.”

Frank snorted. “‘Gee, good luck, Frank, I’m really rooting for you, seeing as you’re my flesh and blood and all.’ No, the only thing she cares about is poor Paul having to work with a rookie.”

Her older cousin had always been cynical, but now his voice held a bitterness that surprised her. He must be edgier over the promotion than she would have thought possible. “I’m sorry—congratulations, really.”

“Forget it.”

“I know you’ll get it. No one else has more time in Homicide than you do, do they?”

He stared at his feet for so long that she thought he wouldn’t answer. “McKissack got there a year and a half before I did. He’s a moron, too, but that’s neither here nor there in the political world. Anyway, forget it. Find anything else in that desk?”

Paul would not be deflected. “Maybe this is exactly what you need to get the inside track away from McKissack. A nice high-profile fed case—provided we wrap it up before your interview, of course.”

“Sure.” A smile flickered on Frank’s lips, gone before it could settle. “That gives us, let’s see, thirty-four hours to find out who killed Mr. Bank Examiner.”

Theresa felt a sudden chill of worry. “He works at a bank—”

Paul followed her thoughts. “And now the wife and kid are missing. But that makes no sense. If they were kidnapped to pressure him into robbing his own bank, then why kill him?”

Frank supposed, “Maybe it’s got nothing to do with the bank, and she killed him. Then she panicked, fled with the kid.”

“That might be preferable,” Theresa said. “Because if Theory A is correct, then with the bank executive dead we’ve got a kidnapper out there who has no reason for keeping Mom and baby around—”

“And every reason to get rid of them,” Paul finished.

Theresa’s boss, Leo, peered at the dead man on the gurney as if he were something Theresa had picked up at a garage sale on her way to work, using Leo’s lunch money for the purchase. “What is
this
?”

“Mark Ludlow. Murdered on his own front stoop.” She held a small but brilliant flashlight up to the gashes in the dead man’s scalp, prodding gently with her other hand. She didn’t want to disrupt the wound pattern or disturb any traces the weapon could have left behind before the pathologist had a chance to examine him, but she might not have another chance before the body was cleaned just prior to the autopsy. The man had died quickly, since his hair was matted but not saturated with blood; his heart had stopped beating early on, stopped pushing the liquid out of the broken capillaries. This told her that he had not bled to death but that the compressions to his skull had halted his brain from directing even involuntary muscle movement, like breathing.

The trace evidence department supervisor took a morose sip of coffee, surrounded by ten other gurneys, each bearing a grim burden. The morning meeting, or “viewing,” would shortly commence, as the department supervisors and all the pathologists gathered for a briefing on the day’s cases and to decide which doctor
would autopsy which victim. “As if we don’t have enough to do.”

“You say that like it’s my fault.”

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