HABIT: a gripping detective thriller full of suspense Page 4

  This was because the end table had been used by the victim to try to block the door, Brendan thought.

  He looked up at the man named Patnode, who had been taking pictures of the room earlier. He was now dusting for latent fingerprints.

  “Did you get the door?”

  Patnode looked around and saw Brendan, who was down on his knees at the entrance to the bedroom. Brendan pointed around to the outside of the door.

  “It’s been kicked in. Get pictures, and let’s see if we can lift this shoe scuff, an imprint in the paint, something.”

  * * *

  The killer had come up the stairs. He had gotten to the top and then strode down the hallway towards the bedroom. He found the door blockaded, and he’d pushed and he’d kicked. It wouldn’t have taken much – the end table likely only weighed thirty or forty pounds. After the initial kick, the killer had probably seen that the door gave easily enough. So he’d pushed it the rest of the way.

  “And fingerprints.”

  “Yes,” said Patnode. “I was getting to the doorknob next.”

  “The door was open when you arrived,” said Brendan, “but it wasn’t when the killer did.” All three of the CSI looked at the young detective, and understood.

  When the killer reached the girl wrapped in her towels, she was still damp from the shower. Rebecca Heilshorn likely struggled with him at the foot of the bed, and then he pushed her onto it. She scrambled back, trying to get away from him. She had been partially under the covers when they’d found her, and so she’d flailed, she’d probably kicked; she’d worked her way under the duvet.

  Then the killer had pounced. He’d climbed on top of her with the murder weapon and pinned her with one hand. What did he want? Just to destroy her? Did he try to get her to do something – agree to something? Many cases like this involved a disgruntled boyfriend, or ex-husband, a rejected lover. When they couldn’t get what they wanted, they eradicated the source of their anger or pain. When this woman didn’t satisfy what was asked of her, she paid for it with multiple stab wounds, and perhaps strangulation.

  Brendan’s unease continued to grow. It wasn’t the same apprehension of coming across his first murder crime scene as it had been an hour ago – it was shaping up to be this different thing, this different sort of feeling. Like he was missing something vital, standing right next to it, and not seeing it.

  He turned and walked out of the room as the CSI began to work the door in earnest.

  Brendan ran down the stairs.

  He walked briskly into the kitchen, his eyes roving, his head turning back and forth. Within seconds, he found the sheath of knives.

  There were ten slots in the sheath. Six slots were filled with a knife. Four others were not.

  Still with his gloves on, he started going through drawers. He went through the dishwasher, too (a Maytag, he saw, recently installed) and finally through the dirty dishes in the sink. Each knife he found, he set down on a butcher’s block in the center of the room.

  The kitchen was old-fashioned and farmhouse-traditional, save for the new dishwasher. The floor was red tile. There was a window over the sink that looked out to the shed with the big dark entrance. To his right was a rudimentary wooden booth built into the wall, bench seats on either side. Then there was a doorway, with no door, to a pantry. This was a small room that took up part of the floor plan of the kitchen, as if added in at some point. Behind him on the other side of the room, more cabinets and a long counter. To his left, an antique hutch with glass doors on top, housing what may have been hand-me-down china. A doorway beside the hutch led to the next room. It was dark, the light not penetrating this far back in a house with southern exposure to its front. Still, the dining room table and chairs were visible. More cabinetry with glass fronts containing dishware, candelabras, and other knickknacks.

  He found knife after knife and set them all out, some splattered with food, some still wet from the dishwasher, some dry and dull from a lack of polish, sitting dusty in the drawers. He found mouse turds in one of the drawers.

  As he laid the knives out – twelve now – he found himself marveling at how Delaney had left him to this. Finding a murder weapon was priority one. Though since it wasn’t a gun, had Delaney deprioritized it? Had he expected – despite the fact that his list of instructions hadn’t included searching for a weapon – that Brendan would get to it quickly anyway? Some things about the older detective just didn’t make a lot of sense, but Brendan chalked most of it to the quirkiness/arrogance that came with seniority. Still, senior investigators were rarely sloppy. That’s why they were still around.

  Twelve sharp knives and he could find no more. He found that several of them were similar in appearance. They had the insignia of Royal Norfolk Cutlery etched in their steel blades. A heraldic lion pawed the air next to the name. There were four of these. Four knives and four slots. He slipped the knives in the sheath and stepped back. He heard someone behind him.

  It was Delaney.

  “How’s it going?” The big man darkened the doorway to the kitchen.

  “Good,” said Brendan. The excitement of the knife hunt was dissipating.

  “You get to talk to the Heilshorn kid further?”

  “A little, sir.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Checking to see if the murder weapon could have come from this collection of knives,” said Brendan. It was hard not to mask some bit of disappointment he felt.

  Delaney walked over at a leisurely pace. He stopped a foot away from Brendan, facing him. Brendan could smell the outside air on the man, and a trace of aftershave. Delaney reached past Brendan and pulled out one of the knives. He wasn’t wearing gloves. “They can clear my prints,” he said absently. He held the knife, resting the blade on one palm and pinching the handle between the thumb and forefinger of his other hand. He rolled it over. He grunted to himself.

  “So you think a missing knife could be our murder weapon?”

  Brendan nodded. “Maybe. But this one set is all accounted for.”

  Delaney raised his considerable eyebrows and looked over the blade of the knife he held up to his face. “You think we’ll find a knife with a print on it. Run the print in the database, match it with a felon, and go pick him up.”

  “Could be.”

  Delaney nodded, slid the knife back into the sheath and stuck out his lower lip. Then he walked to the sink and turned on the water. He splashed some on his face. “Christ it’s hot out there,” he said.

  He turned and started walking out of the kitchen. “Go finish with the motorcycle rider. I’ll have CSI come down and bag that whole assortment of knives. They’re moving into the rest of the house. A K9 unit is en route.”

  Delaney walked out of the room.

  Brendan paused, and then pressed his palms to the wooden butcher’s block, and leaned forward. He let his head hang. He took a breath.

  Then he resumed walking around the kitchen. He stopped and looked at the refrigerator. It was an unusual red color, not quite matching the floor. It was an older model – the handles were chipped, the color dull in places on the face. There were a few magnets on the surface. One was a tiny lobster. One was the flat, thin kind, from a hardware store. There were no notes, no drawings or photos.

  Brendan stood looking at the half dozen magnets. A thought occurred to him and he turned and walked away from the fridge. He passed the butcher’s block, glancing at the array of knives he’d unearthed. Then he walked into the shadowy dining room adjoining the kitchen.

  CHAPTER FIVE / THURSDAY, 10:35 AM

  Brendan wanted to keep close to the K9 unit, but first he wanted to examine the rest of the house himself. He smiled at the two women from the CSI unit, Alicia and Dominique, as he passed them on the stairs.

  In the bathroom, he went through the medicine cabinet. He found prescription bottles for Xanax and Klonopin, and a generic menstrual cramp reliever. He left them on the small shelf.

  The bathroom appeared
undisturbed. The translucent plastic curtain was pushed back, from Rebecca Heilshorn’s last shower. The tub was the kind which sat up on feet – the curled paws of some animal, making Brendan think of the heraldic lion on the knife blades. The sink had a rust stain beneath the old fashioned faucet. The rubber drain plug was mildewed. A bar of hand soap sat in a dish. There was a toilet with a chain flush, and a small wicker laundry hamper. Brendan lifted the lid. There were only a few articles of clothing – maybe what the victim had on before her shower. He reached in with his gloved hand and found a pair of yoga pants, a t-shirt which read “Born Lucky – Lucky Jeans,” some ankle socks, a pair of underwear, and what may have been the outfit from the day before – jeans, a white blouse with a frilly open collar, and another set of socks and underwear. Either Rebecca had been a very tidy housekeeper who did laundry daily, or she had just arrived at the house.

  Brendan made a note in his pad to ask about a housekeeper or caretaker. The house certainly didn’t feel lived in. The bedroom and kitchen were the only places with signs of life. The bathroom was well-kempt. There were no stray hairs or soap scum. Nothing, in fact, anywhere in the house seemed to have much dust on it.

  He left the bathroom. There was a linen closet on his right, the next door down. The careful arrangement of clean towels and bedding also suggested a very tidy person or help with the housekeeping.

  The door at the end of the hallway led to another bedroom. It was nearly twice the size of the bedroom where the victim had been discovered. Bright light shone around the edges of the drawn blinds – fabric blinds that were of a dark, blood-red. The room was much darker than the victim’s bedroom. Those blinds, Brendan recalled, had all been up. The room had been bright. The windows, though, the way the sun had burned through them, they had been dirty.

  So, a housekeeper then who “didn’t do windows.” It was laughably clichéd.

  There were two dressers – one tall, one wide, like the bureau in the victim’s room with the opened drawers. The ones in here were oak, of a set, no doubt. They appeared new. In fact, the bed’s mattress was wrapped in plastic.

  The ceiling was slanted on either side of the south-facing dormer window. To the right of the dormer, a door led to another bathroom. Brendan walked through the dim room across carpeting which was plush but faded. He clicked the light on in the dark bathroom.

  Recently refurbished. A new Jacuzzi, replete with water jets. A new double sink, new cabinetry, light fixtures, the works. It was possible that Rebecca Heilshorn was using the bedroom down the hall while this one, the master bedroom, was being finished. The new mattress, matching bureau set, new bathroom appliances and fixtures – it was a room under construction. Even so, it didn’t tell him much. And Kevin was waiting, and the K9 unit would be here any moment.

  * * *

  He stepped outside into the bright sunlight. He fished his sunglasses out of his inside jacket pocket. Kevin Heilshorn was sitting near where Brendan had left him, picking at the grass between his legs, slumped forward. Deputy Bostrom was nowhere to be seen. Vehicles were everywhere. A dog started barking. The K9 unit had already arrived, and one of the German Shepherds was pulling a cop towards the shed.

  Brendan instantly got going. He’d had a feeling about that shed since he’d first arrived. He jumped from the doorway and started trotting over to the K9 cop and the dog. The dog was really pulling on the leash, straining to get to that shed.

  “Oh my God,” said Brendan. He didn’t know why he said it, it just slipped out.

  In his peripheral vision he saw Kevin Heilshorn stand and dust off the back of his pants. The K9 unit reached the edge of the shed just as Brendan caught up to them. The two men and the dog went into the gloom, and Brendan removed his sunglasses.

  The first thing Brendan noticed was the old John Deere tractor. Its hood was open, engine exposed, looking in surprisingly good shape after all. The bucket was still attached, resting on the dirt floor. On either side of the shed were stacked rows of what looked like cages. The smell of chicken shit was powerful. As his eyes adjusted, Brendan could see the dried white splatters of chicken poop dripping from the cages, and around on the floor. Chicken feed was turned to mush next to the cages. The dog pulled the K9 cop around to the back of the tractor. Its barks resounded in the dark. There was a sudden intensification of smell – the odor of decay, sour and acute. Brendan braced himself to find another body, perhaps of the killer, who’d come out and slit his own throat after perpetrating the heinous crime inside the house.

  But it wasn’t a human body that the dog had found. It was a small animal. Maybe a hedgehog, or a woodchuck.

  The farmer across the road had been after a woodchuck or some other creature, shooting through the desiccated rows of corn at it.

  The stink was even worse back here: chicken excrement, the powerful odor of a rotted animal, and something more. Maggots crawled through the tufts of fur, and flies buzzed and alighted. It looked like a raccoon.

  “Ugh.” Brendan put the ridge of his hand under his nose.

  The K9 cop said nothing, working to restrain the dog from burying his snout in the mess. “What do you think did that?” asked Brendan.

  “Have to order the autopsy,” said the K9 cop with dry humor. Then, “Dunno. Maybe a coyote. Maybe it just came in here to die.”

  There appeared to be some blood, but it was hard to tell. Against the back wall of the shed were trash barrels. Two of these had been tipped over. On the ground were piles of what appeared to be household trash; Brendan thought he could see banana peels, plastic food packaging, an empty Cascade detergent box, some kind of noodles, and more. There were also substances which didn’t resemble food. Holding his nose, Brendan bent and squinted at what appeared to be a large lump of dark plastic. It looked melted, perhaps some appliance that had somehow been superheated until it severely deformed – there was little light in the back of the shed and so it was hard to tell. Around all of this the ground was littered with the mash of feed, and strands of hay, dirt, small rocks. The cop got his dog turned around, and headed back out into the bright square of sunlight.

  Brendan stayed for a moment, looking at the lump of plastic.

  * * *

  “I need to get the young man a grief counselor,” said Brendan to Detective Delaney. “A psychologist. Someone like that. He’s having a real hard time. Who do you have around here?”

  “Call, uhm, Olivia Jane,” said Delaney. He was popping bits of something into his mouth. Sunflower seeds. “She worked with DCH, now she’s on her own. She’s come down a few times to help with grief counseling, she can help set up temporary housing for victim families, that sort of thing. Works with battered wives a lot.”

  They stood in the blistering sun. Sweat patches were visible around the armpits of Delaney’s grey suit. Brendan glanced down at his own darker apparel, wondering if it too was stained with perspiration. His skin felt prickly, the pores popping open, the tendrils of sweat starting to run from his temples.

  “Are we going to put surveillance on the house?”

  “Absolutely. What did Clark say?”

  Brendan thought back to the coroner. So much had happened in just the past hour. He thought to check his notes, but tried to remember instead. “Looks like one stab wound to the pulmonary artery was the non-survivable injury. The victim likely expired sometime between 8:20 and 8:40 this morning, but we figured that already.”

  “Anything else?”

  “He talked about petechiae.” Brendan pointed to his face. “The kinds of blotches that can come from a pinching off of the carotid artery. Typically from strangulation.”

  “I know what it is.” Delaney nodded at Kevin. “Is he going to be alright?”

  “He vomited in the grass not long ago. He could need some medical attention. Some mental attention, too. My plan is . . . well.”

  “What?”

  Brendan squinted in the sun at the senior investigator. Then he remembered his sunglasses and put them back on.
“I was thinking I could get him out of here. Take him back to Remsen myself. To the motel, maybe to the hospital. Talk to him on the way. Get his statement.”

  “That’s a good idea.”

  Compliments were rare with Delaney. It took Brendan aback for a moment. Then he added, “I’ll have the . . . what was her name? Olivia Jane. She can meet us there.”

  Delaney spat out a sunflower seed shell. They were at the outlet of the driveway, getting a word in private, away from the house. The whole scene was before them. The dogs were now out back, sniffing around the barn. CSI was working the entire house. The sun had climbed high into gauzy sky.

  “I think we want to make sure CSI combs through the shed. There’s a dead animal back there, and some interesting refuse.”

  Delaney raised his eyebrows. “Raccoon?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “That’s what Folwell was after. Some animal. Shooting at it with his Browning. I’ll make sure they go through the trash. Something caught your eye?”

  “There’s a fireplace inside, yeah? Something may have been burned and then thrown out.”

  “I want to meet back with you in one hour.”

  “Okay,” said Brendan, and he started to dial Olivia Jane.

  CHAPTER SIX / THURSDAY, 11:08 AM

  He was able to convince Kevin Heilshorn to ride into Remsen with him and get a sandwich. In the car, he lit a cigarette. “Mind if I smoke?” Kevin shook his head. Brendan pressed the buttons to roll down both front windows, and then started turning around in the driveway.

  “Can I get one?”

  “Sure. Take as many as you want. I’m trying to quit.”

  They turned onto Route 12, headed west. Brendan got the Camry up to speed, and the wind beat in through the opened windows, the antenna shivered on the hood. There was quicksilver baking on the road, and the Camry sluiced through it.