Code 61 - Donald Harstad [35]
“Man's name is”—she paused just an instant, so that I knew she was reading from her notes—“William Chester, from Milwaukee.”
My first thought was a pathologist that Harry had contacted regarding the death of Randy Baumhagen, late boyfriend of Alicia Meyer. “What does he do? Or want?”
“Beats me. He looks pretty straight arrow, though. About forty, but that's not all bad. Nice eyes. Slender. Still has all his hair…. ”
“That's not quite what I wanted.”
She laughed. “I don't know. Not an attorney, that's for sure. I asked Lamar that, 'cause I knew you'd just shit—pardon the expression—if we sent somebody like an attorney up there.”
“You sent him here?”
“Well, to Freiberg. He'll get hold of Byng or somebody, and connect up with you later on. Not at the Mansion, though.”
“Okay.” That was a relief. “Anything else?”
“Nope. Lamar just said to let you know. He's over at his sister's, I think.”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, and guess what?”
I was too tired to play. “Tell me.”
“I'm assigned to duty as a reserve tonight, up there!Isn't that just so cool?”
I grinned to myself. “It's cool. Just remember to bring cookies.”
At that point, Hester and Toby came back. Hester was holding a legal pad, making the final touches to a diagram of the second floor. She handed it to me. According to her diagram, Edie's room was the first one at the top of the stairs, on the right. The northeast corner. The next room on her side of the hall was Toby's; the room after that was Hanna's. Across the hall from Edie was Melissa in the southeast corner, then Holly, known as Huck, and then Kevin.
“They're all about the same,” she said. “Basically thirty-six-foot by eighteen-foot rooms, with a dividing wall for the individual bathrooms at about ten feet from the end.”
Like I said, it was a big house. Over a hundred feet long, and about forty-five feet wide.
Hester handed me the pink copy of the “Seized Property” form, listing the knife from the tub. “It's from a set in the kitchen,” she said. “No doubt at all.”
As they sat down, Melissa handed the copy of the Freiberg Tribune and Dispatch to Toby. “Seen this?”
Toby looked a bit surprised, said he hadn't, and opened it up. He looked up at Melissa, rather startled.
“That's freaky,” he said, mostly to her.
I was curious. “What?”
“The bit about Dracula,” he said. “Just floating outside the second-floor window, I mean. Wow.”
“I'm sure he had help,” I said.
Melissa joined in. “In what way?”
“Oh,” I said conversationally, “I'd think a rope, for example.” I forced a chuckle. “He wasn't flying.”
“Did you, you know, find a rope?” Her large eyes were very steady on mine.
“No, but we found ringbolts.” I shrugged. “It's just a matter of the mechanics of the thing.”
“I'm sure you'll find an explanation,” said Melissa.
Hanna suddenly apologized for being a bad hostess, and asked if anyone else wanted coffee. We all did. We spent the next half hour discussing suicide, death, and how friends should deal with it. To me, it seemed that Hanna was by far the most affected by Edie's death. While she was telling Hester just how she'd found the body, I started to think about the possibilities we had. Somehow, it seemed to me that it just damned well shouldn't be this hard to determine the cause and method of death. What had we missed?
Hester interjected a new item. “Did you know the whole third floor is sealed off?”
“No.”
“Yes. It's the owner's private apartment, and nobody can go there unless she's here. According to Toby, here.” She shrugged. “The doors to that floor are both locked, anyway. Keyed. New.”
“That's right,” said Melissa. “We just never go up there unless Jessica's here.”
Hester looked up toward the ceiling. “Must be a pretty damned big apartment.”
The whole third floor would be about four thousand square feet. I could only agree.
There's a rule of thumb in homicide investigations, whereby you either solve the murder in the first forty-eight hours, or the investigation will drag on for months before an arrest