The Second Mouse - Archer Mayor [2]
She was pretty, barely middle-aged, on the short side, with shoulder-length blond hair. Not thin, but in no way overweight, and from the little she was wearing, Joe imagined she was a woman who paid attention both to her appearance and to what she wanted her intimate companions to discover. Peeking out from the edges of her expensive bra and bikini underwear were two delicately rendered tattoos.
“She live alone?” he asked, not expecting what he then heard.
“Yup,” Doug answered him. “She didn’t used to, but from what I was told, her longtime boyfriend died seven months ago, and there’s been nobody since.”
Joe continued watching her. So it probably had been exhaustion, and the underwear a mere talisman of joys past.
“Who’s your source?”
“Mom.” Doug glanced at his pad. “Adele Redding. Lives in Massachusetts. Had a ritual of calling her daughter every morning over coffee, especially since the boyfriend’s death. When Michelle didn’t answer this morning, Mom called a nearby friend, who found her like this and called us.”
“Door was unlocked?”
“Yeah. And all but one light out.” He pointed to the night table lamp, still burning palely in the sunlight. “That one. The friend said the door was never locked.”
Joe didn’t respond at first, pondering the suggested scenario that Michelle Fisher had died last night as she was getting ready for bed.
“What’s the deal with the cat, then?”
Doug gave him a blank look.
“There’s a litter box by the kitchen door, but the droppings are laid out as if shat on the run. Doesn’t seem like normal behavior.”
“The friend might know,” Doug offered. But there was a slight drop to his voice, as if Joe’s last observation had been taken as a criticism.
Gunther pursed his lips, overlooking or ignoring the change for the moment. “You have cats?” he finally asked.
“Dogs.”
Gunther nodded, wondering if fright might have caused the anomaly.
He took his eyes off the woman and looked around the room. “What’ve you got so far?”
“I haven’t been here long,” Doug told him cautiously. “There’s an AA pamphlet on the desk in the corner, some recent bank statements that show she didn’t have a hundred bucks.”
“You find a lot of empties?”
Matthews shared his own surprise at that. “No. A couple of beer bottles in the kitchen, but they look old to me. They have dust on ’em and they’re dry inside. I wondered about that.”
Joe had begun circling the room, looking at the snapshots and postcards. He saw the same woman, animated, laughing, keeping company with pets, children, what were probably friends and family, and, time and again, a stocky man wearing a beard and friendly blue eyes.
“That the boyfriend?” he asked.
Doug shrugged. “I guess.”
This time Joe acknowledged his colleague’s affected coolness. He faced him squarely. “What’s up?”
The other man looked slightly embarrassed. “Don’t take this wrong, but I was wondering why you’re here. This could be a natural, like a bad liver. Or even an overdose.”
Gunther couldn’t resist laughing softly, mostly at himself. They were both employees of the state, both cops, but from different outfits, and Doug’s question ran straight to that divide.
Joe was VBI—Vermont Bureau of Investigation. Exclusively a major-crimes unit, it was made up of the best investigators culled from every agency in the state. A recent creation of the governor and the legislature, it had come into being both to give proven talent a place to go, regardless of departmental origin, and to provide the citizens with a truly elite team of skilled professionals.
Doug was VSP—Vermont State Police. Even more complicated, he was BCI, which, in this alphabet-happy environment, meant Bureau of Criminal Investigation. In the recent old days, they had been the state’s major-crimes unit, made up solely of deserving troopers. Now, while still detectives, they’d been restricted in both