Murder in the River City(24)
“Can you compare it to glass from another crime scene and see if it matches?”
“Probably. We’re talking small amounts here, but I think I have enough to work with.”
“Would you please compare it to the broken mirror from the Mack Duncan homicide?”
Simone said, “Huh. You think they’re connected?”
“Callie Wood was fired two months ago for stealing from the cash register.”
“I’ll get my guys on it, but I’m slammed right now.”
John said, “But you’re confident the mirror you found at Discovery Park is not from a vehicle.”
“Yes, absolutely. And I can safely say that it was thick enough to have been from a bar mirror. I just can’t give you anything definitive right now.”
“That’s good enough for now, Simone. Thanks.” Sam hung up and looked at John. “Our cases are connected.”
John flipped through the reports. “Time of death for Duncan was 10:30, time of death for Wood was 11:30, take or leave. Wood had to have been involved with the murder.”
“What if she went there with her latest boyfriend to steal the baseballs—she’d probably know the Babe Ruth was a forgery—and things got out of hand?”
“Why kill her?”
“Maybe she didn’t want to hurt Duncan, just steal the balls, and threatened to turn in her boyfriend. Or he thought she might.”
John nodded. “Possible. Except there were at least two people in the bar.”
“Callie Wood and her boyfriend?”
“Not if she didn’t have glass on her shoes. We have footprints in the crushed glass so distinct that we can identify two males, one with a size twelve shoe, one with a size eleven. The prints weren’t so distinctive that we could get distinguishable markings, however.
“Callie Wood is”— he looked at the report from Simone—“a size seven shoe.”
“So they go to rob the place, she knows about the baseballs, and for a drug user, four thousand bucks is a good score,” John said.
“Her two partners get out of hand. Or maybe Mack tries to chase them out with a baseball bat and they overpower him. Were there defensive wounds?”
John nodded. “He had a broken arm and bruising on his upper back and shoulders. He was beaten before they used the bat on his head.”
“A lot of rage.”
“The guys may have been pumped up after killing him, maybe Callie was upset and they took it out on her.”
Sam considered that. “She wasn’t beaten. She was strangled quickly and efficiently, according to the autopsy report.”
“Taking out a witness?”
Sam worried about Shauna. She’d been in Mack’s apartment, and it was likely that one of his killers had been the one to attack her. He must have known he didn’t have enough time to find what he was looking for and get out.”
“I’ll talk to Patrick Dooligan and his staff about Callie Wood and her known associates, you check out her apartment,” John said.
#
The door to the outer office of Murphy & Sons jingled. Shauna called out, “I’ll be right with you!” and exited out of her accounting program. The business had been in the red for the last three years, though barely, and then her father had his heart attack and everyone felt they would go under. They were now almost in the black, and Shauna had a plan so that by the next fiscal year, they’d be back on solid ground. Enough so that she could hire an office manager and she could do what she did best—architectural design.
Murphy & Sons was not her father and his sons, but her grandfather Frank Murphy, Senior and his five sons, her father being the oldest. Over the years, her uncles peeled away from the business, leaving only her dad to run it. And though all her brothers had worked at least part-time and summers for the business, none of them stuck around, either. That her paternal grandfather had died of a heart attack twenty years ago made Shauna even more worried about her sixty-year-old dad.
“Hello, Shauna.”
The familiar voice in her doorway surprised her. She looked up, nearly giving herself whiplash. “Jason!”
Her former fiancé. Who had been in prison for three years for insurance fraud. He’d been charged with more, but that was all the DA was able to make stick, and he ended up serving only half his time. She knew he’d been out for six months, but she’d heard through mutual friends that he’d moved to San Francisco.
“Is that pleasurable surprise or shocked surprise?”
“Both?” she said, more shocked than anything.
What happened with Jason had been one of the most difficult things she’d gone through as an adult. They’d been friends for years—since college—and she had liked him. Loved him, for a time. They had the same interests and same sense of humor and he’d been her best friend.