The Stranger(56)

All four men looked at him solemnly.

“We need to talk,” Len Gilman said.





Chapter 26



Beachwood, Ohio, Police Chief Johanna Griffin had never been to a homicide scene.

She had seen her share of dead bodies, of course. Plenty of people called the police when they found that a loved one had died of natural causes. Same with a drug overdose or a suicide, so, yeah, Johanna had been around death and then some. There’d also been a fair number of gory car crashes over the years. Two months ago, a semi cut across the divider line, and when it slammed into a Ford Fiesta, the car’s driver had been decapitated and his wife’s skull had been crushed like a Styrofoam cup.

Bloody and gross and even dead didn’t bother Johanna. But boy, this did.

Why? First off: murder. It was just hard to get around the word. Murder. Just say it out loud and feel the chill. Nothing compared, really. It was one thing to lose your life to illness or accident. But to have your life snatched away from you intentionally, to have a fellow human being actually decide to snuff out your very existence—that just offended on so many levels. It was an obscenity. It was something beyond a crime. It was playing God in the most ungodly way possible.

But even that, Johanna might have been able to live with.

Johanna tried to keep her breath steady, but she could feel it coming in hurried gulps. She stared down at the corpse. Heidi Dann stared back up out of unblinking eyes. There was a bullet hole in Heidi’s forehead. A second bullet—or maybe the first bullet, come to think of it—had blown away her kneecap. Heidi had bled out on the Oriental carpet she’d bought for a song from a guy named Ravi, who sold them out of a truck in front of the Whole Foods. Johanna had halfheartedly chased Ravi off more than once, but Ravi, who gave his customers great value and a ready smile, always came back.

The rookie working with her, a kid named Norbert Pendergast, was trying not to look too excited. He sidled up to Johanna and said, “The county guys are on their way. They’re going to take this away from us, aren’t they?”

They would, Johanna knew. Local cops in this area spent most of their days dealing with traffic violations and bicycle licenses and maybe a domestic dispute. Major crimes, like murder, were handled by the county police. So yep, in a few minutes, the big boys would come in, swinging their little dicks to make sure everyone knew they were in charge now. They would cast her aside, and not to sound overly melodramatic, but this was her town. Johanna had grown up here. She knew the lay of the land. And she knew the people. She knew, for example, that Heidi loved to dance and played a great game of bridge and had a naughty, contagious laugh. She knew that Heidi enjoyed experimenting with weird-color nail polish, that her favorite TV shows of all time were The Mary Tyler Moore and Breaking Bad (yep, that was Heidi), and that she had bought the Oriental rug on which she had bled out from Ravi in front of the Whole Foods for $400.

“Norbert?”

“Yeah?”

“Where’s Marty?” Johanna asked.

“Who?”

“The husband.”

Norbert pointed behind him. “He’s in the kitchen.”

Johanna hoisted up her pants—no matter how hard she tried, the pants waist on the police uniform never quite fit right—and started toward the kitchen. Marty’s pale face tilted up when she entered as though pulled on a string. His eyes were shattered marbles.

“Johanna?”

The voice was hollow and ghostlike.

“I’m so sorry, Marty.”

“I don’t understand. . . .”

“Let’s take it a step at a time.” Johanna pulled out the kitchen chair across from him—yes, that had been Heidi’s chair—and sat down. “I need to ask you some questions, Marty. That okay with you?”

The county swinging dicks would spend a long time looking at Marty as the perp. He hadn’t done it. Johanna knew that, but there’d be no point in trying to explain, because the truth was, she knew because, well, she knew. The county dicks would laugh that off and talk about the percentage of murders like this being committed by the husband. Fine with her. And who knew? Maybe they were right (they weren’t), but either way, the county dicks could go in that direction. She’d try others.

Marty nodded numbly. “Yeah, okay.”

“So you just got home, right?”

“Yeah. I was at a convention in Columbus.”

No reason to ask for confirmation. The county dicks could chase that down. “So what happened?”

“I parked in the driveway.” His voice was flat and very far away somehow, beyond detached. “I opened the door with my key. I called out to Heidi—I knew she was home because her car was there. I walked into the den and . . .” Marty’s face twisted into something barely human and then collapsed into something all too human.