“One, you parked your car in someone else’s garage without their permission,” Leduc said.
“Rico let us in. He knew we parked back here,” she said.
“Deputy Vargas and I will be discussing that in more detail later. Two, you have more suspicious packages in the backseat of your car. They’re plainly visible, so I have reasonable cause.”
“We were shopping earlier. That’s all that’s in the backseat,” Muriel said.
I had to give her points for sheer audacity. She wasn’t a good liar, but she was damn persistent. By the time the car was emptied out, there were two more porcelains: one more like the two in the case, and a plate. There was also a series of jade figurines that turned out to be ancient Chinese. A series of four small oil paintings turned out to be originals painted for the first Marchands back in Europe, so they’d been in the family awhile. There were also two larger oil paintings in the trunk painted by a contemporary of Rembrandt. I would have said Todd and Muriel were stealing a small fortune, but I wasn’t sure it was a small one.
We ended up separating the couple so we could question them. Sheriff Leduc still believed that Bobby was the murderer, but we’d caught Muriel and Todd stealing red-handed, so to speak. Even Duke thought it was suspicious behavior. He had the one deputy I hadn’t met yet, Troy Wagner, trade duties with Deputy Frankie so they could have at least one woman with Muriel. He let us go see the clues from the first crime, while he and his small force started gathering up new evidence for the new crime. Murder and grand larceny in the same location less than twenty-four hours apart was spreading his small force to its limits. We’d help them again after Newman took me through the murder scene and the blood evidence.
We started with the bloody footprints, but to get to the upstairs, which held the “kids’” rooms, was like a freaking maze. “How many square feet is this place?” I asked when we finally came to a white-carpeted hallway that had crime scene tape wrapped around one doorknob and the post of a third staircase. This one had a dark wood banister that curved in a spiral near the top, the wood gleaming with years of polish and care. The wood was so lustrous that it made me want to stroke my hand down it, but since I was already wearing latex gloves and booties over my boots, there was no point. I was trying not to leave evidence behind; it made petting things difficult.
“There are two estimates online and one in the last architect’s plans. None of them is the same.”
“I’ve never been in a house with three separate staircases before,” I said.
“Me either. This was the original main staircase before one of the great-grandfathers started building onto the house. When the master suite moved to the new section, the kids got this wing to themselves.”
I thought about what it must have cost to heat and cool a place this big and almost wanted to know, but not enough to ask. I was here to try to solve a murder or at least find enough reasonable doubt to delay executing Bobby Marchand, not to get nosy about how the other half lived. Jean-Claude had money. As I’d watched him spend money for the wedding, I had begun to realize just how much he might have. We were keeping separate bank accounts so far, but he’d told me that I could know his finances if I wished to know. I was almost scared to find out. Was he this kind of rich and I just didn’t know it, and why did that thought bother me so much?
“Are you all right?” Newman asked, and I realized I’d just been staring into space for a few minutes. I had to get my head in the game, not keep poking at my insecurities about the wedding.
“Yeah, I’m fine. Just thinking too hard and not too productively.”
I could see the footprints on the white carpet down the hallway, but since there were supposed to be prints on the stairs, I decided to start with them. The stairs were all hardwood with only a narrow burgundy carpet runner. The color hid the prints a lot better than the white hallway did.
I bent over on the second step so I’d be able to see it and the one above and below it better. I didn’t kneel, because for so many reasons, I didn’t want to accidentally kneel in blood. I had coveralls in my main gear bag in case things got very messy, but those were mostly for vampire stakings or zombies. Most crimes scenes were less bloody than doing the killing yourself. I used my gloved fingertips to steady myself as I looked for footprints on the burgundy runner. The carpet was held in place by metal bars that snugged in against the bottom of each step. The bars could be unfastened so that the stair runner could be cleaned or replaced without having to tear up carpet and damage the wood underneath. I filed it away to remember if we ever replaced the carpet on the stairs in the house back in St. Louis.
I could smell the blood before I saw it clearly enough to be certain what it was: a bare footprint or at least no obvious shoe tread. I got the small flashlight I carried in one of the many pockets on the tac pants and shone the light down on the blood. The light was bright enough that at night it looked like a prison-break searchlight; on the dimly lit stairway, it highlighted the footprint against the dark carpet nicely. It was a clear footprint, and the stair steps were deep enough that the entire foot showed.
“That’s weird,” I said.
“What’s weird?” Newman asked.
“Let me check another print before I answer you.”
I moved down a step and then more, until I finally moved all the way down to find where the footprints began on the floor below. Newman waited patiently at the top of the stairs. I didn’t need the footprints trailing off away from the stairs to know that I was close to the murder room, because I could smell the blood and meat. It had that thick, beefy smell that comes only when at least one adult human being has bled out in a room. I have to say that one plus for vampire kills is that they are usually neater; less blood means less smell. Then I realized all I smelled was meat and blood. I didn’t smell the outhouse smell that usually comes with someone who has been ripped open by a wereanimal. It didn’t mean that Ray Marchand’s body hadn’t emptied itself, which is what usually happens, but the intestines hadn’t been pierced at all or the smell would have been a lot worse. If Bobby had lost so much control of his beast that he had killed the man who raised him, the man who had been his father figure, then it should have been brutal. If the stomach hadn’t been opened up and none of the body had been eaten, which is what the crime scene photos had shown, then it had been a controlled attack. If Bobby had had that much control, he’d have remembered the kill.
I walked back up the steps toward Newman, using the bright flashlight to make sure I didn’t step in the footprints. “The footprint evidence is all wrong. I might buy that the leopard form walked through the blood and up the stairs, but he’d remember what happened once he changed to human form.”
Newman came carefully down the steps in his own plastic booties, trying to avoid the prints, as if anyone ever collected that much evidence at a crime scene when the perpetrator would be dead in less than two days. “Also, Bobby still passes out when he changes from animal to human form. He should have been passed out next to the body, not in his own bed.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Are you sure he always passes out right after changing back?”
“Are you wondering if he did it now?”
“No, but I like to cover my bases. I like Bobby, but just because I like someone doesn’t mean they aren’t capable of doing bad things.”
“That’s fair. I interviewed some of the people that work in the house. They’ve got three people who live on-site. They’ve seen him come over the garden wall in back and then collapse and change back. He’s human, but it’s like a coma. He’s out cold for hours.”
“Would the domestic help lie for Bobby?”
“The gardener and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Chevet, have worked for Ray Marchand since Bobby was a toddler. They can’t believe that Bobby woul
d do something like this, because they’re used to shooing him out of the house if he’s in leopard form. They talk about him like he’s a big house cat. Until this happened, they weren’t afraid of him.”
“Were they around him when he first got lycanthropy, or did Bobby go somewhere else until he got it under control?” I asked.