“She’s not!”
“I’m really sorry, sir.”
“Oh, Jesus H. fucking Christ!” H. Richard Detweiler wailed.
Mrs. H. Richard Detweiler, who had been standing just inside the door, now began to scream.
Violet went to her and, tears running down her face, wrapped her arms around her.
“What happens now?” H. Richard Detweiler asked.
“I’m afraid I’ve got to ask you some questions,” Officer Wells said. “You’re Mr. Detweiler? The girl’s father?”
“I mean what happens to…my daughter? I suppose I’ll have to call the funeral home—”
“Mr. Detweiler,” Wells said, “what happens now is that someone from the Medical Examiner’s Office will come here and officially pronounce her dead and remove her body to the morgue. Under the circumstances, the detectives will have to conduct an investigation. There will have to be an examination of the remains.”
“An autopsy, you mean? Like hell there will be.”
“Mr. Detweiler, that’s the way it is,” Wells said. “It’s the law.”
“We’ll see about that!” Detweiler said. “That’s my daughter!”
“Yes, sir. And, sir, a sergeant is on the way here. And there will be a detective. There are some questions we have to ask. And we’ll have to see where you found her.”
“The hell you will!” Detweiler fumed. “Have you got a search warrant?”
“No, sir,” Wells said. There was no requirement for a search warrant. But he did not want to argue with this grief-stricken man. The Sergeant was on the way. Let the Sergeant deal with it.
He searched his memory. John Aloysius Monahan was on the job. Nice guy. Good cop. The sort of a man who could reason with somebody like this girl’s father.
Sergeant John Aloysius Monahan got out of his car and started to walk up the wide flight of stairs to the patio. Officer Wells walked down to him. Monahan saw a tall man in a dressing robe sitting on a wrought-iron couch, staring at a blanket-covered body on a stretcher.“Looks like an overdose,” Wells said softly. “The maid found her, the daughter, in her bed with a needle in her arm.”
“In her bed? How did she get down here?”
“The father carried her,” Wells said. “He was sitting on that couch holding her in his arms when I got here. He’s pretty upset. I told him about the M.E., the autopsy, and he said ‘no way.’”
“You know who this guy is?” Monahan asked.
Wells shook his head, then gestured toward the mansion. “Somebody important.”
“He runs Nesfoods,” Monahan said.
“Jesus!”
Monahan walked up the shallow stairs to the patio.
“Mr. Detweiler,” he said.
It took a long moment before Detweiler raised his eyes to him.
“I’m Sergeant Monahan from the Fourteenth District, Mr. Detweiler,” he said. “I’m very sorry about this.”
Detweiler shrugged.
“I’m here to help in any way I can, Mr. Detweiler.”
“It’s a little late for that now, isn’t it?”