14th Deadly Sin (Women's Murder Club 14)

“I just do.”

I sighed. “OK. If that’s what you want, that’s what we’ll do.”

CHAPTER 60

CONKLIN PARKED IN front of the green house on Texas Street. We sat quietly for a moment under a telephone line loaded with blackbirds, then got out, ducked under the tape, broke the seal on the front door, and shouldered it open.

The murder house had no trace of life in it, but it smelled bad, and in the seconds before we threw on the lights, I could almost hear Marie Calhoun screaming.

Finally, I suggested we each take a room and try to look at it with fresh eyes. Conklin wanted to see the boys’ room.

I took the kitchen.

The first thing I saw was the spoon and bowl in the sink with the remains of a helping of chocolate chip ice cream. I imagined that this had been someone’s last meal. There were blood-spattered drawings of Easter rabbits and Little League baseball schedules stuck up on the fridge with magnets, five feet above the chalk marks on the linoleum floor where Marie Calhoun’s body had come to rest.

The refrigerator door was open, and the food had gone bad. The smell of rotting meat permeated the room. I looked into the trash can, just in case it had been forgotten, but the garbage had gone to the lab and the bin was empty.

The knife block on the counter had one knife missing, presumably the paring knife, which had likely been used to slice the lids off Tom Calhoun’s eyes.

I tried to take my own advice to look at this scene as if for the first time, but it was impossible to keep any distance from a multiple homicide, especially one like this.

The word that kept echoing in my mind was why?

Brady had wondered out loud if Calhoun was one of the Windbreaker cops, wondered if he had had knowledge about the large stash of drugs we assumed had been the reason Wicker House had been robbed and the lab rats killed.

I trusted Brady’s instincts. So if Calhoun was one of those renegade cops, he wasn’t alone. Could he be working with other cops? Could Swanson, Vasquez, even Robertson be part of the crew?

Conklin, too, had thoughts that Wicker House and this quadruple murder were related. I heard his footsteps and turned as he came into the kitchen.

He said, “Linds, there’s nothing new upstairs. It was a straight-up execution. I don’t see signs of a robbery. As Clapper said, nothing was tossed.”

“Who killed them?” I asked my partner, but I was really asking myself.

“What do you think, Linds?”

“Let’s say Brady is right, that Calhoun may be one of the Windbreaker cops. Calhoun was pretty excited by those dead Windbreaker-wearing copycats, remember?”

Conklin nodded.

“It was like he was saying, ‘Yahoo. The case is closed.’ And maybe it was because if he could convince us that the Windbreaker case was solved, there’d be no heat on him.”

“Go on,” said my partner.

“OK,” I said, “let’s take it a step further. If Calhoun was involved in the Wicker House robbery, those drugs were worth a lot to someone. And that someone, let’s say it was Kingfisher. What if Kingfisher knew who robbed him?”

“Oh. OK, so you’re saying maybe this wasn’t torture for information,” Conklin said. “Maybe the Calhoun family was the message. ‘Screw with us, this happens.’”

“It’s a leap,” I said, staring at the blood on the kitchen floor.

Conklin said, “It’s a leap. But it makes more sense than anything I’ve heard so far.”

CHAPTER 61

I WAS HOME before dinner, and after showering and changing into sweats, I took Julie onto my lap and fed her strained lamb and peas while listening to Valerie June singing “Pushin’ Against a Stone.” After that, I put Julie in Joe’s arms. I filled Martha’s bowl with a premium kibble I’d been saving for a special occasion, and I told Joe I was cooking dinner.

“I have to do something that I can control and that will make me feel like I’m doing something good.”

“You had me at ‘I’m cooking,’” Joe said.