At the Scene of the Crime Read online

  Husband Roger, his dark hair cut in a flattop, wore jeans, a white Polo, and tennis shoes, expensive ones, but tennis shoes nonetheless. His brown eyes seemed dazed by the crowd and the activity. He kept a protective arm around his wife’s shoulders and Hawkins noticed a tiny burn on the man’s forearm.

  “What’s their story?” Hawkins asked. He was content to get this from Stark, not Yack.

  “Mrs. Triplett was downstairs,” Stark said. “She was hosting a charity function in the second floor ballroom. Her husband said he wasn’t feeling well, so he’s been up in their apartment all night. He heard the shots, called us.”

  “Can I talk to Mr. Triplett for a second?”

  “Sure.”

  They approached the couple and Stark made the introductions.

  “Mr. Triplett,” Hawkins said, after they had shaken hands. “You said you heard the shots?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I would think these apartments would be well soundproofed.”

  “Yeah,” Triplett said, “they really are. The sound was very faint, but I do know a gunshot when I hear one. I served in Iraq.”

  Given the man’s age, Hawkins was a little surprised.

  “Not this time,” Triplett said, reading Hawkins. “Desert Storm, back in ninety-one. No matter how muffled, I know gunshots when I hear them.”

  Hawkins nodded. “Mrs. Triplett, you weren’t around when your husband heard the gunfire?”

  The woman seemed to shrink further into her husband’s embrace at the mention of her name.

  “No, I was downstairs until Roger called my cell,” she said, a quaver in her voice, “and told me.”

  Hawkins wondered where she kept a cell phone on that dress, but for now didn’t push it.

  “What about your neighbors?”

  “The Hoffs?” Triplett asked.

  Before Hawkins could respond, Mrs. Triplett spoke up, surprising him.

  “I knew Carl had a vindictive streak,” she said, “but I never imagined he was capable of anything like this.”

  “So, the Hoffs were having trouble?”

  “They were separated,” Triplett said. “Caroline was living here, Carl spent most of his time away on business.”

  “What kind of business?”

  “He’s a commercial real estate developer. He had deals going on all over the country.”

  “Did he have any history of violence that you know of?”

  Triplett shook his head. “I had no idea either of them even had a gun.”

  “Thank you,” Hawkins said. “I’m sure Detective Stark explained that we might have more questions later.”

  They both nodded.

  As Hawkins and Raines moved away, Hawkins turned his attention to Stark.

  “Yack’s already inside?” Hawkins asked.

  Stark nodded. “You and Raines better get in there before Yack decides it was a double suicide and sends everybody home.”

  Hawkins moved toward the open door of the other apartment, Raines just behind him. They stopped outside the doorway long enough to don latex gloves and plastic shoe covers with the word “POLICE” stenciled in the bottom, so they could tell their own footprints from any they lifted. One thing Hawkins knew for sure: unless the perp was Superman and flew in and out of the crime scene, he’d have left footprints.

  The living room was bigger than any two rooms in Hawkins’s house. The floor was a light-hued hardwood. The wall opposite the door was at least nine feet high and all glass, letting in the night and the lights of the city.

  Raines said, “That’s a lot of windows. Could we have a witness in another building?”

  “This is the tallest structure in Des Moines,” Hawkins said. “Short of having somebody passing by in a low-flying plane, I don’t think we’re gonna have an eyewitness.”

  The right-hand wall was mostly bookshelves that ran floor to ceiling, filled with leather-bound books that looked shelved more for their appearance than their content. A large cut-out center section held a big-screen plasma television. The surrounding living room was furnished with a long, wide sofa, two huge chairs with ottomans, and a glass coffee table on a white area rug. The furniture was white leather. At the near end of the shelves, a dark corridor led back to what Hawkins assumed would be bedrooms and the bathroom.

  On the left the large room was bisected by a stone wall that contained a gas-driven fireplace. Hawkins estimated the large openings on either side of the fireplace wall were about eight feet wide, figuring the far opening led to the kitchen while the near one revealed a full bar (and another uniformed cop, who waved).

  Before Hawkins could say or do anything, Raines stepped up. “C.J., what’s up?”

  “Hey, Krysti,” the uniform said. He was a tall, broad-shouldered kid with a blond crew cut and an easy smile.

  “Jacobsen,” a voice growled from the adjacent room. Hawkins recognized the cantankerous tone of Phil Yackowski.

  The blond uniform turned away from them.

  “Does you opening your mouth mean the crime scene crew is finally here?”

  Hawkins chuckled to himself. What a jackass. He stepped forward and peered around the stone fireplace to see Yackowski standing next to a white piano, directly between two bodies sprawled on the floor, one male, one female, a small puddle of blood near the man, relatively little blood around the woman.

  The female wore only a revealing negligee, her breasts clearly visible through the gauzy material. She lay on her back, a small, neat entry wound in her forehead. The male victim lay on his stomach at almost a ninety degree angle from the woman, his head resting on the left cheek, his eyes open, staring at nothing. He wore a tan Polo shirt, khakis, and expensive brown loafers with no socks. A nine millimeter automatic lay on the floor near his right hand. He had an entrance wound on the right side of his head.

  “Yackowski,” Hawkins said easily. “What brings you out in the dark?”

  The detective was a muscle-bound weightlifter whose biceps bulged beneath the polyester of his navy blue suit jacket. His florid face included a nose that had been broken at least twice and a forehead wide enough to serve as a solar panel.

  “Hawk,” the detective said noncommitally. Then he grinned and added, “What can I say? The chief wanted the best on this one.”

  “Where’s Dearden, then?”

  “What’s that, a dig? Dearden didn’t get the call, did he?”

  “What call? The one advising the detective in charge to tromp through a crime scene before my team had a chance to process it?”

  Yackowski’s already ruddy face turned crimson as he looked down to see where he was standing. “I took care, damn it. I was studying the evidence.”

  “You were contaminating the evidence, Yack. You think you can get out of there without messing it up any more than you already have?”

  The detective fumed, but carefully walked over until he was in front of Hawkins, the BCI supervisor at least three inches taller than the detective.

  “Don’t make no nevermind, anyhow,” Yackowski said. “This fucker’s open and shut.”

  “Always nice to hear a professional opinion,” Hawkins said. “Care to tell me how you arrived at it?”

  “The woman,” Yackowski said, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the female victim, “Caroline Hoff—this is her place.”

  “Well-off lady,” Hawkins said.

  “Not so much. She was married to decedent number two, Carl Hoff. Rich guy with a pretty little trophy wife. Problem was, they fought all the time, and maybe Caroline ran around on him some. So he was divorcing her, only the prenup gave her the condo—she could hump the doorman and the UPS guy and still wind up with the fancy digs. Seems Carl had second thoughts, about losing the apartment anyway, so he comes over, they argue, one thing leads to another, bing, bang, boom, murder-suicide.”

  “You must have witnesses,” Hawkins said, “to have it all laid out like this.”

  “Just the neighbor across the hall, who heard the shots. He
was the one that called it in. Besides, what do you care? Who needs witnesses? It’s all about the evidence, right, Hawk?”

  Hawkins moved closer to the two bodies. Squatting next to the male victim, he examined the entrance wound in the man’s head, near the back of his right ear. There was a small, neat hole, not unlike the woman’s wound, with a smear of blood around the wound.

  “Yack, nothing would give me more pleasure than to let you go to Chief Anderson with your half-assed theory. . . .”

  “Half-assed how?” Yackowski bellowed.

  “This is a double murder.”

  Yackowski wanted to argue, but he hesitated. “Not a murder-suicide?”

  “If he shot himself, where are the powder burns around the wound? There’d probably be a starburst wound from a contact or near contact wound, too. That’s not here, either. And to top it off, unless Hoff was double-jointed, I’m not sure how he shot himself from this angle. The wound was delivered from almost behind him. Tough shot if you’re holding the gun yourself.”

  Yackowski just stood there.

  “Only person shooting himself tonight, Yack,” Hawkins said, “will be you, in the foot, if you take this to Anderson.”

  “All right, all right,” Yackowski said. “I get it. You do the crime scene, then we’ll go talk to the neighbor again. Maybe he heard more than shots. He might have heard the killer.”

  “Good. And we’ll start with you taking off your shoes and giving them to CSA Raines.”

  “What the hell?”

  “You don’t have on shoe covers. You want us to be able to tell your prints from the killer’s, or would you just like to give a statement as to your whereabouts at the time of the crime?”

  Grumbling the entire time, Yackowski slipped off his shoes and handed them to Raines, who bagged them and somehow managed not to smile.

  Yackowski shuffled out on the hardwood floor in his stocking feet, grumbling the whole way, Jacobsen trailing him as far as the door.

  When the others were out of earshot, Raines said, “You two have a nice rapport.”

  “See, already you’re analyzing.”

  “Thanks,” Raines said. “Where do you want to start?”

  “You do the bodies and the immediate scene. I’m going to poke around a little. Want to make sure we can rule out robbery as a motive.”

  The rookie looked hesitant. “Are you sure you don’t want to do the bodies yourself?”

  Hawkins took a couple of steps toward her. “You’re going to have to do it sooner or later. Sooner’s better.”

  “This is an important murder—”

  “Are there unimportant ones? You’re as natural at this as anyone I’ve seen, and you’ve had good training, Krysti. Trust it.”

  She took a deep breath and let it out. “Yes, sir.”

  In the living room, Hawkins looked around. Knickknacks on the coffee table were untouched, magazines stacked neatly. On a side table next to the front door, a small basket held envelopes that proved to be the day’s mail and a set of keys, presumably Mrs. Hoff ’s. Everything seemed to be in order.

  He went down the hall. On the left, he peeked into a small bedroom that had been turned into an office. Again, nothing seemed disturbed.

  On the right side of the corridor, he entered a bathroom that felt like stepping onto the flight deck of the starship Enterprise. Two glass sinks perched on twin black columns beneath two stainless steel plates with no visible faucets. Beyond those, a small cubicle housed the toilet. Against the opposite wall was a deep, two-person tub outfitted with water jets. Dominating the center of the far wall was a glass-enclosed shower with four brass heads aimed at various angles. The glass walls still showed beads of water. In front of the shower a huge, furry, lavender rug covered most of the Mexican tile floor. It felt damp, but not wet. Someone had taken a shower earlier in the evening. He looked at the towel rack on the wall next to the shower—empty. Maybe Mrs. Hoff had taken the towel, or towels, into the bedroom with her.

  Getting his face down in the rug, Hawkins peered at the footprints pressed into the nap. They were already fading away, with no way to preserve them, but Hawkins was sure he could see the outlines of at least two different size feet in the damp rug.

  Mrs. Hoff had been wearing a negligee, but Mr. Hoff had been fully dressed. Could they have had a short-term reconciliation that went bad later?

  Maybe.

  Hawkins pulled a short, unfolding ruler from his pants pocket. Normally he used it to give scale to evidence he was photographing, but tonight he measured the disappearing footprints in the rug. The first print was almost exactly eight inches long, the length of the ruler. The second print was at least two inches longer than the first and much wider.

  Again, he wondered where the bath towels were. Looking at a second towel rack between the sinks, he noticed two lavender hand towels matching the rug. He rose and considered trying to photograph the footprints, but he knew by that time he could get the lighting right they would have long since disappeared.

  He left the bathroom and returned to the corridor, where he checked two doors, both on the left side. The first door led into a small bedroom that had been turned into an immaculate office, apparently undisturbed. A computer desk occupied one corner, the monitor on top in sleep mode with the power on.

  The second door led to the master bedroom. He flipped the light on and found this room immaculate, too. A tall armoire stood immediately to the right of the doorway. A king-size bed took most of the right-hand wall along with two night stands. In the corner in front of him, a flat-screen television and DVD player occupied the top of a dresser. Nearer to him, on the left-hand wall, a double-door closet was closed. After opening it carefully, he pushed back both doors all the way without touching any areas that might contain fingerprints. A wicker laundry hamper stood against the right-hand wall. He used his Mini Maglite to see inside. There were no towels. Where the hell had they gone?

  He knew that someone, probably two people, had showered earlier in the evening. Why weren’t the towels here?

  Hawkins turned away from the closet and let his eyes wander the room as if the towels would suddenly appear before him. He was staring emptily at the bed when he realized a wrinkle stood out on the floral bedspread just where it disappeared beneath the pillows.

  Hawkins was no OCD type who needed everything just so, but the obsessive-compulsive who lived here was. That meant that even this tiny wrinkle, something Yackowski probably would have overlooked if he had even bothered to come into the room, yapped at Hawkins like an angry little dog.

  No way Mrs. Hoff would have been able to tolerate this affront to her neatness.

  Raines appeared in the doorway. “Something’s not right.”

  He looked at her. “What’s not right?”

  “No shell casings.”

  Hawkins considered that. “There have to be. The pistol’s an automatic. The ejected shells are somewhere.”

  “Agreed,” Raines said. “Just not in this apartment.”

  “Don’t get ahead of yourself.”

  “Well, they’re not in the room where the crime happened, anyway.”

  “Better,” he said. “You’ve moved the furniture?”

  She nodded.

  “The bodies?”

  Another nod.

  First the towels disappeared, now the shell casings. Some murder-suicide. He still had a hunch about the wrinkle in the bed. “What do you see here?” he said.

  She took in the room for several long moments, before pointing at the closet. “I see the same thing in here that I saw in the rest of the apartment, somebody with serious obsessive-compulsive issues. The hangers all face the same direction. The clothes are divided by her good clothes, her work clothes, and her casual clothes, and within those sections, subdivided by style and color. Everything has a place and everything is in its place.”

  Hawkins nodded. “Anything else?”

  Raines looked around again, Hawkins watching her. Hawkins w
as about to tell her his theory when she suddenly said, “The bedspread is wrinkled.”

  Smiling, he said, “It sure is.”

  “But what does it mean?”

  Hawkins shrugged. “Maybe something, maybe nothing, but the small out-of-place things can sometimes be the most important. Do you have a forceps with you?”

  Nodding, she pulled the ten-inch stainless steel tool off a loop on her belt and handed it to Hawkins.

  He took it, opened the serrated jaws, got the end of the bedspread between them and locked the jaws, then pulled back, revealing the pink blanket beneath.

  It, too, was wrinkled. Releasing the jaws of the forceps, the bedspread fell away and he repeated the action with the forceps on the blanket and top sheet. Beneath that, on the pink satin bottom sheet, was a wet spot the size of a half-dollar near the middle of the bed.

  “Looks like someone had sex recently,” Raines said.

  “Swab that.”

  But Raines was already moving in, buccal swab at the ready.

  She pushed the swab up out of its protective plastic sleeve and gently wiped it over the spot on the bed. Next, she pulled the paper handle so the swab disappeared back into the sleeve. She snapped the small lid on it, then held it carefully as she handed Hawkins a roll of an adhesive tag from her pocket.

  Using his Sharpie, Hawkins dated the tag, initialed it, then pulled off the backing and handed it to Raines, who placed it over the lid of the swab sleeve, sealing it.

  “What have we got?” Hawkins asked.

  Raines took a deep breath, then let it out. Holding up the swab, she said, “We have evidence that someone, probably Mrs. Hoff and a partner, had sex in this room.”

  “Her ex?”

  Raines considered that, then shook her head. “Doubtful. I used the electrostatic print lifter and got footprints off the wood floor. I think we have a third person present. Another man, this one wearing sneakers.”

  Hawkins told her his theory about the towels and the wet rug in the bathroom.

  “So,” she said, “there were three people here.”

  “I think Carl Hoff definitely interrupted something. Tell me about the shootings.”

  “Both were shot from a distance of about six feet. It looks like they were both shot with the same gun, about the same caliber anyway, judging from the entry wounds, and the shell casings have disappeared from Hoff ’s automatic.”