“Why did you want to meet with her?”
“Because I wanted to get her help on the case. I won’t be able to help you solve it by merely observing, Blake. You know that, and I know that.”
Decker had been prepared for Natty to explode at this comment, but to his surprise the detective merely nodded. He rubbed his nose and said, “I guess I can see that. Do you…do you think Sally was the target?”
“No. I was. Someone already tried to kill me once. We were standing so close together that the shooter hit Sally and not me.” He paused and looked at the disconsolate Natty. “I’m sorry, Blake. I really am. Sally was just trying to do the right thing.”
Mars said, “Why is someone so desperate to kill you?”
“Someone doesn’t want Decker to figure out the truth,” replied Natty. “I mean, you worked on that case all those years ago. Hawkins came to you and Mary to clear his name. And now they’re going to try to stop you. Mary got recused, but you’re still on the trail.”
“So are you,” pointed out Decker. “I think we all have to watch our backs.”
“So you think someone hired the guy to do this?” said Natty.
“I do. Which means that Hawkins was innocent. And that means the forensic evidence tying him to the scene was somehow forged.”
Natty glanced at him incredulously. “Prints and DNA at a crime scene. Forged?”
“It can be done,” responded Decker.
“It would be hard as hell,” retorted Natty.
“But not impossible.”
“Who would want to frame Meryl Hawkins?” asked Natty.
“Wrong way to look at it.”
“What’s the right way, then?”
“Someone wanted to get away with murder. Hawkins was the patsy they chose to hold the bag. It could have been anybody, but for some reason they chose him. That’s how we have to look at it.”
“But, Decker, that turns this whole case upside down,” said Natty.
“No, the case has always been right side up. We’ve just been looking at it from the wrong angle.”
“You mean we have to start from square one?” said Natty.
Decker pulled the flash drive out of his pocket and held it up. “Commencing with this.” He looked over at Brimmer’s body. “Because the dead deserve answers,” he said. “Sometimes more than the living.”
Chapter 33
MARS WAS SOUND ASLEEP on the bed in Decker’s room. It was past two in the morning and yet Decker was wide awake sitting in a chair and studying his laptop. He was scrolling through all the information that had been on the thumb drive Brimmer had given him.
He had taken off his belt holster with his new pistol to replace the old one damaged in the fight in the alley and laid it on the nightstand. He was still upset that he had let the shooter get away.
He and Mars had been at this for hours, until Mars had grown exhausted and collapsed on Decker’s bed instead of going to his own room. The rain was pouring outside, and Decker could hear the drops ramming his window like thrown handfuls of gravel. It was one of those Ohio Valley storms that sprang up out of nowhere and pounded the entire state for a while.
But right now, he had tuned out the storm and homed in on the critical facts of his case from over thirteen years ago.
The 911 call had come in at 9:35 about a disturbance at the Richardses’ house. That should have been a red flag for him, as should many things, in retrospect.
Who made the call? And what was the disturbance?
Not even the neighbors had noticed anything unusual that night. And there were no tracks of any other car coming to the house that night, just David Katz’s. With the rain and mud, there would have been fresh tire tracks. So no other car had been there.
And here was the kicker. Decker was looking at the times of death provided by the medical examiner who had done the posts on the four bodies. The ME had said that all four victims had been killed close to eight-thirty. The records showed that he had based his conclusion on several indicators, one being the temperature of the bodies when they were discovered. Although Decker knew that was very tricky and could be affected by numerous factors. But a one-and-a-half-degree Fahrenheit drop in body temperature per hour after death was the standard rule.
But principally the ME had based his conclusion on the contents of the Richards family’s stomachs. Susan Richards had testified that she had made dinner for the family and then left it in the oven before she went out. She said the family usually ate dinner at around six. The autopsies of the Richardses had revealed that if they had indeed eaten around six, the state of digestion of their food demonstrated that around two and a half hours had passed between their eating the food and being killed. It was not an exact time, the ME had been careful to stress, but he felt confident. And he could not possibly have been off by a full hour, he said.
Katz had shown up around six-thirty, according to Mrs. DeAngelo’s testimony. The meal presumably had been finished and the kitchen had been cleaned up by then. Decker had even checked the dishwasher and seen the three empty plates and accompanying glasses and utensils inside. That probably confirmed that the Richardses had indeed eaten at around six. If they had still been eating when Katz had shown up, they might have invited him to join them, but the contents of the dishwasher demonstrated this had not been the case. He had probably arrived when they were cleaning up after finishing dinner.
Richards had offered him a beer and the kids had gone upstairs. And then someone had come and killed them all.
But that’s when things got weird.
Because that meant that four people lay dead in the house for a little over an hour before someone called 911, citing a disturbance. And they had called from a phone that no one had been able to trace.
Now that Decker was looking at all of this with a detached, objective eye, the holes in the story seemed obvious. He actually groaned at his ineptitude.
Okay, time of death does not jibe with the 911 call citing a disturbance. Four dead bodies could hardly cause a disturbance an hour after they died.
An alternative theory occurred to him suddenly. Had someone entered the house and stumbled upon the four bodies an hour later and that person had been the one to call 911? And had that person been Meryl Hawkins? That might explain how his fingerprints had been found on a light switch. But that could not explain his DNA ending up under Abigail Richards’s fingernails. And how could Hawkins possess a phone that couldn’t be traced?
Decker put those difficulties aside and focused on another. They really didn’t know the order in which the victims had died. They had just assumed that the bodies on the first floor had been dealt with before the killer had gone upstairs to dispatch the two children.
That was problematic, Decker knew. And he had thought so all those years ago too, though he had finally discounted the significance of it. You shoot two people on the first floor, there’s going to be some noise, and not just the gunshots. There will be people shouting, presumably, or a scuffle. The house was not that large. Those sounds would surely have carried upstairs.
There was one landline phone upstairs, in the parents’ bedroom, and they had determined that neither of the Richards kids had cell phones. But still, they could have tried to reach the phone in the bedroom and call the police, then hide, or escape out a window. But they hadn’t.