Lancaster rolled the lit cigarette between her fingers. “I keep coming back to a dying guy taking the time to come here to clear his name. He has to know the odds are stacked against him. Why waste what little time he has left?”
“Well, what else does he have to do?” countered Decker. “I’m not saying he came to this house to murder four people. Hawkins probably picked this house to commit a lesser crime of burglary and it snowballed from there. You know that happens, Mary. Criminals lose it when they’re under stress.”
“But you know his motive for the crime,” said Lancaster. “That came out in the trial. Without really admitting his guilt, the defense tried to score some sympathetic points on that. It might have been why he didn’t get the death penalty.”
Decker nodded. “His wife was terminal. He needed money for her pain meds. He’d been laid off from his job and lost his insurance. His grown daughter had a drug problem and he was trying to get her into rehab. Again. So he stole credit cards, jewelry, a laptop computer, a DVD player, a small TV, some watches, and other miscellaneous things from this house and the vics. It all fits. His motivation might have been pure, but how he went about it sure as hell wasn’t.”
“But none of those items ever turned up. Not at his house. Not in some pawnshop. So he never realized any money from it.”
Decker said, “But he had money in his pocket when he was arrested. We could never prove it was from fencing the stolen goods, and he might well have been scared to try to move it after the murders. That’s what the prosecutor postulated at trial, although, reading the jury, it seemed to me that they thought the money he had was from selling the stuff. It’s just a cleaner conclusion.”
“But none of the neighbors saw a car drive up or leave other than David Katz’s,” retorted Lancaster.
“You know it was storming like hell that night, Mary. Raining buckets. You could barely see anything. And if Hawkins didn’t have his car lights on, maybe no one would have noticed it.”
“But no one heard it?” said Lancaster.
“Again, the noise of the storm. But I see you really have doubts about the case now.”
“I wouldn’t go that far. I’m just saying that I believe it deserves a second look.”
“I don’t see it that way.”
“Despite your words, I can tell that you’re at least intrigued.” She paused and took another puff of her smoke. “And then there’s the matter of Susan Richards.”
“The wife. Left around five that day, ran some errands, attended a PTA meeting, and then had drinks and dinner with a couple of friends. All verified. She got home at eleven. When she found us here and learned what had happened, she became hysterical.”
“You had to hold her down or I think she would have tried to hurt herself.”
“Not exactly the actions of a guilty person. And there was only a fifty-thousand-dollar life insurance policy on Don Richards, from his job at the bank.”
“I’ve known people who have killed for a lot less. And so do you.”
Decker said, “So let’s go.”
“Where?”
“Where else? To see Meryl Hawkins.”
* * *
As they pulled to a stop in front of the Residence Inn, Decker had a moment of déjà vu. He had lived here for a while after being evicted from the home where he found his family murdered. The place hadn’t changed much. It had been crappy to begin with. Now it was just crappier still. He was surprised it was still standing.
They walked inside, and Decker looked to his left, where the small dining area was located. He had used that as his unofficial office when meeting potential clients who wanted to hire him as a private detective. He had come a long way in a relatively short period of time. Yet it could have easily gone the other way. He could have eaten himself into a stroke and died inside a cardboard box in a Walmart parking lot, which had briefly been his home before he’d moved to the “fancier” Residence Inn.
When she stepped out into the lobby Decker didn’t look surprised.
Jamison nodded at Lancaster and said to Decker after reading his features, “I guess you expected me to turn up here?”
“I didn’t not expect it,” he replied. “I showed you the paper with this address on it.”
“I looked up the basic facts of the murder online,” she said. “Seemed pretty ironclad.”
“We were just discussing that,” said Lancaster. “But maybe the iron is rusty.” She eyed the badge riding on Jamison’s hip. “Hear you’re the real deal FBI agent now. Congratulations.”
“Thanks. Seemed the logical next step, if only to manage Decker a little better.”
“Good luck on that. I was never able to, despite my badge.”
“He’s in room fourteen,” interjected Decker. “Up the stairs.”
They trudged single file up to the second floor and halfway down the hall to the door. Decker knocked. And knocked again.
“Mr. Hawkins? It’s Amos Decker.”
No sound came from inside the room.
“Maybe he went out,” said Jamison.
“Where would he go?” asked Decker.
“Let me check something,” said Lancaster. She hurried back down the stairs. A minute later she was back.
“The front desk clerk said he came in about two hours ago and hasn’t left.”
Decker knocked harder. “Mr. Hawkins? You okay?” He looked at the other two. “Maybe he’s in distress.”
“Maybe he died,” said Lancaster. “The guy’s terminal.”
“He might have just passed out,” suggested Jamison. “Or overdosed. He told us he was taking street drugs for the pain. They can be unpredictable.”
Decker tried the door. It was locked. He put his shoulder to the door and pushed once, then again. It bent under his considerable weight and then popped open.
They entered the room and looked around.
Sitting up in a chair across from the bed was Hawkins.
He was clearly dead.
But the cancer hadn’t taken him.
The bullet wound in the center of the man’s forehead had done the trick quite effectively.
Chapter 4
SO ANYWAY, a dead guy gets murdered.
It sounded like the opening line of an abysmally poor joke. A man terminal with cancer, who would probably be dead within a few days or weeks, gets hurried along to the end by a bullet.
Decker thought this as he leaned against the wall of Meryl Hawkins’s room while the two-person forensic team carried out its professional tasks.
The EMTs had already come and pronounced death. The medical examiner had then made his way over and told them the obvious: death by a single GSW to the brain. There was no exit wound. Small-caliber probably, but no less lethal than a big-ass Magnum with that relatively soft target lined up in its iron sights.
Death was instantaneous, the ME had said. And painless.
But how does anyone really know that? thought Decker. It wasn’t like they could go back and debrief the victim.
Excuse me, did it hurt when someone blew your brains out?
What was significant were the burn marks around the forehead. The muzzle of the gun had to either have been in contact with or within inches of the skin to make that imprint. It was like touching a hot iron. It left a mark that would be impossible if the iron was six feet away. Here, the gun’s released gases would have done the work when the trigger was pulled.