In the center of the room, beside a beautiful seventeenth-century Persian rug, sat Michael’s desk, a massive rolltop of old dark wood. A computer monitor and keyboard were perched incongruously on the desktop, and there was Michael, slumped over, apparently asleep.
Katrina was momentarily stunned—how could he fall asleep like that? She’d heard him yelling at Randall; he had to know. Did he really care so little?
Her anger flickered high again. She stepped into the room, now completely determined to put him on the defensive. “Damn it, Michael!” she said—and stopped as her brain registered what she was seeing. “. . . Michael . . . ?” she said. It was almost a whisper, but that didn’t matter.
Katrina was fairly certain Michael wouldn’t hear her, no matter how loud she called him.
CHAPTER
17
The police arrived fairly quickly. In Katrina’s neighborhood, they usually did. Cops are ultimate realists, and they know how the world works. Slow response and sloppy service tend to piss off rich guys. Piss off a rich guy, you’re looking for a job. And Katrina and Michael Hobson were very, very rich. So even though most cops would not really go out of their way to give rich people a better kind of law enforcement, it was a good idea to let the rich folks think they did. Katrina’s 9-1-1 call got a very quick response.
First on the scene was a patrol unit, two uniformed officers with over thirty years on the job between them. They arrived, took one quick look at Michael’s body to verify that he was dead, and then went to work. There is a well-established routine for a homicide, and both officers knew it well. Hoffner, the senior of the two, led Katrina gently away to the kitchen. There he politely asked her for a cup of coffee. Over the years he’d found that giving somebody a definite task settled them down, and coffee created a chummy atmosphere that made a witness more likely to talk freely. He had also found that the smell of coffee usually covered any unpleasant odors from a homicide. And there are odors, almost every time. So if you wanted your witness to calm down a bit and answer questions rationally, it helps if they’re not thinking, Oh my God—that stink is Herbert’s intestines!
So Hoffner asked for coffee, and Katrina bustled about making a pot. He asked a couple of simple questions as Katrina worked, noting down her answers as well as his own observations: Witness’s hair was tousled, clothing a bit mussed—probably just out of bed. Witness appeared greatly agitated but not hysterical, and so on.
Hoffner’s partner, Officer Beard, was junior by seven years, and so he got the dirty end of the stick, doing the grunt work. He immediately secured the area around the crime scene—Michael’s office—and then began a careful perimeter search. By the time he finished that and returned to the house, the detectives had arrived.
Officer Beard led the two detectives to Michael’s office, informed them that the victim’s wife had discovered the body approximately twenty minutes ago, and that no one had been in the office since their arrival on the scene. Then he took up station beside the office door and the two detectives, pulling on latex gloves, went into the room.
They paused just inside and surveyed the room. “Nice office,” the younger one, Detective Melnick, observed. His gray-haired partner, Sanders, just nodded and went to one knee just inside the door, looking at the scuff marks on the floor. Melnick took two steps in toward the body, and so he saw it first and jerked to a halt. For a long moment, he was absolutely speechless. Then, when he tried to think of something to say, nothing came. Melnick wanted to be a captain someday, and he was enrolled at the community college to better himself with that in mind. He wanted to say something really cogent, something that reflected the B-plus he got in his psychology course, but what finally came out was “Holy shit.”
Sanders looked up at Melnick with one raised eyebrow. “You gonna hurl?” he asked with mild scorn. “First dead guy?”
Melnick shook his head. “Lookit,” he said, nodding toward the victim. “You’re not gonna believe this.”
Sanders sighed heavily and got slowly to his feet. He looked at the corpse, expecting to see nothing out of the ordinary. But what he saw was a surprise, even to him.
After a first quick glance he had seen only the handle of a knife protruding from the victim’s back. But this was not an ordinary knife. The handle was beautifully carved, from ivory, it looked like. And the loving and skillful hand that carved it had fashioned it into a perfect likeness of a penis, now sticking straight up in the air. The sight of it was enough to make even Sanders grunt with surprise, which annoyed him. He covered it by saying merely, “Uh-huh. How ’bout that.”
“The handle,” Melnick said. “The handle of the knife?”
Sanders nodded. “Yup. Looks like a dick,” he said, straight-faced.
Melnick, in spite of his lofty ambition, tried for a true cop zinger. “Kinda small one, don’t you think?”
Sanders didn’t even look at him. “You’re the dick expert,” he said.
Defeated, Melnick moved around his partner and bent over the body where the blade stuck up. “It’s ivory. Isn’t that illegal now?”
“You want to write him up?” Sanders asked. He nudged in beside his partner. “Multiple stab wounds,” he said.
Melnick frowned. “Doesn’t look like he struggled much.”
“Mmp. One of the first stabs musta been the lucky one,” Sanders said. “Cut the spinal nerve.”
“But the killer kept stabbing anyways,” Melnick said thoughtfully. “So . . .” He glanced at Sanders. “Not a professional job. Killer was upset? That work
s with the multiple wounds, too.”
Sanders nodded at his partner. “Yeah, that makes sense. So, upset about what?” He knelt beside the opened briefcase. “Be nice to know if anything was missing from the case.”
“Yeah, but . . . ,” Melnick said. He tried to shape the scene with his hands. “Briefcase looks like it fell, maybe during a struggle? Except the guy’s already at the computer, working. Right? So the killer comes in, stabs him, takes out whatever . . . and THEN drops the briefcase? I mean—if he wanted something from the briefcase and the guy’s dead, he just takes it, probably takes the whole case, and then puts it back so nobody notices something’s missing. But it’s on the floor, like busted open? And they didn’t fight for it ’cause the wounds are all in the back, and . . . it doesn’t add up.” He looked inquiringly at his partner. “Set dressing? Make it look like a robbery gone bad?”
Sanders said nothing. He’d already reached the same conclusion. He glanced up at the desktop. “Hey, the screen saver is on,” he said.
Melnick reached for the mouse. “Let’s see what he was working on when he got stabbed,” he said. He twitched the mouse, and the computer screen came to life. “Oh Jesus fucking Christ,” he said.