Chapter 25
Chapter
In the beginning, I shielded Robin from the work I did with Milo. It created tension and I learned that overprotectiveness can come across patronizing. Worse, insulting.
More important, serious blank spaces in a relationship don’t work.
Anyone who meets Robin finds her charming but at her core she’s a sensitive introvert who’s chosen to spend her life with inanimate materials. I’ve seen her eyes mist up when coming across roadkill.
Horror doesn’t play well with a mind like that. But things needed to change so we worked out a system of sorts. When cases begin, I offer the basics. After that, she sets the pace.
So far, what Robin knew about Sophie Barlow and Martha Matthias were the basics plus. Two women strangled, no mention of dismembering, though I had told her about the deep-freeze and the hoarding palace.
Before I’d left for the meeting with Milo and Villalobos, I’d placed a note on the kitchen table letting her know “Big Guy” had called me away. When I got back home, I was pretty sure she’d be curious.
She was in the kitchen, hair pinned up, wearing her go-to black overalls over a red T-shirt, drinking orange juice, nibbling on a cookie, and reading Acoustic Guitar.
Curled at her feet, Blanche snored like a steam compressor. Dogs sleep easily and extensively but not deeply, and my footsteps brought her upright and shaking off canine dreams. She waddled forward for a neck rub and a mutual smile-fest.
Robin put the magazine down. “Hi, handsome. Progress?”
“Not sure how to categorize it.” I told her about the discovery of Lynne Gutierrez’s body, left out the dumpster, the landfill, and the shattered skull.
She said, “Oh no. Where was she found?”
“Irwindale.”
“All the way out there? Near the racetrack?”
I hesitated.
“Alex?”
Sitting down, I recited the ugly details.
As she listened, she bit her lip, tugged at her hair, played with her hands. When I finished, she said, “Repugnant. The poor, poor thing, so vulnerable. You’re figuring the same person did it.”
I said, “Hard to see it otherwise.”
“Was she strangled like her mom?”
“Hit over the head.”
She grimaced.
I picked up her hand. Her skin was cool and tight, her fingers unyielding.
She said, “Admire your ability to deal with it.”
Standing suddenly, she kissed me hard on the lips and announced, “Back to work.” Without looking back, she headed for the service porch door that leads to the garden and her studio at the far end.
Blanche remained in place for a second, debating her options. Then she left, too.
I washed Robin’s glass. Brushed away cookie crumbs and tossed them in the trash.
It wasn’t like her not to clear. She’s organized and neat, snips loose ends reflexively. Good quality when you work with power tools.
Shaken by what I’d just told her.
An imperfect system.
—
My stomach was growling so I downed two glasses of juice and demolished three cookies. If my blood sugar skyrocketed, I wasn’t feeling it. Just a cold, hollow sadness at the fate of three women. A trio of cases that, so far, had defied comprehension.
Time for escape into my basic shrink philosophy: When life tosses you lemons, get lost in the problems of other people.
I walked to my office where obligation awaited: a court report summarizing work I’d done on a particularly malignant child custody case. One of those dreary parental jihads where you know the kids will suffer and there’s not a thing you can do to prevent it.
I wrote for two oblivious hours. Read, re-read, revised, saved, and printed the hard copy that would go to the judge and enter the official case file. Futility formalized.
Seconds after closing the file, my mind snapped back to the murders.
Sophie.
Martha, Lynne.
When you begin thinking of people you’ve never met by their first names, you’re committed.
Two unrelated strangulations within a week of each other. Followed by a blunt-force trauma.
Something itched the back of my brain but I couldn’t put it into focus.
Then it hit me: the math.
—
Strangulation’s a common cause of death in murders depicted on screens of all sizes. Both fictional homicides and the real-life savagery that gets true-crime bloggers salivating.
But it’s incredibly rare.
I keep yearly FBI homicide reports on file, pulled up the most recent annual summary not expecting the facts to change.
They hadn’t.
Strangulation and asphyxiation combined amounted to less than one and a half percent of murders nationally.
Blunt-force killings were a bit more prevalent but still uncommon: around four percent.
Guns, knives, fists, and feet—in that order—cause the bulk of the deaths people inflict on one another. Mostly guns and like most homicide detectives, that’s what Milo customarily deals with. Yet during a brief interval, he’d picked up three outliers.
He and Villalobos had talked about the rarity of blunt-force homicides but they hadn’t wondered about the total picture. Neither had I, until now.
Because we were all caught up in the details.
Hello, trees; go away, forest.
But what if?
—
I sat at my desk for a long time but failed to come up with anything that could tie in the death of an office manager in her thirties strangled at her kitchen table and that of an elderly former homicide D choked out in the hoarder’s palace she’d created.
Toss in planted DNA at Sophie’s crime scene and postmortem mutilation in Martha’s case and the differences grew.
Toss in the brutalization of that same detective’s mentally impaired daughter and they ballooned.
But.
The math.
It took another hour of headache-inducing concentration before the giant, fuzzy question mark in my head began to take on sharp angles. Bad headache, as if my brain could take only so much.
I self-medicated with caffeine and that reduced the throbbing to an oddly comforting two-two beat.
Then I phoned Milo.