Chapter Thirty-Nine
Thirty-nine
“You shouldn’t let him get to you,” I said to Klamm as we trudged through weeds around the back of the house. “I mean, the whole thing is stupid anyway. It’s not like you came up with your last name yourself.”
“I know, right?” he said.
“Honestly? I know a guy named Carll and he spells it with two l’s. He chooses to do that. Corrects people when they spell it the way it’s supposed to be spelled. To me, that’s a hell of a lot weirder than a last name you were born with.”
Klamm nodded. “Hanson can be kind of a jerk.”
“Don’t need to convince me.”
The weeds were tall. I reminded myself to do a tick check at the first opportunity. Gnats hovered around our faces. The sun was just starting to set, but it was still so hot and humid that the air around us felt like breath. “So, Officer Klamm,” I said, “were you here for the initial response?”
“Yeah,” Klamm said. “I was here when the ME came. I helped bag evidence.”
“Anything strike you as unusual?”
“That’s hard to say,” he said. “I mean, I’d never been at a murder scene before.”
“First one’s rough.”
He nodded. “I gotta tell you, I don’t think I was prepared.”
“No one is ever prepared,” I said. “The blood…”
“It wasn’t just that…” Klamm stopped walking. “The killer shot her in the back of the head with a .45. The back of the head. She wasn’t even facing him, and he blew her skull apart.” He cleared his throat.
A warm breeze ruffled my hair, bringing with it a pasty scent. Wild lilies. Just like yesterday, when Melanie Joan and I had stood at the front door of this house, waiting to meet Book Babe face-to-face.
“Or her,” Klamm said. “I didn’t mean to say ‘him.’ The killer could have been a woman, I don’t know. But who does that? Who shoots a lady in the back of the head?”
I remembered Leila standing there facing us, her slim frame and her hard eyes and her I Think, Therefore I Read T-shirt. Leila Donnelly, alive and breathing.
It was the first time I’d really given thought to what had been done to Leila.
My dislike for her aside, I wouldn’t have wished it on anyone, a death like Klamm had just described.
A violent explosion that had come out of nowhere, one she hadn’t even been able to brace for.
Her skull blowing apart, not in the midst of a confrontation, but at a time when she’d been comfortable enough to put her back to her killer.
I tried to imagine Melanie Joan shooting Leila Donnelly in the back of the head. I couldn’t.
“And with her own gun, in her own house,” Klamm said. “Who does that?”
“Someone who knows where she keeps the gun,” I said.
He nodded slowly.
At the back of the house there was a big sliding glass door.
The curtains were drawn, but only partially.
I walked up to it and peered inside. From where I was standing, I could make out the far wall, the bloody, scrawled message: Justice for MJH.
I shuddered. “Is this the room where the body was found?”
“Yeah,” Klamm said.
The room was empty, save for a battered old couch and a plastic bin full of kids’ toys. At the center of the dusty floor was a big, clean square where a throw rug used to be. “Did there used to be more furniture in that room?”
“Uh huh,” he said. “There was a desk over there with some papers on it. Couple folding chairs. Nothing fancy.”
“Seems like she lived pretty simply for a famous author,” I said.
“That’s what I thought when I first saw it,” he said. “I figured maybe she had another place somewhere else and this was like her writing retreat or whatever. But from what I hear, nope. This was it.”
“Anything else that was collected?” I said. “I know there was a highlighted book.”
“The murder weapon.”
“Yeah, besides the gun.”
“A bookcase,” he said. “It was filled with books, and we took those, too. Because of the blood spatter, I think. It was everywhere.”
I stepped back from the house and started toward the garage. “I imagine you took her computer, too.”
“There was no computer.”
I stopped walking. “What?”
“No desktop. No laptop. Nada. We searched the whole house.”
“There was a computer,” I said.
“Wait, what?”
“That’s how I knew where she lived,” I said. “My client and I were able to get an IP address from something she posted on the Internet, and it led us here.”
I started walking again.
“So, either she, like…left it somewhere,” Klamm said.
“Or the murderer took it,” I said.
“Yep,” he said. I kept walking. “Did it seem like anything else was stolen?”
He shrugged. “She had a flat-screen upstairs, some jewelry. A big wad of cash in her dresser drawer. None of that was taken.”
He followed me until I reached my destination.
The place I’d wanted to take a closer look at in the first place.
The side of the garage, where that sleek, spoiled brat of a convertible Porsche had been parked the previous day.
I stared at the spot. The Porsche wasn’t there.
And there was no evidence that it had ever been.
No tire marks on the grass. No dribbles of oil or air conditioner fluid.
“Did you guys impound her convertible?” I asked Klamm.
He stopped walking and squinted at me. “What convertible?” he said.