Chapter 3
Back in the office, Kate called forensics. Adam, one of the techs, picked up on the other end.
He greeted her with, “We just got back with all the stuff from the crime scene.”
“Right,” she agreed. “His phone, … I need that first.”
“Then come on down here and work on it,” he replied in exasperation. “You and I both know that there’s no time or energy or budget money for most of this stuff.”
“Good, I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
After a moment of silence, he snapped, “Fine, have at it.” Then ended the call.
She laughed, looked over at Lilliana, and shared, “Heading down to forensics. I should have just brought the phone back with us, but they wanted to go over it first.”
“It’s fairly common,” she noted, then glanced at her. “If they clear it, we can work on it up here maybe.”
“That’s what I thought, except he wants me to work on it down there.”
She rolled her eyes at that. “I’m not surprised, but let’s start with that cell number, check his phone records, all that good stuff,” she suggested, with a nod toward Rodney, who was already on his phone, asking for just that.
“Good idea,” Kate muttered. “Let me go get it.” She stood, grabbed her phone, ready to exit her department.
Colby walked in and took one look at her. “Where are you heading?”
She gave him an evil smile and replied, “To light a torch under forensics.” He gave her a worried look, and she held up a hand.
“I’ll just grab the phone. They can clear it first for whatever they want, but Rodney’s getting John’s cell number so we can see a list of John’s calls. We have to start on that.”
“Fine,” Colby muttered, a frown creasing his forehead, “but don’t push forensics. There’s been some … unrest down there.”
“That’s fine,” she said. “I get it. Unrest is part of working with a scant budget, but we also need to get on this case.”
As she walked past Colby, he stopped her. “Hang on a minute. Do you think something else is here, other than a single murder?”
“I have no idea,” she conceded, turning to him. “All I can tell you is that I need to get at it.”
Colby seemed concerned that there was more to this.
Kate had tried to keep her voice calm, but she knew that look on Colby’s face. She added, “If you’re asking about Simon or anything else along that line, no. I don’t have anything from him. I don’t have any reason to believe this case is anything other than an isolated incident.”
“Thank heavens for that,” Colby muttered. “The last thing we need is another serial killer and a string of bodies attached to him.”
“I understand. Thankfully not a lot of serial killers are out there,” she noted, “but they are all deadly, either way.”
“Get a move on it then.”
And, with that, she walked out, leaving him staring behind her. As she headed to forensics and pushed open the door, Adam looked up at her, and his eyebrows met.
“You really don’t give us much time, do you?” he grumbled.
She shrugged. “You and I both know that, as the body is getting cold, the trail’s getting colder.”
“And we don’t have any time to spare either,” he pointed out. “It’s not me, per se. It’s the case itself hasn’t got any allowance, and we have a budget issue.”
“We all have a budget issue, but I can’t let it blow up in my face.”
Adam didn’t say anything at first but eventually nodded. “I guess your job is just as stressful as ours, isn’t it?”
“It is,” she confirmed, “and sometimes it’s worse. Although I’m not interested in getting in a pissing contest with you, we’re the ones who have to deal with the families, and it’s damn hard to tell them, Hey, everything’s just sitting in forensics, while we wait for answers.”
He shuddered. “I could not deal with the families. … That sounds godawful.”
She smiled. “Give me what you got, and I’ll get out of your hair.”
“It doesn’t matter if you get out of my hair now because you’ll be back again in no time, looking for more.”
She burst out laughing and coaxed a reluctant grin from him.
“Rodney forewarned me. So, as soon as I knew you were coming down,” Adam shared, “I worked on the phone. We’ve taken any fingerprints from it, and I’ve pulled a history of his calls and text messages.
So, if you want to dig around some more,” he shared, pointing to a printed file, “we’ve already copied over the SIM card.
Have at it. It’s all in an email to you.
” He handed her the phone, still in its protective baggie.
“Perfect,” she said. “Now I don’t even have to bug you, see?”
He rolled his eyes and shook his head. “You’ll bug me anyway.”
“But not intentionally,” she clarified. “We are on the same team, you know?”
“Sometimes it doesn’t seem that way.” And then he glanced around and added, “Things are rough here, with more budget cuts happening.”
“I’m sorry about that,” she replied, “because you and I both know you need a bigger slice of the pie to run this place.”
“Yeah, we do. But it’s not always as clean-cut as we want it to be. And, right about now, definitely some people are not as happy with our department as we want them to be.”
She wasn’t sure what to say to that. “What about Smidge? Does he have any say in this?”
Adam shrugged. “Who the hell knows.” he stated. “He definitely walks to a different beat.” Then he glanced at her and frowned. “You seem to be one of the few people who can keep up with him.”
She laughed. “I don’t know about keeping up with him because, when he moves, he moves. Yet … I get along with him just fine. So I understand that already makes me a novelty.”
“Yeah, you’re not kidding,” he muttered. “People here want to see if the budget cuts include him.”
She winced. “I don’t want to see that.” He gave her the side eye. “He’s good, and we need good,” she declared.
“He’s good, but he’s also impossible to work with.”
She didn’t say anything to that because she was pretty damn sure a lot of people might say the same thing about her. She didn’t want to get into that right now. “Hopefully everything will work out.” With a smile, she walked out with the phone that she needed so badly.
As soon as she got back to her office, she held it up so Lilliana could take a look.
“Perfect.” Lilliana grinned.
Kate continued to her desk. “Adam’s emailed some of the back history we could get off of it—text messages and the like. But I want to go through the phone myself.” As she settled into her desk, she pulled up the email and ran a finger down her screen.
Rodney grabbed a chair, walked over to her, and flipped it around so he could join her, asking, “Anything interesting?”
“This number,” she muttered, as she wrote it down. “John’s been sending texts back-and-forth with that number multiple times, with the end of it saying, No, and that’s final.” She frowned. “I wonder if that final …”
He glanced at her and nodded. “Led to John’s death?”
“Yeah, that will be one of the questions we have to answer,” she muttered. “Still, it gives us something.”
Rodney suggested, “Copy me on that email with the list of numbers and texts, and I’ll start calling them. Maybe we can identify who they are.”
“You call, and I’ll keep reading through these texts.” She sent him the email, pointing out the one number in particular. “From the gist of this, I’m thinking it’s probably the ex-girlfriend, Norma.”
“And how recently?”
She grimaced, shaking her head. “Up to the day he croaked, so yesterday. So, the very day he died,” she noted.
“So, she’s the last person to have contact with him.”
“That we know of,” Kate added.
He stared at her, as realization dawned. “Right, and that could change, depending on whether we can get anything from the apartment building cameras.”
She sighed. “The cameras won’t tell us much. None are in that hallway,” she pointed out. “I checked.”
“Of course not. It always seems as if cams aren’t anywhere they are truly needed.”
“And maybe that’s what the super, the manager, was talking about. Run him too, will you?” she asked, turning to Rodney. “That comment of his made me question what he meant.”
“And I wasn’t with you at the time.”
She nodded. “He made a backhanded comment. I’ll have to find out more now because it won’t leave me alone.”
“What’s that?”
“His comment about that building or that area not being for families,” she stated.
Rodney eyed her. “Yeah. That’s an oddity. I remember you mentioned that.”
“And I don’t like oddities,” she declared, with a frown in his direction.
“Okay, that’s not a problem. I’ll run him anyway just because he’s associated. What about the women who lived on John’s floor?”
“Nobody was suspicious in the group I was talking to,” she shared. “They were all older than him, like twenty years older. Yet all seemed to be half in love with him.”
“Yeah, so we don’t know whether he was poisoned or was drugged, which kind of is a female murder mode. Yet it doesn’t seem the ladies on his floor would have been involved enough with John to do that.”
“Agreed,” Kate replied. “I’m not putting them on my suspect list for the moment at least. How about the men on your side?”
“Why the men?”
“Because John might very well be having an affair with other women in the building. Maybe he’s not too particular as to whether they’re married or not.”
Rodney snorted. “Good point. Let me follow up with them and see what’s going on.”
“And you asked if anyone had seen John last night, right?”
“Yes, I did ask them,” he confirmed, with a wave of his hand.
“Nobody saw or heard anything. Nobody could say when they had last seen him, outside of possibly a couple days ago, when he was taking out the garbage. According to one of the men, John was whistling and seemed … happy, in a great mood. When the guy mentioned that to John, he answered, Yeah, finally cleaning out the trash that needed to be gone for a while. Complete mind shift.”
“Any idea what he was carrying?”