AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Teddy was working in the kitchen when the chime went off, signaling a car entering the driveway. That would be Lauren, he guessed, but he still went to the door and looked outside to be sure. She was spending more and more time at his house; some of her clothes were in his closet and chest of drawers. He liked that.
Lauren came in the door and gave him a wet kiss. “Whatever that is smells good,” she said.
“It’s only meat loaf.”
“My favorite!”
“Then you came to the right place.”
“I know I did.”
“How was your day?”
“Another murder,” she said. “Out at the fairgrounds, west of town. A young woman who worked as a ticket seller at the Indian River Mall cineplex.”
“Any new clues?”
“We may have gotten a break,” she said. “We know that Bruno said he was working all night at the police station, and there was nobody there who could give him an alibi. We also found a tire track with a cut in the tread.”
“Is that tire on Bruno’s car?”
“We don’t know,” she said. “Hurd and I drove past his house, and his car was parked in the driveway, so we had a look at the tires. We couldn’t see a cut, but it could have been on the ground, and we couldn’t move the car without a warrant. Of course, we don’t have enough evidence to get a warrant.”
“And while you’re waiting for enough evidence, he could kill a few more women.”
“Please don’t say that,” she said. “That’s my worst nightmare.”
Teddy fixed them a drink and handed her one. She took a stool at the kitchen counter. “I’m getting tired of looking at corpses,” Lauren said. “This one was posed in the driver’s seat, kneeling.”
“I think I get that picture,” Teddy said. “No more details, please.”
“I don’t want details myself,” she replied, “but details are my job.”
“Details were always what made my work fun,” Teddy said, then he realized he was talking about his career at the CIA and stopped talking.
“Go on.”
“I was just going to say that when you’re inventing gadgets, everything is in the details.” He held up a plastic frame with a blade in it. “Like this potato slicer,” he said. “It would have cost too much to make the blade adjustable, so I had to cook a lot of potatoes to get the slicing thickness just right.”
“A crime scene is nothing but details,” Lauren said. “I just can’t imagine how murders got solved fifty years ago before gunshot residue and knife blade matching and DNA came along.”
“Isn’t that when the cops just beat confessions out of the suspect?”
“Wash your mouth out with soap,” she said. “Well, maybe, but we don’t do that.”
“But the Supreme Court says you can lie about evidence to the suspect, in order to get a confession.”
“That’s not twisting science,” she said, “it’s using human nature against him. If the guy is already feeling guilty and he thinks you’ve got him, likely as not he’ll spill the beans with a video camera running.”
“I heartily approve of that technique,” Teddy said. “I don’t know how any murderer can think he’ll get away with it these days, what with all the science involved, all the ways he can get caught.”
“Somebody like Bruno,” Lauren said, “who has police training, has an advantage. He knows what we’ll look for, and he works at not leaving any evidence. He uses condoms, so that he won’t leave his DNA; he wears latex gloves…”
“I get the picture,” Teddy said. “But I’ll bet that if he has a cut tire, he doesn’t know it.”
“We didn’t get tire tracks at any of the other scenes,” Lauren said, “just this one.”
“Maybe he cut his tire since the last murder, ran over something sharp.”
