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She knew what she had to do and it wasn’t sit around here and mix martinis or sweep the kitchen floor. She headed to the garage and climbed into her Honda, leaving the Jeep parked in Reed’s space. Backing out, she planned her evening. Since she couldn’t interview Owen Duval, his story about the night that his sisters disappeared would never change, so she decided to follow up on what her mother had told her and decided to talk to Jacob Channing.
Jacob had been Tyson’s friend.
He’d been at the river the day Nell had drowned.
He’d been blamed for Nell’s death by Connie-Sue Beaumont.
He lived next door to the Beaumont estate.
And he’d been rich enough to date Ashley McDonnell.
She couldn’t wait to talk to him.
* * *
“I’m not sure it’s suicide,” Delacroix said to Reed as they stood over Owen Duval’s body. “Check out the back of his hand. GSR’s not right.”
The victim was slumped in his chair, his right arm hung over the arm rest, a pistol, the obvious weapon that ended his life, on the carpet beneath his fingers. He was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, his eyes fixed and glassy, his color gray, his mouth open and the round dark hole at his temple encrusted with blood visible.
Reed eyed the back of Duval’s right hand—presumably his gun hand.
“There would be more,” she said, nodding. “Wait ’til the tests come back.”
When he glanced at her, she said, “I took classes about gunshot residue and blood spatter while I was in New Orleans. This is all wrong.” Her eyes narrowed on the victim. “Staged. I’d bet my badge on it. And get this. According to the landlady, Owen Duval was left-handed. Like me. Hele
n Davis said she’d watch him write out checks and saw him hold a hammer or screwdriver when he was fixing stuff for her, like a broken shelf.”
Reed looked at the scene. Owen’s drink and pill bottles were at the left side of the chair, on a table with the television remote. On the right little table, only a box of Kleenex.
“So you’re saying homicide.”
“Definitely.”
She had a point, he saw it as well.
“Did we find out about forced entry?”
“None noted according to the first cop on the scene.”
“Tina Rounds?”
“Yeah.”
When they’d first arrived, Delacroix had zeroed in on Rounds, while Reed talked to a couple of cops outside, helping them set up barriers as a crowd of neighbors had already started to gather.
“Rounds checked everything out when she got here. The door wasn’t forced, locks not broken, but the window in the bathroom was cracked, and then there’s the door between the units; and Mrs. Davis, the widow who owns the place, said she did notice that her side door was unlocked and she can’t remember if she left it that way by mistake or not. Originally she thought Owen, here, had left it unlatched.
Reed eyed the surroundings.
Cops were crawling all over the place, taking pictures, searching for trace evidence, going through the place, while the landlady, Helen Davis, holding a one-eyed cat, was just on the other side of the open door that connected this studio apartment to the main house where she lived.
Obviously upset, she walked back and forth from her kitchen to her living area and kept watching what was happening. She’d already given her statement to the first officer on the scene, and the story was simply that she’d returned home a day early from a trip out of town, discovered her cat hungry and without water, so she’d gone to Duval’s outside door to ask him about it. He didn’t answer, but she’d known his car was parked outside, so she’d gone back through the house, through the usually locked connecting doors and found him as he was. Dead. She’d called 911.
Reed walked through the doorway and introduced himself.
“I told the other officer all I know,” she said. A small, round woman with tight gray curls and laugh lines cut into mocha-colored skin, she surveyed Reed as if he might be the devil himself. “I found Owen just as he is now. Dead. The gun there on the floor. I went over to ask him why he hadn’t taken care of Romeo here like he promised and, well, really, I was going to give him a piece of my mind. That’s no way to treat an animal, don’t you know, and there he was.” She bit her lip. “He wasn’t a bad man, not like everyone says. He was decent, don’t you know, went to work every day, paid his rent on time, even helped me out when I needed someone to move the refrigerator when it leaked or change a lightbulb I couldn’t reach. He gave me no trouble, not one bit, and so I was surprised when I got home and found Romeo cryin’ for his dinner!” She let out a breath and stroked the mottled gray cat in her arms. “Anyway, that’s all I know.”
* * *
