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“Yeah, but what if he isn’t home? Can we do a B & E then?”
“No.”
“How about if we smell a decomposing body?”
I looked at Lula. “Do you really want to break down a door and find a decomposing body?”
“You got a point,” Lula said.
We walked across the street, and I rang the doorbell. No answer. We looked in the front windows. No indication that anyone was at home.
“Now what?” Lula asked.
“These row houses have small backyards that back up to an alley. We can check out the alley.”
We returned to my car, and I drove down the narrow one-lane road that cut the block in half. I counted off houses and parked behind the yellow clapboard. The Kia Rio was parked in the small backyard.
We got out and knocked on the back door and looked in the rear windows.
“His kitchen looks clean from here,” Lula said, peering through the window next to the door. “I don’t see dirty dishes or anything on the table. Since he probably can’t walk on his own yet, much less make breakfast, I’m betting he’s not here.”
I called Connie. “I’m at a dead end on Duncan Dugan. He’s not home but his car is here. Can you check hospitals and walk-in medical clinics for me? He’s going to need serious medical care.”
“No problem,” Connie said. “I’ll get right on it.”
I disconnected from Connie in time to see Lula bump the lock on Dugan’s back door.
“Look here,” Lula said. “The door just flew open.”
We stepped inside and I shouted, “Bond enforcement,” to make it legal.
“Crickets,” Lula said. “Only sound I hear is the refrigerator running.”
“I’m going to search the house,” I said to Lula. “Stay in the car with Bob, and don’t let him escape. I won’t be long.”
Ten minutes later I was back behind the wheel.
“Well?” Lula asked. “Did you find anything?”
“He’s very neat. Everything in the refrigerator is perfectly lined up with the labels facing out. No mold on anything. The handle on the refrigerator door wasn’t even sticky. Everything is color coordinated in his closet and all the hangers face the same way. His bed was made with the corners tucked in. No wrinkles anywhere.”
“I bet he presses his linens,” Lula said. “A man like that is hard to find. It’s a shame he had to go break all his bones. It’s gonna be a while before he can hold a steam iron.”
I drove down the alley to the cross street. “He seems to be living alone. One electric toothbrush in the bathroom. The second bedroom is furnished as an office. The desk had a dock with plug-ins for a laptop, a tablet, and a phone. The plug-ins are all labeled.”
“You’d expect that from a man who keeps an orderly refrigerator. A man like that would have a label maker. And I’ll tell you another thing, you wouldn’t expect a man like that to attempt a half-assed robbery of a jewelry store. He’d plan ahead. He’d make a risk assessment. And now that I know this individual, I can’t see him involved in a badly orchestrated suicide. At the time of maximum desperation, he must not have been thinking clearly. I didn’t see signs of any drugs, so he had to be severely organically and without-substance-abuse depressed.”
“That’s your official opinion, Doctor?”
“I studied this shit for a semester at the community college,” Lula said. “I didn’t actually finish the semester, but I read the chapter on the psychology of the criminal, and I watchCSIall the time. Did you find anything good on his laptop?”
“I didn’t see any electronics. No laptop. No tablet. No phone.”
“Did you look in his drawers?”
“I looked everywhere.”
“I’m thinking someone came in and scooped those devices up,” Lula said.
