usable information.
The staffs of each of the neighbors had also been tboroughly questioned.
There was nothing there. Telephone interviews had been conducted of
Sullivan’s household staff, who had accompanied him to Barbados, with
nothing earthshattering to report back. Besides, they all had ironclad
alibis. Not that that was insurmountable. Frank filed that away in the
back of his mind.
They also did not have a Pood snapshot of Christine Sullivan’s last day
of life. She was murdered in her house, presumably late at night. But if
she had indeed been murdered on Monday night, what had she been doing
during the day?
Frank believed that information had to lend them something to go on.
At nine-thirty in the morning on that Monday, Christine Sullivan had
been seen in downtown Washington at an upscale salon where it would cost
Frank two weeks’ pay to send his wife for a pampering. Whether the woman
was gearing up for some late-night fun or this was something the rich
did on a regular basis was something Frank would have, to find out.
Their inquiries had turned up nothing on Sullivan’s whereabouts after
she had left the salon around noon. She had not returned to her
apartment in the city, nor had she taken a taxicab anywhere that they
could determine.
If the little woman had stayed behind when everyone else went to the
sunny south, she had to have a reason, he figured. If she had been with
someone that night, that was someone Frank wanted to talk to, and maybe
handcuff.
Ironically, murder in the commission of a burglary did not constitute
capital murder in Virginia, although, interestingly enough, murder
during the course of an armed robbery did. If you robbed and killed, you
could be sentenced to death. If you burgled and killed, the most you’d
be looking at was life, which wasn’t that great of a choice given the
barbaric conditions of most state prisons. But Christine Sullivan had
worn much jewelry. Every report the detective had received indicated she
was a great lover of diamonds, emeralds, sapphires; you named it, she
wore it. There was no jewelry on the body, although it was easy enough
to see the marks on the skin the rings had made. Sullivan had also
confirmed that his wife’s diamond necklace was missing.
The beauty salon owner also remembered seeing that particular piece on
Monday.
A good prosecutor could make out a case of robbery on those facts, Frank
was sure of it. The perps were lying in wait, premeditation the whole
way. Why should the good people of Virginia have to pay thousands of
dollars a year to feed, clothe and house a cold-blooded killer?
Burglary?
Robbery? Who the fuck really cared? The woman was dead. Blown away by
some sick goon. Legal distinctions like that did not sit well with
Frank. Like many law enforcement people, he felt the criminal justice
system was weighted far too heavily in favor of the defendant. It often
seemed to him that lost in the entire convoluted process with its
intricate deals, technical traps and ultrasmooth defense attorneys was
the fact that someone had actually broken the law.. That someone had
been hurt, raped or killed.
That was just flat-out wrong. Frank had no ‘Way to change the system,
but he could peck around its edges.
He pulled the report closer, fumbling with his reading glasses. He took
another sip of the thick, black coffee.
Cause of death: lateral gunshot wounds to the cephalic region caused by
high-velocity, large-caliber firearm(s) firing one expanding, softnose
bullet causing a perforating wound, and a second slug of unknown
composition from an unidentified weapon source causing a penetrating
wound.
Which, in ordinary English, meant her brain had been blown apart by some
heavy-duty hardware. The report also stated that the manner of death was
homicide, which was the only clear element Frank could see in the entire
case.
He noted that he had been correct in his conclusion of the distance from
which the shots had come. There were no traces of powder in the wound
track. The shots had come from over two feet away; Frank surmised that
the distance was probably closer to six feet, but that was only his gut