“Her ride’s inside the garage,” Marino said as we got out. “A nice black Honda Accord EX. Some details about it you might find interesting.”
We stood on the drive and looked around. The slanted rays of the sun were warm on the back of my shoulders and neck. The air was cool, the pervasive hum of autumn insects the only sound. I took a slow, deep breath. I was suddenly very tired.
Her house was International style, modern and starkly simplistic with a horizontal frontage of large windows supported by ground-floor piers, bringing to mind a ship with an open lower deck. Built of fieldstone and gray-stained wood, it was the sort of house a wealthy young couple might build–
big rooms, high ceilings, a lot of expensive and wasted space. Windham Drive dead-ended at her lot, which explained why no one had heard or seen anything until it was too late. The house was cloistered by oaks and pines on two sides, drawing a curtain of foliage between Beryl and her nearest neighbors. In back, the yard sharply dropped off into a ravine of underbrush and boulders, leveling out into an expanse of virgin timber stretching as far as I could see.
“Damn. Bet she had deer,” Marino said as we wandered around back. “Something, huh? You look out your windows, think you got the world to yourself. Bet the view’s something when it snows.
Me, I’d love a crib like this. Build a nice fire in the winter, pour yourself a little bourbon, and just look out at the woods. Must be nice to be rich.”
“Especially if you’re alive to enjoy it.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” he said.
Fall leaves crackled beneath our shoes as we rounded the west wing. The front door was level with the patio, and I noted the peephole. It stared at me like a tiny empty eye. Marino flicked a cigarette butt, sent it sailing into the grass, then dug in a pocket of his powder-blue trousers. His jacket was off, his big belly hanging over his belt, his short-sleeved white shirt open at the neck and wrinkled around his shoulder holster.
He produced a key attached to a yellow evidence tag, and as I watched him open the dead-bolt lock I was startled anew by the size of his hands. Tan and tough, they reminded me of baseball mitts. He would never have made a musician or a dentist. Somewhere in his early fifties, with thinning gray hair and a face as shopworn as his suits, he was still formidable enough to give most people pause.
Big cops like him rarely get in fights. The street punks take one look and sit on their bravado.
We stood in a rectangle of sunlight inside the foyer and worked on pairs of gloves. The house smelled stale and dusty, the way houses smell when they have been shut up for a while. Though the Richmond police department’s Identification Unit, or ID, had thoroughly processed the scene, nothing had been moved. Marino had assured me the house would look exactly as it had when Beryl’s body was found two nights earlier. He shut the door and flipped on a light.
“As you can see,” his voice echoed, “she had to have let the guy in. No sign of forcible entry, and the joint’s got a triple A burglar alarm.”
He directed my attention to the panel of buttons by the door, adding, “Deactivated at the moment.
But it was in working order when we got here, screaming bloody murder, which is why we found her so fast to begin with.”
He went on to remind me the homicide was originally called in as an audible alarm. At shortly after eleven P.M., one of Beryl’s neighbor’s dialed 911 after the alarm had been going for nearly thirty minutes. A patrol unit responded and the officer found the front door ajar. Minutes later he was on his radio requesting backups.
The living room was in shambles, the glass coffee table on its side. Magazines, a crystal ashtray, several art deco bowls and a flower vase were strewn over the dhurrie rug.
A pale blue leather wingchair was overturned, a cushion from the matching sectional sofa nearby.