“Weapon?” I asked Chief Ireland, who had come up to stand next to me. He hadn’t said anything yet—he was giving me a chance to look at the body.
“It just got bagged. Twenty-four-inch adjustable wrench. Laid out right next to her.” He gestured vaguely toward one of the many portions of the dusty floor that had been marked with tape.
“What else they find?”
“Plenty, from the looks of it. Footprints, fibers, hairs. You missed the bagging party.”
“Anything unusual?” I asked.
“You mean more unusual than a girl with her head beat in?”
“I mean anything that doesn’t make it look like what it probably is. I mean, anything that doesn’t make it look like Brad Daggett panicked, brought her here, and beat her to death.”
“Well, no. We didn’t find the dropped wallet of the mayor of Kennewick, if that’s what you mean. There were some pretty fresh tire tracks out front that didn’t get run over by the dog and pony show. They looked like truck tracks to me, and they probably belong to Daggett’s F-150. So nothing really strange. I mean, if you ask me, it’s all strange. She put her hand up to block the blow”—Chief Ireland raised his own wide hand to the side of his head to demonstrate—“but that was all the fight she put up. So, yeah, that’s a little strange. He marches her in here holding a giant wrench and she just stands there and lets him beat on her head.”
“That is strange,” I agreed. “No sign of there being anyone else in here besides the two of them?”
“Well, they photographed everything, so we’ll wait and see, but just eyeballing it, I’d say no. What was odd was that it looked like she probably came in through the front door, and Daggett came in through the sliding glass doors—these ones right here. See those big prints? Those are his.”
There was tape marking everything, but I picked out the small muddy ridges on the otherwise dusty floor that must have come from Brad’s boots.
“Why would he do that?”
“I can think of some reasons. Not necessarily good ones. Maybe the front door was locked, so while she looked for the key he went around the back to see if those doors were open. Maybe he sent her into the house first, then went back, got his wrench, and came in the back door in order to sneak up on her and surprise her.”
“That makes sense, I guess,” I said.
“Maybe he wanted to look at the moonlight on the ocean.”
“You never know,” I said.
One of Ireland’s officers was waving him down from across the room. He excused himself and went over to him. I stood for a while longer, looking at the body, wondering about the footprints. James came over to me. She wore a gray London Fog trench coat over her black pantsuit. Stylish as always, except she wore a winter hat in Celtics green with the awful logo of the little Irish leprechaun spinning a basketball on his finger.
“What’d you find out?” I asked her.
“All signs point to Daggett. Time of death was probably twelve hours ago, which means he could be pretty far away.”
“He’ll get caught,” I said.
“Oh, yeah,” she said.
I told her about the footprints that came in from the front and from the back as well. She thought about it for a moment. “Makes sense. He brings her here to kill her but he can’t walk in with a big wrench in his hand. So he makes an excuse to return to the truck, gets the wrench, then runs around to the back of the house. Sliding doors were probably already unlocked. What makes less sense is how he talked her into coming to the house at all. I mean, if he told her he wanted to talk, they could’ve talked in the truck. It’s not like this place is warm and comfortable.”
“Yeah, I know. That bothers me, too.”
We stood for a moment quietly. Then I said, “Have you seen the view? Out the back.”
“No,” she said. Together, we walked toward the sliding glass doors that led to a stone patio, and through them out into the beautiful fall day. The view was stunning. The house was on a bluff directly over the Atlantic. You could see miles in all directions.
“Was that going to be a pool, you think?” James asked about the wide hole dug in the sloping back lawn.